This work was created for Sounds Sonic 2013, a Sonic Arts Festival at firstsite curated by artists from Colchester New Music and Sonic Arts Forum. The work was selected following a call for electroacoustic works (5 mins max, but the shorter the better) integrated with an accompanying image or visual score, responding to the theme ‘Music, Embodiment and The Body’.

The image I have used shares characteristics with ‘found’ images, in the sense that it is a record of an actual, stumbled-upon scene. An incongruous discovery: a discarded packet offers a message. A sentence in isolation: you and others around you. The composition begins with natural sounds, encouraging viewers to imagine themselves in the landscape they see pictured, drawing on embodied memories of outdoor spaces. Then the voices of others (recorded at an event in a gallery) intrude. The work explores the way that art may draw the viewer into the mind’s eye (or the mind’s ear), yet does not offer an escape into an inner world, rather creating a relentless need to question, compare and ask oneself: where do I stand in relation to the world and others? ‘The mind’s eye’ a phrase in itself embodying the inescapable link between how we collect sensory information and how we form our ideas and ourselves.

‘There is no way of living with others which takes away the burden of being myself, which allows me not to have an opinion; there is no ‘inner’ life that is not a first attempt to relate to another person. In this ambiguous position, which has been forced upon us because we have a body and a history (both personally and collectively), we can never know complete rest. We are continually obliged to work on our differences, to explain things we have said that have not been properly understood, to reveal what is hidden within us and to perceive other people.’ –Maurice Merleau-Ponty [1]

[1] Merleau-Ponty, M., 2008. The world of perception, London; New York: Routledge. Excerpt from Man Seen from the Outside, one of a series of lectures devised for radio, 1948.