ANGELA MCARTHUR

McArthur's website

McArthur describes herself as someone that makes "spatial sound-led installations representing 'othered' voices, through uncomfortable spaces of ambiguity.". I find this idea of 'othered' voices to be particularly fascinating. I'm not entirely sure what it means to be 'othered' but I think it relates to the abstraction of self - or others. The way I understand othered-voices, is a separation of sound from the object that created it. Decontextualisation in order to make the sound explicit.

One way that McArthur has trialed this is by filming the upper halves of faces of multiple subjects. By not filming the mouth - the source - and instead, filming the eyes and noses, we don't have this emotional 'link' to the source of the sound. We find this 'link' in other human characteristics.

'Foursight', 'con(t)act', 'Chalk n Cheese', 'detached' and 'abstraction 2' make a point of maintaining eye contact with the - audience, I suppose. They're looking into a camera, which really isn't the same as looking into somebody else's eyes. How does this abstraction from source inform the language that we use?

In 'Language as Sound as Art Material' McArthur continues these thoughts "Language cannot be considered in isolation from all the other elements of separation I describe in this chapter, but only as part of a vast, comprehensive pattern. Spoken language was only the beginning of this division. Voice inevitably lives on in spoken words, though masked more deeply the more controlled and refined the speech. The invention of writing, therefore, was another huge step away from the Original Language and toward the complete replacement of direct communication by arbitrary, abstract symbols."

Abstraction from the spiritual source to the human source can void the meaning of words, especially when we don't know the origin of the words. She uses the example of trees being named trees as a collective - instead of one being Gerald, another being Timothy, etc - gives us the blindness to cut down entire forests without forethought. To paraphrase McArthur, the destructive potential of language gets lost in the manmade realm of abstractions.

SPATIAL AUDIO

McArthur's primary territory is spatial audio. As someone with a heavily audio-based background, my interests also join up with spatial audio.

In her lecture organized by the Audio Engineering Society, she immediately starts off by saying that it "affords new kinds of audience subjectivities" and "sensorial experiences". It does. It can create new regions of sonic exploration such as the virtual yet embodied example of VR (see Peter Bathurst).

I, personally, prefer the idea of spatial audio to that of VR due to the fact that VR is still far off being 3D. While it can be far more immersive than traditional single-screen entertainment, I still see VR as a two-dimensional experience. The illusion of depth does not mean that there is a real sense of depth. I would cede these opinions if touch can be introduced.

Touch proves depth, which, in turn, proves sight. Once haptic/ ultrasound technology is implemented properly, then (and only then) will sight be superior to sound.

Sound proves distance, which proves depth, which is proven by sight. Sound is physical, embodied, unreal, and phantasmic. "I'll believe it when I see it." - if you hear it, then it exists.

Whose imagination is it?

Someone's ontology - when properly described, can represent a brand new world. The idea of imaginary worlds as a concept has influenced the final piece for this module so much that I am afraid to write about it in this post. How can something that doesn't exist be real? Is the imagination real?