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Recognizing, and formalizing what the audience does, what the audience makes, during sound work l l l l l
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Faced with a certain body of sound, the audience, seemingly passive, acts.
Certain sound-conditions together work to induce this creative action:
1) The work must be long enough such that the audience has time to become acclimated to it, and feel comfortable enough inside of it to really see it.
2) The work must be wide enough (made of enough layers) to provide for complex interactions (tensions, harmonies, rhythms, mnemonic associations), and provocative uncertainties.
3) Arrangements and patterns that trigger recognizable themes, narratives, and expectations serve as vehicles to carry an audience toward an intuitive destination, or in the very least, they promise that there is a destination. These compositional attributes do not promote vivid drifting thinking, thus the work must sufficiently lack them.
Given these conditions that amount to enough substance and absence, the audience, conscious or not, makes pictures, scenes, colors, objects. Few or many, they are flashes, strings, fragments that come go stay and overlap.
Usually these thoughts, what is made, remain in the background, unaddressed, fleeting.
They are, however, a bright and relevant way to define the work, and talk about the work.
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During the sound in the dark write down words lines figures as a record of what is being made: the thinking, what the work is. Do not feel a strain to keep what you write down in clear separate pieces like words in sentences, nor strain to make it neat, clever, sense or nonsense; that is something different.
After the performance, and if you wish, after you look at what was done by others, it would please me very much to collect these papers as records giving shape to the work.
(CK 2004) (Interchange 2, Los Angeles)
