Moving forward from Assignment 3, I was still intrigued with the notion of emptiness that we emphasised with that assignment. After a discussion with Georgia and Daniel, we defined our goals heading into the next assignment as follows:

• Emphasise community
• Expand scope from Assignment 3
• Explore presence
• Deviate from Assignment 3

From here, I felt that the best way to explore community and presence would be to immerse myself directly within it. By spending time at the Tote and allowing myself to be involved in the culture, I felt that the process would be organic and meaningfully connected to the function of the venue. At this stage I still had a vague conception of what I wanted to actually produce for Assignment 4, until Robbie took us to the local RMIT gallery space to experience the work of Nathan Gray, which by chance also had the visual art of Daniel Crooks on display. The amorphous, flowing nature of Crooks’ work had a big impact at the time and provided an aesthetic inspiration that set me on the trajectory for the creation of my own piece.

My process became fairly regular attendance at the Tote when gigs were happening to record moments specifically shared between the audience and the artists. I chose to isolate my technical approach to purely audio in an attempt to engage as wholly as I could with the way the venue sounds. In a way, the process called back to the beginnings on the studio, and I felt as though I was using the zoom recorder to expand my awareness of the moment, the reciprocal energy that flows between the audience and the artist and how this energy feeds into the experience of being at the Tote. What I found is that the totality of the experience is what distinguishes it from any other, that is, the presence of people interacting with the music and talking to each other, creating the atmosphere between songs, all of this amounts to the distinct nature of the various subcultures that pass through and flourish at the Tote. Philip Auslander describes this experience in Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture, where “the value of live performance derives from its existence only in the moment, and its putative ability to create community (if not communion)”. The audience’s engagement with the transparency of an artistic performance amounts to a sort of spiritual experience of catharsis, celebration and an interest in cultivating a particular cultural movement.

To further inform my investigations I was inspired by the central ideas at the core of a collation of RMIT Masters of Interior Design research projects entitled INTERsection, proposed by Suzie Attiwell in her essay of the same name. The use of the word ‘intersection’ in this instance is the marriage of ‘interior’ and ‘section’, which she used to frame the function of the collation itself, creating “an assemblage of individual and intersecting projects”, and that simply by engaging with these works within the collation is “to be among projects”, that is, intersecting with them. I feel that this idea can be applied to the way in which the artist and audience intersect with one another at the Tote, creating the cultural force that passes through the Tote.

With all of this in mind, I chose to centralise the community in my piece as the vital source of energy that sustains the cultural momentum that can be found at the venue. Surrounding this, passages of musical performances seep in to the periphery in the same way that one might find music beckoning them from various passages of the venue itself.

See below a link to the finished piece:

LINK TO SOUND PIECE

Today we took an excursion to a nearby RMIT gallery space to experience Nathan Gray’s work (follow link for footage of its exhibition setup), a soundscape created from various industrial objects on Cockatoo Island. Having already been exposed to this work briefly in class a few weeks ago, where the footage and sounds were sequentially edited in a single piece, it was definitely worth comparing to the exhibit, which was comprised of a number of screens and speakers each feeding different sequences into the space at the same time. There was a choreography to the edits, although the effect felt quite spontaneous and tied to our being in the space itself. This inspired me to think about ways the sort of work we’ve been doing, which has thus far been necessarily tied to a sequence, could be adapted into more immersive spatial experiences.

Also exhibited in the space was a film created by Daniel Crooks, in which he took natural imagery and contorted it with lines of code, creating these meditative and monolithic structures. The human body was similarly contorted in this piece and appeared to be in the process of a twisted dance with itself.

After visiting this space we began walking directly to the atrium/lobby room of building 12 where we initiated the observation process in our first week. Robbie revealed that we have this space booked and that following our presentations we will be hosting our exhibition there. Robbie explained that the exhibition was open entirely to our input but had the potential to be an additional piece involving and incorporating all of our input as a celebration of the studio. Georgia suggested a structure to the presentation, envisioning a linearity that would evoke the way our own pursuits developed throughout the course of the studio – that is, from the home out into the world, from the familiar to the unknown. Daniel proposed that we establish a group document wherein we could store the words that each group had formulated in the last class to establish a consistency across the board that would provide a springboard for a class collaboration. Before leaving, Daniel and I spoke about the possibility of facilitating spontaneous events, such as live audio recording of the space and live abstract video footage, that could be presented in a way that emphasises the sacredness of the current situation. While ambitious, I think this could be a worthwhile project and I’m glad that we’re considering it at this stage.

