Aftermath2

 

Introduction to the project by Robert Miles-Kingston.

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Aftermath 2 is a exploration of our exposure to and processing of traumatic information, both personal and abstract.

Abstract: Our ability to accept traumatic information through media

Personal: Our ability to cope with grief and the loss of loved ones.

 

Presented in 4 acts.

Act 1: Event

Act 2: Comprehension

Act 3: Reality

Act 4: Metamorphosis

 

Our aim is to raise funding for a 1 hour film of a live performance installation and once built, to tour the installation in spaces around the world.

 

 

 

Origin and background.

The project began life as an Audio installation after the catastrophe on the East Coast of Japan on 11th of March 2011.

In 2013 I was asked to design an installation for a sound studio at the old Anglia TV studios.

The concept for the installation was to be ‘What is human in our information age?’

In a world where information is pervasive, omni-directional, non linear, invisible and intangible, but which effect us so directly in all aspects of life, how is our humanity coping with this revolution? How does media overload affect our ability to process all information, both abstract and personal?

The theme for this concept would be the disaster in Japan.

Having married into a Japanese family who live in Tokyo, the events around the Earthquake, Tsunami, eventual Nuclear disaster at Fukushima and their aftermaths had a profound effect on me.

Not just the speed, severity and enormity of the devastation, but also the event’s short lifespan in our media and conscious awareness. The event commanded an immediately powerful, global press, but within a week or so was replaced by more mundane, celebrity focussed stories. I wanted to explore the process within the contemporary human mind which enables us to cut off from extreme, traumatic events and move on.

With this concept in mind I set about creating an Audio landscape for an immersive audio installation.

Aftermath 2 grew out of this.

 

 

Audio

The creation of the audio landscape was also a study. Composing on Logic software, I decided to try a composition technique borrowed from William Burroughs and David Bowie, but with sound instead of words.

Each instrument timeline was ‘cut up’, juggled at random and reintroduced onto the timeline. The effect was a random collection of new sounds and textures that I was forced to collaborate with.

I wanted to explore the creative process, by initiating a relationship with information that was as close to anonymous, impersonal and unpredictable that I could make. I wanted a process that mirrored the concept of the installation. A relationship with the abstract.

Music, sound, and their colours, textures and tones have many associations in us that we grow up with and accept as 'normal'. There are established formulas that make us laugh, cry, exhilarate or pacify etc. I wanted to explore our traditional relationship with these and see if there was a way to break some of these rules by using this technique combined with new digital sounds.

 

Then my parents died and that changed everything.

The process suddenly became profoundly and deeply personal and I found it very difficult to work on.

I found myself evading and avoiding any contact with the piece, particularly the audio.

In my efforts to break the rules I found myself succumbing to the sounds I created emotionally. The piece suddenly became linked with my personal grief and another narrative opened up.

It was this personally traumatic narrative that Travis SC Knight encouraged me to explore and our journey together really began.

We started work on an immersive installation with dance with 2 parallel narratives , personal and abstract.

The parallels started to leave together and the work started to become an exploration of denial.

The original Audio installation was a dark space around a dry wishing well. The visitor approached the wishing well on an amplified floor which sucked their footsteps into the soundscape. When they threw a coin into the dry well and made a wish, their wish dries up. The sound of the coin and their footsteps to and from the well echo away into the distance.

We wanted to echo this visually and so created the concept of the cube.

 

 

The Cube.

The Cube is a large black walled entity filled with blinding white shifting lights and a low frequency sound that produces inaudible rumbling tremors through the floor of the installation.

Its black walls have tiny, hairline fractures that lets the viewer see the immense power that is stored within.

It is the centre of the installation. It is both an attractor and a repeller. A thing of beauty that instils the desire to approach, but combines a fear that makes one want to avoid.

With the cube, we wanted to mirror such entities as the nuclear core, the human centre of consciousness, the potentiality of an idea and the singularity of an event as it happens, before consciousness can evaluate it,identify it, name it and categorise it. The cube is all those things that can spark a beginning through creation and/or destruction. But above all it is Potential.

The cube changes as the performers move across it. 

This is what we aim to build for our installation.