Author Archives: Rose-Ebony Vargas

Amsterdam: Exploring the Cultural Freehaven

Leave a Reply

A group of musical friends and I took a trip to Amsterdam to play a gig consitsing of UK underground dance music, namely, Jungle. We stayed at a commune in the North of Amsterdam named Het Groene Veld. This was our second stay, six months after our initial stay in May.

The second day, the Saturday, was one of my rainiest days I’d experienced. Our stay coincided with ADE (Amsterdam Dance Event) Festival, and also a pivotal moment in Global Political Awareness, with many protests happening across the world for Palestinian liberation. Therefore, Saturday saw our day parading throught he streets of central Amsterdam, following a number of vans and vehicles with rigs attached to them, playing out sounds of trance, fast techno, jungle and dub. Some of the people hosting sets on the vehicles would occasionally mention the reason for the prosession, and call for those of us following to think about the situation happening in the Gaza strip.

The weather combined with the seclection of music gave the setting the atmosphere and aesthetics of an illegal free party, excpet this was a planned and approved public event. When spaces are open to cultural activity legally, it lessens the need for people to attend illegal gatherings, aswell as opens the setting to those who wouldn’t usually attempt to be in that setting.

We returned to the commune, where the venue for our gig was also located. This rave was the second installment of N4 x Percy Mingle x Singularity in the city. The rave was one of the most beautiful nights of electronic dance music I’d witnessed. Perhaps it was because I was travelling and playing alongside a crew that has come to be a community and dancefloor family to me. Or perhaps it was because of the free nature of the city, and better yet, the commune we were staying at. The open attitude towards drug usuage in Amsterdam allows for people to enjoy the rave as they please, free of judgment, as well as allowing for more forms of connectivity within the audience to take place. This open attitude also allows for people to abstain from any substances; I felt there was zero pressure to even drink in Amsterdam compared to the UK. The people of Amsterdam enjoy the music more deeply than we do in the UK- you can tell from the way they engage with the dance and the DJs. Only in Amsterdam have people I’d never met before in the crows come up to me after my set to really speak about the music I played, and compliment my set genuinely. More people are dancing, and in freeing, non restrictive ways, something that is apparently seen across continental Europe.

The commune, Het Groene Veld is a place I fell deeply in love with since I visited the first time back in May. It is a breakaway from society, its own mini society. When leaving, I collected some resources about the commune, including newspaper articles and booklets, from the people we were hosted by, Kiara and Chin. Whilst the commune may seem like a place of pure joy and freeness, it has had to go throigh tribulations to create that safe space. The nature of the cultural freehaven is that its future is never guaranteed- growth in urbanisation of land will be and has been a threat to squatter communites cross Europe. However, regardless of the worries members of those communities may have to go through, and the tensions it may create within the environments, art is always available for the community to turn to collectively, and has been a key tool in keeping these communites alive.

Before Het Groene Veld, there was ADM, a squat that housed 130 people. It lasted from 1997 until late 2018 / early 2019. Throughout its period of existence, there were many threats to its longevity, with many eviction attempts, and even members of the commune being attacked or killed. Regardless of these issues, ADM was known as a “cultural freehaven”, with the many festivals its members put on providing a a centrepoint of music and art for themselves as well as the wider community.

Although ADM doesn’t exist anymore, Het Groene Veld houses around 40 of the old occupants. Sadly, all the others were displaced. ADMs story is one that can be seen across Europe, with the KOPI Wagenplalt eviction in Berlin, and even closer to home, the REPO centre in Norbury, London, which housed some freinds of mine.

ADM- and Het Groene Veld- proves the viability of a society away from mainstream norms, and proves for the importance of sound, music and art in upholding such a community. It is a desirable environment to live in- the cultural freehaven allows for one to live at their own pace. The “jobs” would the use of personal skills and trades to uphold the upkeep of the comune, with everyone’s skills sustaining the basic needs of each individual. The cultural freehaven allows for one to connect with nature, an important asset to our human experience- something we lack in cities that affects us more than we can even comprehend.

