Читать книгу Critical Digital Making in Art Education - Группа авторов - Страница 34

Use the simplest speaker element as a loudspeaker in your system and play any sound or music. Find any material that you have around you; it could be grass, sticks, leaves, soil, or garbage and put it on the speaker element. Look carefully when the materials start to move as the sound makes the tissue move on the speaker driver. Now take away the material and touch the speaker with your body. This is a very simple way of touching sound, you can touch sound also via the air, but then you need a stronger amplifier to create higher volumes and that requires more electric energy. For us, sitting on our knees bending forward to touch the speaker driver and feeling the music that materializes through touch and listening became a meditative movement of the body. Feeling the sound while adjusting and engaging in the outdoors, allows for both the material sound and the natural conditions to become a part of our experience and memory. The sensation feels inexplicably meaningful. The conventions of listening to digital sounds outdoors becomes apparent. Making use of nature and the wilderness as a context for the events, instead of a lab or a studio, challenges the setup and the performance. Limitations in modern facilities such as transportation, electricity, and maintenance must be considered, as well as everyday necessities like water, food, and restrooms.

By focusing on touching sound through its vibrations and by relating to the source of sound differently than through earphones, other phenomena appear. Listening becomes an apparent phenomena of the body, the sound technology, and the environment. The division of earphone and human ear is not the emphasized intra-action here. The movement of the individual person’s eardrums are, in this specific intra-action less emphasized. Instead, the tree’s movement by the wind make sounds, the leaves and sticks on the ground move from the vibration, the touch of the skin from the vibrations of the membrane of the speaker, the sun shining or not all becomes a vague event of listening. This illustrates that specific material engagements do matter in “(re)configuring the world” (Barad, 2007, p. 91).

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