Core Principles is a taxonomy of movements essential to everyday life and functioning in digital environments; a typology of actions synonymous with platformed existence. Core Principles draws on the scientific management techniques of Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, contemporaries of Frederick Winslow Taylor. In the 1910s Gilbreth compiled a series of 'motion studies’ designed to optimise the movements of workers and maximise their productivity. Core Principles transposes the Gilbreth’s motions into the always already optimised field of digital labour. Core Principles takes inspiration from a long history of documentary filmmaking depicting everyday labour, including the Lumiére Brothers' Workers Leaving the Factory, Louis Malle’s Humain, trop Humain, Jean Luc Godard’s British Sounds, and Harun Farocki and Antje Ehmann’s Labour in a Single Shot.
Subdomains
As a domain for experimentation, collaboration and creativity, Avantwhatever hosts a number of subdomains. These are works commissioned as part of various Avantwhatever programs, which push beyond the conventions of the web and the affordances of standard web hosting. Experiments with the internet as a space of listening and engagement, these subdomains bind together human and non-human (techno)ecologies.
- Core PrinciplesTom Smith (+)
- I Can Still Hear the Strong...Mara Schwerdtfeger (+)
- Local TimeBec Fary (+)
- Object AnimacyPatrick Hase & Asher Elazary (+)
- Propositions for ListeningByron Dean & Polly Stanton (+)
I Can Still Hear the Strong Winds Outside emerged from a place of frustration. While making field recordings in the East Fjords of Iceland, the continuous wind infiltrated and obstructed sounds that were, at the same time, being generated by the wind. Drawing inspiration from Norse Mythology, I Can Still Hear the Strong Winds Outside embraces the wind as an anthropomorphised element; a performer of the earth’s surface. Similar to the god of the North Wind, Kári, the wind becomes a singer and an activator of sound. Using field recordings and electronic music techniques, the sounds have been translated from physical movement into chance composition via code. I Can Still Hear the Strong Winds Outside shifts into the inner sound space of the winds forthright presence, pulling them apart both digitally and musically. By placing this new environment within a webpage and having the physical experience of wearing headphones, what is inside or outside becomes confused. Allowing the wind to be understood as a performer gives a greater spectrum to how it is felt and heard. It is awakening the sounds around us.
Local Time is a durational listening experience exploring the presence and absence inherent in place-based sound. It was developed from Bec Fary's deep listening and field recording in their local area, on Woi Wurrung and Boonwurrung land in and around so-called Footscray and Melbourne’s inner West. These listenings explore sonorous urban environments — public space, wildlife, regenerated vegetation and echoes of everyday industrial and domestic noise. Longform field recordings — interspersed with perceived sonic microdisturbances and interruptive temporalities — are programmed algorithmically to play overnight approximate to sunset—sunrise in July 2020 in the UTC+10 timezone. Through these acoustic entanglements, Local Time unfolds the complex interrelations between a recordist and a place, and their human and non-human neighbours.
Object Animacy is a tactile audiovisual web app developed to interact with digital slime mould. The site prompts the user through calibration of a personal interface agent, providing a custom feel for communicating with non-human intelligences.
Propositions for Listening is a browser-based sound work that explores the contingent moments of fieldwork as a generative space of listenings. Drawing from field research undertaken during an artist residency at the Hepburn Wind farm in Victoria Australia, the work presents the field as an assemblage of networks between bodies and events, revealing the multilayered transformation of local phenomena. Juxtaposing sound, text and imagery as a shifting and iterative articulation, Propositions for Listening situates fieldwork as a productive space of knowledge making - where interplays and relationships coincide to make something new.
This work was created on the unceded territory of the Dja Dja Wurrung people. The artists acknowledge the Traditional Owners of country and recognise their continuing connection to land, waters and culture. We pay our respects to their Elders past, present and emerging