Whilst I think every human would benefit from this type of living, I think it would be impossible to build an environment of such in a widescale manner. We, as modern Western beings, are adapted to a technological way of living; we rely on the systems built by mass industrialisation. However, I believe that an open space available for everyone to access as they please, and return to “normal” society when needed would be more feasible. i envision a centrepoint of sound and art, a communal space for people to connect, and simultaneously disconnect from modern society.

I envision an everlasting, open access, cultural freehaven.

Creating Sound Assets 2

Leave a Reply

From the list of sounds required, I decided to first ceate the sound of a “moonjump”. I was confused by this being a required sound, as our game is set on a fictional planet in space, not the moon. I did not want to conform to the conventions of scientific space, where I would assume moonjumops make little to no sound due to the gravity of the moon and how that changes human movement.

I started creating the sound of these “moonjumps” using the sound of me jumping on rocks that we recorded in the foley studio as a group.

I started off by layering the initial “jumping” sound at varying speed and pitches, to create an alien-like sound that sound like it has been affected by a different effect of gravity than on earth. At this point, I decided I wanted to make a sequence of multiple steps, just dropping out some of these layers for some of the steps and manipulated the levels of them for each step, in order to make it sound more realistic that the player is jumping on this unkown planet.

I then moved onto creating the “button sounds”. The button sounds we recorded in the foley studio were very “clicky” in my opinion. Although this is obviously realistic to the sound a button actually makes, I felt it did not fit the theme of the game. I decided to repurpose one of the layers from the moonjump sound I made, and use synthesis to create a more melodic button sound. I then pitched the synth at different pitches, so that each sound could be used for a different button.

Reflections on virtual reality

Leave a Reply

My first experience of VR was when I was fifteen, on a school trip to the O2 in Greenwhich. Individiually, one by one, we were given a headset, and made to sit in a chair that could spin 360 degrees, in a small dome-like temporary structure. I watched my classmates, they seemed terrfied. They were screaming, and jumping up off the seat. I was prepared to be frughtened. My turn came, and I was not. The figures looked false and intangible to me, I would liken the experience to going to the Planeterium. I did feel a little ill from the expereince, a feeling similar to motion sickness. I decided on this day that I do not like VR.

Years later, I spoke to someone about this experience, and they too said that in their virtual reality experiences, they too felt motion sickness. I also experience nausea when playing video games, but not when watching long films. I discovered a term called “cybersickness”, which can make people ill due to causing a disruption in bodily function. When the human body is static, but the brain in percieving that it is moving, such as when using virtual reality, confusion is caused in the body, bringing on sickness (in some people).

I thought about how if this cybersickness is a sensation that commonly occurs, how is virtual reality still prevailing? There are VR experiences where the user is able to move physically with the virtual movement, or the user can choose to have a much less immersive experience in terms of the visual.

The game that my group have created is very immersive, but the player must stay in one place to play, using the controls given with the headset to navigate the virtual world. I wonder how cybersickness will affect the experience of our game.

Decoloniosing VR: reading ‘A Journey from Virtual and Mixed Reality to Byzantine Icons via Buddhist Philosophy’.

Leave a Reply

“We are witnessing the shaping up of a world more and more devoted to separation” – Paulo S. H. Favrero.

Favrero’s article is a propsotion of viewing emerging digital words, such as those created in Virtual Reality, through a decolonialist lens. As we are living in an era of post-globalisation, to avoid a growing separation and disconnect from our wider global community, it is imperative to invest in decolonialist thought.

When looking at art, a decolonialst lens is often overlooked, as it is politicised. Drawing on ideas from Sara Ahmed’s On being Included (2012), accepting an institution (institutions, whether that be the gallery or the university, is where art exists and is validated) as built on colonialst structures is to admit to an inherent racism / bigotry, which has brandished the image of what we have come to accept as art. To admit the bigotry would be to unlearn this “brandished image” of art, and therefore everything academia has built in the field of art would have to be deconstructed and rebuilt.

With Virtual Reality being so wrapped up in modernity compared to other art forms, it is easy to apply decolonialist though to the way in which we view our experiences in VR. Favrero proposes that VR is to be looked at through the lens of Buddhist Philosophy. Virtual Reality is largely image based; in Buddhist philosophy, and other religious contexts, images function as “portals”. Favrero is therefore proposing the idea that Visrtual Reality is not just a visual experience that we appreciate for its aesthetic qualities, but rather a world which we immerse ourselves in and can naviagte, completely seperate the one we’d just come from, before placing the headset over our eyes.

