The author considers the ideas behind her series of temporary audio (and video) installations collectively entitled A Record of Fear, made for the site of Orford Ness on the Suffolk coast. This remote shingle spit was a covert military testing site for much of the 20th century and is now owned and run by the National Trust. The author worked with three sound recordists to capture ambient and “performed” sounds subsequently used in three separate on-site installations. These pieces were a response to both the site's painful history and its current rich soundscape.
English Heritage and others are often called upon to record historic aviation sites, along with a range of other comparable (in scale and complexity) former military and industrial places. Recording typically takes place once the site is abandoned and prior to its redevelopment. RAF Coltishall (Norfolk, UK) presented a rare opportunity to record the site while it remained in use, and to continue to record it during the period of drawdown and closure; to watch as things were packed away and as families left. This seemed too good an opportunity to miss, and to take full advantage English Heritage decided to share the task, gathering together a team of artists and archaeologists whose interests were focused on the types of material culture and methodological issues which
This article – comprising a series of notes − explores the field of contemporary artists’ research in(to) varying gravitational states. It is anchored in a discussion of zero gravity, derived from my own participation in a parabolic flight above Star City in Moscow in 2001 (Arts Catalyst MIR flight 001). The audio interviews, video documentation and e-mail correspondence gathered pre and post-flight, have variously informed my thinking into the unparalleled physical, psychological and philosophical effects that can be experienced. The notion of the MIR flight offering productive material for art making is contextualized within a longer timeline of my own personal experiences in specific research environments being subjected to (recorded) scientific study. This earlier lab activity initially resulted in artworks where the intersubjectivities of scientist and subject were foregrounded, however, a persistent consideration had been the agency of technology in effecting physical phenomena. As will be emphasized, the temporary transformative states experienced in a parabolic flight are strongly affective and meaningful. I will argue that parabolic flight produces ‘intra-action’ (to use physicist Karen Barad’s term), a process whereby bodies, technologies, discourses, gravitational variants and vibration momentarily come into being with enduring significance.
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