in/transience
In
this work I was interested in exploring our experience
of in/transience within public spaces. Much of our
time is spent commuting through these spaces without
any sense of them as places in and of themselves.
As Marc Augé discusses in his book Non-Places,
they become nothing more than conduits people pass
through enroute to somewhere else. Outside of a means
of passage, these spaces have little or no significance
to us.
What is interesting in Augé’s observations
is the idea that we identify ourselves and each other
via the spaces we occupy and share experiences within.
He defines a non-space by its negative:
“If place can be defined as relational, historical
and concerned with identity, then a space which can
not be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned
with identity will be a non-place.”
The significance of this statement is in how we experience
our sense of self within these ‘non-places’.
Here we are often reduced to solitude and our individual
identity and social interactions are minimized. We
become as ‘non’ as the non-places themselves.
Thus the transience is not only one of spaces but
of ourselves as we traverse within them.
But
just as these non-spaces seem to impose a numbing
of our sense of self, we too invest our own experience
of intransience into the structures that create these
spaces. We all know that this building hasn’t
always been here and that eventually it will cease
to exist at some point in the future (at least in
its present state) and yet we experience it as permanent.
Could this reflect our own experience of (im)mortality?
We know that at some point we were born and eventually
will die, yet we experience ourselves as being permanently
apart of this world. We are transient, yet our experience
is of intransience.
As
a sound artist, I experience the world and thus myself,
most deeply through listening. There is a sense of
intimacy in the experience of sounds, a sense of presence,
that I don’t enjoy with the other senses. In
these non-places however, we often tune out the sounds
around us as we pass through them, just as we seem
to tune ourselves out and each other.
To explore these ideas I decided to contrast two sound
worlds relating to the station. The first involves sounds
found within the train station itself, primarily the
sounds of electricity. These are of the ubiquitous ‘life
blood’ of the station without which it truly would
be a non-place. We don’t notice it so much as
would miss it were it gone. Occasional recordings of
people boarding and unboarding trains, waiting on benches,
or walking to cars and busses were also made.
These are contrasted with the sounds of numerous walks
made along abandoned railway tracks over the course
of several weeks. The sound of feet on rock, glass,
paper, and brush, combine with the occasional birdcall,
traffic sound, or deer running along the tracks. Littered
with the detritus of the city and abandoned as a ‘non-place’
itself, nature is steadily reclaiming this space once
more.
Within
this installation these recordings mix freely over
each other blurring the boundaries between one sound
world and the next, not unlike our own experience
as we transition between place and non-place, identity
and anonymity, transience and intransience.
bill
thompson
www.billthompson.org
*Special
thanks to Sound, Pete Stollery, and the University
of Aberdeen for support and loan of equipment.