In Buddhist thought, seeing invloves the whole body. Virtual Reality is based on a similar concept, where it draws attention to the space between ‘the self’ and ‘the other’- attention is being drawn to the relation between the body and the mind. Not only is this alluding to the aforementioned Buddhist thought, but also the principle of non duality. Virtual reality provides a fragmented map of reality, or the scene that you are being placed in. Fragmentation is what bring Buddhist philosophy and VR close to each other.

I’m not meant to be here

Leave a Reply

I may have picked the wrong essay question. I may have picked the wrong essay question as it’s sparked an anger, a sadness and a disonnect within me. I’m not meant to be here, studying at UAL, writing in this blog about all the pretentious art practices. Academia is a disease we use to intellectualise our humanity and place ourselves above others.

When I first started studying sound art, I immedietly felt othered. I felt laughed at by other students for being a DJ and not knowing who John Cage is. Why should I know who John Cage is if his work doesn’t move me. I thought “I’m not meant to be here”. Yet, I persisted. Sound Art also allowed me to view music as fluid, allowed to me rid constraints of “genre” from my mind and work. It allowed me to learn about practices which have made my art more refined, more meaningful. Sound art as an abstractification of the view of sound. That is what sound art means to me. I came to view everything in life through the lens of sound.

I am a thinker, not a doer, not a collator. My mind has become enriched with texts I would have never been exposed to without this course. I still feel like I’m not meant to be here. This isn’t to do with art, this is to do with academia. It takes a PhD to be allowed to be a thinker, up until that level, university is just a task of collating research and applying that to your practices, or expanding knowlege. Which is absolutely a good thing. Until you realise that because of this, the knowledge on this things we might want to learn isn’t available to us. I still feel othered, on this course. Perhaps this is the fault of my delusions, my view of the world is warped. Perhaps I shouldn’t have entered university without sorting this first, but how would I have ever been able to, when the institutional barriers in place to access mental health support are so prominent? My energy is drained and I am weak. I cannot create, I can only see the writing of society in anything I look at. The writing of society is the colonial roots it is built on, how this silences me in asking for any sort of help, and when I finally do, I am failed the access to support.

Perhaps this blog is a plea for help. Perhaps this blog is an excuse for the lack of quality of work I have produced throiughout this unit, and in the course in general.

I am aware that personal nuances aren’t an excuse in a lack of performance within academia. I believe I can channge that though.

I’m not meant to be here. But if I stay here and embrace the richness of knowledge the institution can provide, I will work my way to a PhD, where I will be allowed to think, allowed to theorise, allowed to challenge the institutional barriers that have come to weaken my happiness. I refuse to pause my studies, regardless of the mental challenges and the business of life.

This term I was not able to produce high quality work of passing standard, or on time at all. I am aware I may not pass this year but I need to.

Researching Black Sound Artists

Leave a Reply

To write on the exclusion of black artists from the sound arts canon, it is important to focus in on a partticular artist’s work or methoology. I identified artists I could think of from previous knowledge, thinking on the ways in which they work with sound.

As my Knowledge of Klein is what iniially sparked my intetrest in sound art, I identified her as an artist I could speak about. Her practice involves performance using DIY instruments, as well as the manipulation of vocals and live triggered samples. Her “musical” works lack structure, rhythm and cohesiveness, likening them to the sound art works which we are introduced to throughout this course. Speaking about Klein would allow me to speak on perforance within sound art, as well as on this importance DIY cultures play in sound art. If I were to choose to speak about Klein within my essay, I would be held back in justifying my thoughts, as there isn’t any validated literature that concerns Klein’s work specifically. The documentaion of modern arts cultures, particuarly those coming from non-white backgrounds, is scarce. Therefore, Klein isn’t written into any litterature that can support my arguemnts through the academic lens. This not only exemplifies the prominence of the issue that I am attempting to discuss in this essay, but also creates an unmovable block in being able to write about Klein.

It made sense to look to artists working with installation / in a gallery context, as their works are therefore validated through an academic lense, even if not included within the sound arts canon. I decided to speak about Satch Hoyt, as his wrok with “Afro-sonic” mapping is something that really spoke to me.

