After articulating my ideas to a friend for the upcoming assignment, I’ve finally decided to narrow down to the four following prompts:

ROUTINE, TRANSCENDENCE, ATTENTION, PERFORMANCE

These have been inspired by / extracted from past observations and boiled down into prompts that I find interesting and relevant to my situation. From here I shall break down what I find interesting about each of these prompts, how they apply to me and what specifically about them I’m planning to investigate.

ROUTINE
This is a loaded word that I find can be both enticing and repulsive. I feel that I operate at a more productive level when I have a routine in place as it provides me with the means to re-access certain streams of consciousness. At the same time, when I am pinned down by certain routines and structures I feel a bit claustrophobic and creatively strained. I think what separates these notions of routine is whether or not I feel like I’m making progress towards goals. If a routine can stimulate me to be forward-thinking, momentous and spontaneous then I am determined to maintain it, otherwise it is something I try to avoid. This dichotomy of routine is something I will attempt to represent in the assignment.

TRANSCENDENCE
After thinking more about the notion of heaven/hell that I extracted from my last major observation session, I felt that this could be refined into an exploration of transcendence. I am particularly interested in the ways that space can be organised in pursuit of transcendence. Home is often a sanctuary that people become familiar with to such a degree that simply stepping into it can relieve tensions formed through being in the outside world. In this way, it is separate from the world and exists as a multimedia reminder of our personality, memories, and values. What have I/has been organised in my home environment that offers the possibility of transcendence? Is transcendence always a positive thing? Am I attempting to transcend to distract myself? These are all questions that connect to following prompts.

ATTENTION
If there’s one ability that we have that I feel can influence our experience of the passage of time, it’s the ability to harness and focus attention. I see some of the observational practises of this class to be mindful activities, where opening an awareness of the present moment helps to find pure spontaneity within it. This gives a certain significance to each moment, enabling us to avoid the tendency to group experiences together into compartments that gradually grow larger and more vague. I am particularly interested in the ways different mediums demand different degrees of attention and begin to influence our broad capacity to concentrate. What you do and don’t pay attention to influences who you can be. How an idea, or a distraction, can have so much gravity. Attention-grabbing. Attention-seeking.

PERFORMANCE
In every social situation we become performative based on the circumstances. Here I think of Sartre and his notion of bad faith, that over-commitment to a character or role within society, the sacrifice of humanity. For the purpose of this assignment, I am considering how I perform in my own home. I feel that this could be directly connected to routine, as I am performing in a certain way to establish and carry out any routine. How do I perform within my own space? How do I perform in the spaces I share with others in my home? What is happening in the moments where I feel as though I’m not performing? Is this even possible?

For yesterday’s class we were split up into groups of four to hear the presentations of those that weren’t able to present last Thursday. We gave feedback and extracted two one-word prompts from each presenter. In my group, the first presenter spoke about gaining new awareness of very minute and discreet details in his living room, such as imperfections in the coats of paint on the walls, which ultimately influenced IRREGULARITY as a prompt. From this same observation, he noticed that the roof was significantly higher than he had ever noticed/presumed, leading to a strange reorientation in the space, from which we extracted SCALE as a prompt. His next observational practice was a sonic exploration of the neighbourhood sounds from his backyard, resulting in what he described as a “slice of suburbia” with no particular sounds seeming too detached from the suburban space that they were born from. From this, we decided upon SUBURBIA as a prompt.

The next presenter was particularly struck with how the quality of a light can dramatically influence how we feel. She connected this to how light is employed in cinema to immediately evoke feeling, which we briefly explored as an effect that feeds from reality into cinema and into reality again. From this observation, we decided that TEMPERATURE would be our last prompt to explore.

After this, we set out into the campus with our phone cameras to observe and document whatever we could in relation to these prompts. The first site that drew my attention was the design of a wall that stood next to one of the classrooms nearby. Made up of a series of wooden blocks of varying tones and uniform size acting upon each other to create a ripple effect, the imperfections in the wood and scuffled marks left on many felt to me connected to the IRREGULARITY prompt. In the photo, I decided to include the key card access sensor, which seems alien and disconnected from the effect and feeding even more into this idea. I’m drawn to the fact that there is a striking, almost animated effect to their grouping and a unity to their presence, and that it is actually the irregularity in the individual blocks that emphasises the effect, furthermore enhancing the unity.

The second I noticed the rainbow staircase I almost automatically photographed it with the TEMPERATURE prompt in mind. This seems like a fairly surface level interpretation of the prompt, and while I think in the moment it probably was, as I reflect on the photo I think that the stairs contribute a sort of transitory nature to the notion of temperature. We ascend and descend stairs as we progress towards a destination, just as temperature itself is in flux although we emphasise the definite experience of certain temperatures – “hot”, “warm”, “freezing”, etc. I feel that the colours represent those approximates we impose on the fluctuating experience of temperature, like snapshots of its effect on us.

