Worldizing- outline of a theory of a practice

 

 

Good news this week, our application to a south Yorkshire fund was successful, we have £3500 to buy materials to build our pirate ship.  I can't claim the credit for this as the funding bid was a team effort but it's interesting how you need a little bit of a push, a central idea to move things forward.  Funders like to see outcomes, in-fact I like to see outcomes.  The pirate ship above is about what I'm thinking we can make, with some adaptations to fit our needs.  We want a covered place for kids to shelter in the rain and we want some shade in summer.  My mind now is taken up with a circular set of compromises, as the ship becomes a reality it's reality has to compromise to become what is possible, working the constraints of time and energy what is practical.  There is a question that gets asked a lot at art school, 'Where is the work ?'  it's a question that replaces the more easily answered 'What is the work' .  To ask 'where' something is is to position it in a context, it asks for more than a description of a thing it also asks what contingent, on the outside.  

 

The problem is that any physical manifestation that exists within a single point of time and space is liable to become the simulacra of the work, the golden calf, that can be tied down unpicked and assessed against the criteria of other things that are tied down and assessed.  When people ask me what I'm doing at the adventure playground I will tell them I'm making a pirate ship for children to play on.  If they ask me if this is art I will say, I'm an artist, I'm funded through the arts and humanities research council and the building of the pirate ship is part of this project. It's not a real pirate ship though and it's not real art, it's first priority is as a piece of play equipment. On one level to demonstrate that the kids who play here are worth investing in, that play and the imagination are worth investing in.  When I get to work on cutting and bolting and planning, the old bits of my brain will get to work and my nights will be filled with dreams of hammers and screws and work arounds and mistakes and some of the other things that fill my brain  will slip sideways. I will miss appointments in my dairy, I will appear slightly distracted, my brain will be building solutions to problems I encounter and imagine.

Taking stock on where I am in this project is difficult.  I have two strong ideas emerging.  The first concerns the idea of been 'in residence'  and what this can mean and the second is the role of theory in practice. Both these ideas are complex and interconnected. Much of my recent practice has involved bringing a theory lens of some description to my work.  I am now both an artist and a writer and I am jobbing in both.  The point here is to expand on both the idea of been in residence and how it relates the subjective spatially  to the place of residence.  I can describe my practice as a series of adhoc self created residencies across a series of change programs.  I have become by default  a project manager, a writer, and academic an odd job man, a fixer and a worrier.  I worry in both a good way and a bad way,  I think Heidegger on occasion may have mistaken angst for worry.  I am still working on  my idea of the informal residency in your own life as a concept, calling it residency as method worked for a while but I'm not sure this has the legs it needs to carry me very far.  I need to sit and think about this more, I have reconsidered the last 10 years of my work as an artist through the lens of residency as method I can pull from it a lot of moments that sit on a way marker between been 'in residence' and doing a specific job.  The waymarkers across the terrain are not clear.  When you ski into a storm the visibility can get so bad that you have to work from one piste marker to the next.  When it is really bad you have to work to the person in front of you who works to the person in front of them who works towards the piste-marker.  This is how you find your way, up, down, in front ,behind is white everything in all directions is white, yet your ski's take you downhill, you follow other peoples tracks.. 

I'm taken with the idea of worldizing at the moment - it seems to be what is happening with both the making and thinking about art and working with the world of theory within the world.  I don't like to say communities as this closes things down - communities are starting to feel a bit small like enclave or settlements.  The thing I like about the idea of worldizing as both a practical way to work with sound and a metaphor for both residencies and working with theory is that the process allows something to be present but to fade into the background.  It recognises that this is not as simple as it sounds, the dropping away of a soundtrack is not just mixing in something else or lowering the volume, your brain follows this down - worldizing in contrast is about rounding the sounds edges so it sits within the body of the film, becomes part of it. Perhaps this is the practice to allow the art and the ideas to be present within the field and to emerge fully formed and with clarity at the moment when they make some sort of sense of what is happening and then drop away.

 

The great sound engineer Walter Murch coined the term ‘Worldizing’ while working with George Lucas on the Film Amercan Graffiti in 1973. He was Struggling to balance the sounds of Wolf Mans Jacks radio show, playing on young peoples car radios across the city, with the films dialogue.  Eventually he took the sound track out into the street played it through a speaker then re-recorded the sound from down the street whilst randomly moving the microphone.  This process blurred the edges of the sound and allowed it to slip into the background, it mimicked the way we hear things in the world.