I decided to speak about Actress, as I have a book that unpicks his methodology.

Documentation of Creative Project:

Leave a Reply

Before actually conducting the performance I had planned, I decided it was important to even experiment with using multiple mediums at once. I connected one turntable and my laptop (with Logic open) to my mixer. I decided to use each channel as though I was mixing in a DJ setting in terms of EQing and volume levels, and blending into each channel. However, I did not adopt constraints of timing and using tracks of the same genre, or even tracks at all at some points, that there would be within DJing.

I begun my experiment by playing this vinyl I bought in El Salvador a couple months back. This was to signify that the work is about my heritage, a mark of my own sonic mapping. I have Vestax PDX-2300 turntables, which means that I can manipulate the vinyl to slow down and speed up in very large amounts, as well as reverse tracks. I decided to use these functions to manipulate the sound of the vinyl from El Salvador.

I started off by playing with the pitch functions, and then reversing the record where there was a drone-like loop. I thought about how I could apply this as a technique when producing music, as a sort of “live chopping” technique when sampling. I then played with this idea of live chopping, thinking about how I could incorporate splices from other tracks to sample. Using Maria Chavez’s techniques in abstract turntablism, I used my cracked vinyl to add variation of samples used on the one turntable. I then added a second instrument, my laptop, with Logic open, to trigger samples from tracks I created. It was difficult to do so without having pre-organised a set of samples or loading them onto a sampler, I was just attemppting to work with raw audio. I found it was easier to play synthesisers I had created, as there was less ryhthmic clashing, and I had more control over what was being played. I added a third instrument, flute. I thought whilst experimenting, it would be easier to use than a saxophone because it is quieter.

DOCUMENTAATION OF EXPERIMENTATION.

This video displays a “rough sketch” of what my performance would look like. To improve, I will pre-load synths in one project in logic so that I can access them more easily, and switch between them with ease. I thought about how my saxophone is broken, and this is a big reasoning as to why I am reluctant to use it. I then thought about the use of broken vinyl, and how the rhythms of the different elements clashed with each other. The idea of incorporating the broken saxophone then adds to the aesthetic of the work, and allows me to conceptualise it.

On Creation

Leave a Reply

Writing on the exclusion of black artists from the sound arts canon, I came to discover the abundnce of black artists working within sound. I found that majoritively, artists who identify as black often tie their art to their heritage. Previously, I had thought this was something artists of colour may feel is expected of them due to the pressures of the academisation of art, and therefore the politicisation of black (specifically, although also extends to all non-white cultures) existence. However, in my research, I found that carrying the importance of heritage within many artists’ works was more about keeping history alive, and celebrating how that history has naturally reproduced in the sonic landscape of black and non-white art today.

I got to thinking about my own heritage, and how even though I am not actively particpating in the communities where my cultures reside, how it changes aspects of my life: how I am othered from those around me at times, how I have gained or lost opportunities, how generational trauma manifests within me.

I want to honour and preserve my own heritage and history the way in which prominent figures working with sound do. To preserve a history, though, is not to portray an idealised image. It is to carry fact, as Sacht Hoyt does with Afro-sonic mapping.

To take this idea of “Afro-sonic mapping” and apply it to myself would be to create a “REO-sonic mapping”:

For my creative piece, I am going to use all of my artistic mediums to create a performance based on this idea of preserving history and heritage. These mediums are saxophone, sampling using DAW, and turntablism. I will use field recordings from El Salvador within the performance, and images taken in South Africa as visual score.

Thinking on Essay Ideas

Leave a Reply

Initially, I wanted to write on music’s place within sound art, and problematise the literature on dance music. I found that when reading Simon Reynold’s Energy Flash, there was much focus on the drugs culture of early rave music; the book was written very anecdotally, yet is taken as an academic source for documentation of early rve music and culture.

However, when reading modern readings in general, I found them to be centred around the social culture of the topics in which they speak on. I came to realise that whilst I still problemetise Reynold’s writing on UK dance music, I am now in recognition that the way in which academic writing has progressed into the twenty first century, more social and cultural observations are made, and there is less of a focus on technical research.

