My name is Angus Carlisle. I'm a professor of sound and landscape at London College of Communication and I'm the co-director of a research centre called CRSAP, Centre for Research and Sound Arts Practice and I've been responsible for the project coordination of the LCC's contribution to the sound portal that you see behind us. My name is Iris Garelves. I am I am a PhD student at LCC, currently in my third year of practice-based PhD research. I've been involved with this project as one of the facilitators or project leaders.
I had two MA students and one BA, second year BA students to work with. Our idea was to do something around the idea of 2001, Stanley Kubrick's film. It so happened that the Portal designer was inspired by HAL and also LCC, where I'm based, holds the Stanley Kubrick archive. And as I'm also a sci-fi fan, I thought it would be a really nice thread to follow through and build something around that. The name of our project was Sound, Place and Memory. The initial period of the project involved three two-day workshops taking place at LCC over at Elephant and Castle.
The first workshop involved teaching the students to build their own microphones and to use those microphones to record different aspects of the environment than you normally get on a microphone like this. So these recordings included recordings of vibration through metal, through concrete, vibrations of liquids under water. We took a few different musical themes around that. I have a background in voice, so I sang the Blaue Dau, the Blue Danube, and we played around with some processing techniques to make that a bit more fragmented. We also went into the archive and listened to some recordings that were made as part of the Inner Circle project that talked to relatives and also colleagues of Steniel Kubrick.
Yes, there's lots of other things going on in there but that's a few of the elements that you can hear. That was the first workshop that was run by an artist called Jez Riley French. We then brought in another artist called Daniela Cachela, who uses sound and writing in close connection. And so that was a way of teaching the students how to think differently about their relationship to the sound environment, how to hear things that are very close and also how to hear things that are very distant. And then finally, we had a workshop by Felicity Ford, another artist who was exploring how you can use the human voice as a way of understanding the world that surrounds you both the landscape and the dynamic movements within cities and other spaces. Three of our PhD students worked with
groups of undergraduate and postgraduate students to develop compositions for the sound portal. I think the importance of sound within the arts and design medium is I think this for me it's a little bit difficult to say because I'm coming from a musical trajectory so I'm not necessarily within the arts and design background people coming from these different trajectories they have very different ways of working with it for example in art you might see it more of a material to work with that equals say oil or another visual arts medium it's It's just because of the fact that you can, and you can come from very different approaches and make sound meaningful for yourself and to others, I think that's a very important
aspect. I think that at the moment in 2013, one of the ways in which innovative artistic practice is being conducted is through the area of sound. We've seen a big explosion of work that could be called sound art, and I think that my understanding is that B Open have been looking at sound as one of the senses that has previously had less of an emphasis in artistic practice. So their connection to it might be a connection that relates to the innovation and the newness of this way of exploring the world and this way of expressing yourself as an artist. Sound doesn't work in this hierarchical way, it's accessible to people and it's your experiences