For the SCALE prompt, I was drawn to a view I was able to get from an upper level looking down at people boarding an escalator. There are three people in the shot, one in the foreground at the highest point of the escalator, one just about to board deeper into the shot and someone exiting the building towards the outside light. Each perspective is in motion, on different trajectories, or different stages of the same trajectory. The person at the bottom of the escalator is preparing to ascend; the person already on the escalator is preparing to depart (or soon will be, potentially just drifting at this stage) whereas the person in the background is preparing to adjust to the outside world. In the moment of taking this photo, I decided to convey scale in a perspectival way, capturing three disconnected perspectives and forcing them into a single cohesive image. As it was pulled up in class, Robbie was immediately drawn to the beanbag and noted its allure, which I think does pull focus because of the frame and lighting it finds itself within. Comparatively, the beanbag is stationary and unmotivated, although its sagging presence suggests the its frequent use and introduces a ghostly presence into that room.

Lastly, I chose to photograph a small communal setting of a table and chairs set up by a collection of microwaves, vending machines and a sink to satisfy the SUBURBIA prompt. This was probably my most surface level photograph and to me signified a constructed sense of home, an arrangement made to contribute a homely sort of comfort to the students. My group was also attracted to the 70s throwback chairs and the humour in using these as an attempt to allude to the feeling of home.

This exercise was quite brief and I feel as though I could have been more active in the time allotted, however I enjoyed the experience of cooperatively establishing prompts to then individually explore. Robbie emphasised the importance of developing a method, which for me in this exercise was to snap a myriad of photos almost automatically as I happened upon various sites. It would be worth my while to experiment with other methods to see what results I get.

After having practiced both sonic and visual/other sensory observation in class, I felt pretty well equipped heading into this assignment. I experimented with a few different spaces, immersing myself in the soundscape of a train ride into the city which gave me some interesting insights into the notion of personal space, how we conduct ourselves on the train, the sound of movement and how the amount of people on a train affects our comfort within the space. I also spent time observing in coffee shops, where I noticed the specific sounds of someone assuming a role. In this case it was the hurried, precise sounds of the barista as they prepared all of the orders, which sounded quite different to how someone might if they were preparing one for themselves in the comfort of their own home, or to how someone would likely sound with much less experience.

Eventually I attempted a sonic observation session in the morning at a friend’s studio apartment on the upper level. I sat staring out an open window (fixing my visual gaze on the trees outside helped me broadly ground my sensory focus which is something I found interesting and will continue to experiment with), having not long woken up, and began documenting what I heard. I took note of the sounds of routine in the morning, particularly in the chirps of the birds from above and the scheduled bin collection in the form of heavy, mechanical sounds from below. These polarising sounds formed a sort of traditional heaven/hell dichotomy in my mind and began to play off each other in quite a musical way, with the polyrhythms of the different bird calls forming a melody that sat atop the grinding industrial percussion of the garbage truck below. The morning commuter traffic that I could hear distantly coming from Burke St provided a calming ambient backdrop to the rhythmic interplay in focus and established a distance and direction to the soundscape. I realised there was a linearity in the way I was noticing these sounds and forming this narrative, with each new sound appearing like a new musical element joining the composition. Eventually some sounds from within the room grabbed my attention: a phone notification chime, the clinking of a spoon against a bowl, and ultimately the hungry rumbling of my stomach, each sound gradually sucking my attention away from the soundscape that was expanding out into the world and drawing me back towards my body and own perspective.

The visual site that I had the most profound observational experience within was during the class in which we went to the state library reading room. In that space, I was struck by the arrangement of the space and how it could create a communal sense of privacy, with everybody utilising the space and each other’s involvement in the space to commit to their own personal studious pursuits. I found that I was drawn to events that occurred within the frames that decorated the perimeter of the room, and the significance they gave to those events that could be seen within them – for instance, I found that arched frames gave an almost ceremonious feel to a mother holding their child up to marvel at the majesty of the room (it was a true Simba moment).

I found the feedback in class to be really interesting and motivating, a lot of suggestions for investigations were offered as well as genuine interest and excitement across the board. The feedback I received for my presentation noted the intersection of different sounds across time – in this case it was the sound of the phone chime, a sound generated in the past, colliding with the present sound of actual chirping birds – as something with potential for further experimentation. Robbie also noted the conditioning of historical narratives as potential contaminants for observation, with the notion of heaven and hell weaving its way into my observation of the interaction between morning birds and garbage trucks.

Every single presentation was full of fruitful points of discussion, and I felt that the ideas all dovetailed into one another pretty seamlessly. I was particularly intrigued by the notion of urgency in sound and how that might factor into an individual perspective and the experience of focus. The idea that a sound, although familiar to us, can take on a different identity through the imagination also grabbed me, with the potential for the mind to form a narrative out of a collection of sounds being something I am also interested in experimenting with (with the aural geographical work of Hildegard Westerkamp in the Seeking Ursound reading staying with me as a big point of inspiration). I also found the idea that a person can completely reanimate a space to be full of investigative potential, with perception and perspective influencing not only the seer’s experience but also those around them.

At this stage I feel that sonic environments are intriguing me most, although I am open to whatever we continue to experiment with. I’m looking forward to recording space and seeing how recorded artefacts can affect our memory of the space and potentially future experiences of those spaces.

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