This means that the way modern works in art are written into history from this new more culturally focussed lens. This allows us to use these resources as research into social perspectives of issues. However, it could also begin to seperate newer art forms from older ones, disallowing them to exist in certain canons.

We can problematise this particuarly in the case of black sound art. Whilst my intial interest was to write within the topic of dance music, I came to read Teklife / Ghettoville / Eski: The Sonic Ecologies of Black Music in the Early 21st Century. Actress’s practice as a producer felt akin to the way in which sound artists create their sound. Well, Actress is litteraly using sound as his median, why isn’t he considered a sound artist? I thought about how the term “sound art” has been presented to me by educators and experiences as a very broad term, with sound art being able to be considered visual art in many cases. If sound art is a fluid art form, how can we explain its undeniable exclusions of certain artists from its canon? I beleive that the fundamental reasoning for this is the way that soubnd art, and art in general, have become academic practices; the study of them in order to validate oneself as an artist, the mass inaccessibility of historical readings or knowledge on practices.

When choosing to study sound art, I wasn’t sure what it even was- to be honest I’m still not sure what it actually even is. We had Jose telling us in first year that music was NOT to be created within the course, an overall feeling of dislike for structured music from the educators on the course. I thought about Actress speaking on his own music in Sonic Ecologies: “I wanna hear form, I wanna hear structure”. I thought about how I, too, want to hear form and structure. There is something about rhythm that feels like I inhabit it within my body, where music without a clear sense of direction or groove, I feel detached from. Does this mean I’m not a sound artist? Maybe. But I would like to propose the idea of sound art as litteraly any art situated around sound. And would like to further propose the idea that exclusions of partciular artists from its canon is due to sound art’s position within academia.

When chossing to study sound art, I looked to Berlin based artist Klein, from South London. I percieve her art as sound art. Maybe it is not, but then we must unpack why. I don’t have a statistic or anything to prove it, but I know that there is a clear exclusion of black artists from the sound art realm. I see artists who created very musical works, such as Harold Budd or even Brian Eno becoming main proponents on the topic, yet Actress’s avante garde experimintalism with field recordings, isn’t even considered sound art. Isn’t what he does quite litteraly the definition of ecological sound art? I believe that the barriers put in place in what is and isn’t considered sound art are institutional barriers; with instituitional racism being the root of the black exclusion. Therefore, I have decided to us ethe opportunity of writing this essay to speak on the reasons for exclsuion and highlight the issue.

Anthropology of Sound

Leave a Reply

Anthropology is the study of, and everything within, human culture. When thinking of the anthropology of sound, it opens up questions around the problemetisation of anthropology, as well as questions around what is sound. Practices within the field of anthropology are known as ehtnography; ethnographic research entails the practice of “field work”. Field work involves direct contact with the environment and people involved with the cultures which are being researched over an extended period of time. Ethnography can be therefore seen as research based on personal accounts and experience. Where this can be seen as problematic, sensory ethnography seeks to recognise the researcher as part of the environment, as well as any political or ideological agendas that may be at play.

Anthroplogy is further problemetised when ackowledging its roots in eurocentrism. SOAS inversity, one of the largest research centres in the world for world cultural studies, was initially founded as a place of study for missionaries to become acquainted with the values ad lifestyle choices of the cultures they would subsequently come to infiltrate with eurocentric, Christian standards. This would therefore make many of the sources involving ethnographic research shrouded in outdated eurocentrism. This opens questions around the meaning of “truth”- it can be seen as a concept of male perspective. Sensory ethnography may seek to acknowledge that “truths” are gained from “situated” experiences. Timothy Morton offers the idea of nature as a concept of human construction in their book Ecology without Nature. “Truth” and “nature” are here likened as concepts that should be beyond human construction, however, have been dicated as such. Anthropology, where it concerns nature and the envoronment, is undebatably favoured to a eurocentric perspective.

The anthropology of sound is a highly autoethnographic practice; oral traditions are exactly that- oral traditions. Where anthroplogy is considered a writing practice, the idea of the anthropology of sound as autoethnographic is supported. Sound is percieved differently by different people, and can be hard to be captured by words. So therefore where sound is written into anthropological literature, it cannot capture the exact sameness of what that sound actually was.