I borrowed a Zoom Recorder after class with the intention of heading to The Tote on the weekend to record some band presence. After watching Daniel Crooks’ piece, I’m inspired to create an amorphous sound piece composed of various moments in several different performances at The Tote as a way of embodying the diverse presence of the venue.

Today we caught up in groups again to describe our process moving forward via a brainstorming activity. The first stage was to conjure 20 words that we each drew from the process and the site, which we ultimately condensed to 10 words. We ended up with:

foster
movement
threshold
intersection
ritual
faceless
emptiness
presence
grunge
blurred

I contributed “foster” as I thought about The Tote’s role in facilitating the underground music scene, as well as the patrons feeding into and fostering the culture. We discussed approaches to incorporating different interpretations of community as we head into future investigations, and out of these discussions we developed prompts such as “blurred” and “faceless” – as these may suggest, we are hoping to capture human presence as anonymously as possible, so that the result emphasises the effect of their presence more than anything else. I also fed “intersection” into the discussion, largely having been inspired by an RMIT Interior Designs Masters research compilation that I managed to acquire by chance entitled INTERsection, which I am sure will provide fruitful inspiration and momentum to the process. I will explore this further in more blog posts, although at this stage I understand that the use of “intersection” in this context can be read as the marriage of “interior” and “section”, where the interior becomes a compilation of sectioned spaces. This resonates with my experience of accessing The Tote before hours, finding intriguing qualities in rooms and areas usually inaccessible, either due to a lack of permission or by way of being shrouded in darkness. The Tote also represents a space where different people intersect for a common ritual, the intersection of artist/audience. The venue also conveniently sits on an intersection. One of my favourite terms we discussed here was “threshold”, which Georgia introduced and described as the experience of being on the brink of danger in the moshpit, navigating the chaos and existing at the threshold of safety as a ritual and sometimes cathartic activity.

Following this, we paired these words together to create new conjunctions and possibility for creative potential. Some pairings that arose were “faceless ritual”, “emptiness presence”, “foster threshold” and “blurred movement”. This activity served as a way to imagine contexts for some of these prompts and to recognise the potential for their interplay and inevitable interconnectivity. Daniel discussed his urge to represent both “faceless ritual” and “blurred movement” in a motion blurred image of enthusiastic audience members in the moment of moshing, with faces peeling away in a warped blur.

From here we developed another 10 prompts, which although quite abstract I think provide some more interesting stimulus. They are as follows:

challenge
expose
pressure
hold
feed
sync
moment
threaten
resonance
element

With these in mind we spoke about how to represent a “moment” at The Tote, as it is experienced. I think there is a lot of potential for us to visit this idea at different times, although this may be our biggest restriction: the restricted time we will spend at The Tote.

Lastly, we defined our overall goals, which are to:

• Emphasise community
• Expand scope from Assignment 3
• Explore presence
• Deviate from Assignment 3

With this all laid out, I am confident that moving forward we will bring some more interesting material out of our experiences at The Tote. At this stage, I plan to delve into INTERsections and feed that into my process. I am still drawn to the experience of emptiness and how that might still be at play even with a full Tote – can there be moments of emptiness? Would any moment spent in the packed Tote reflect those I experienced in the empty Tote? Will my experiences in the empty Tote effect subsequent visits? Excited to move forward armed with these questions.

Finally, I should note my reluctance before today to follow on with The Tote. I felt as though I might have everything I need from there and was keen to apply these ideas to different sites. However, speaking to Daniel and Georgia along with Robbie discussing the effect of honing in on something specific to draw expansive material from it rather than finding little from an overwhelming stimulus has inspired me to persist with The Tote and see what else I can tease out of it.