# data[].attributes.body
Maha Sarakham is a province known for its Thai silk and a place where my family is rooted. The province is situated in the North East of Thailand, it is part of the Isaan region. This region was formerly part of Laos, thus share many cultural heritage and identity with Laos. From the food, to language and music the region is more akin to Laos than Thailand itself.

Rasmee, combines the traditional folk & country singing with the local dialect in a soulful form yet narratives the hardship faced by the souls in the region. A narrative that is synonymous with the genre.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Lady Donli - Corner Ft. VanJess & The Cavemen (The Movie)

# data[].attributes.location_name
Princes Park Mansions, Croxteth Road, Liverpool

# data[].attributes.headline
Princes Park Mansions, Croxteth Road, Liverpool

# data[].attributes.subject
Princes Park Mansions, Croxteth Road, Liverpool

# data[].attributes.body
“We comfort ourselves by reliving memories of protection. Something closed must retain our memories, while leaving them their original value as images. Memories of the outside world will never have the same tonality as those of home and, by recalling these memories, we add to our store of dreams; we are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.”
― Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
This series of notes ponders Architectural Body (2002), a manifesto of Madeline Gins and Shusaku Arakawa, as a form of experimental methodology. An artist-architect pair who believed that, through profound recalibration of our constructed environment, humans could solve life's greatest design flaw - immortality. These musings are placed alongside a series of sound recordings, which consider Gins and Arakawa's ethos of 'reversible destiny' by questioning the possibility of longevity by activating the body though movement, sound and a relationship with space.

https://arowoftrees.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/Ground-1.mp3

1. "We have decided not to die," a succinct declaration of Gins' and Arakawa's lifelong ambition, in which the boundaries between human and architecture are blurred - a symbiosis between lived environment and resident, in an eternal state of tentativeness.

2. If we consider the basic notions of matter, in this case, not in the sense of an art-object, but rather as a stabilising process of materialisation, then the tangibility of something, its actuality and realness, are subsequent states of its own boundary: a fact which leads one to question the bodily involvement in such materialisation and what it is that matters about the human body and subsequent material bodies. If the intelligibility of one's own presence within space can merge the individual site/occupant boundaries, can this ensue the preservation of life or sound? If so, what does the fabric of this vibrational fixative look like?

3. Is it possible for a space - our relationship to it and the vibrations that occur between - to challenge us to the point of immortality? Gins and Arakawa believed this with all certainty - that the lived environment and the challenges it proposed could indeed reverse mortal destiny. Thinking on this, in my own surroundings, these walls built in 1848, by design of architect Wyatt Papworth, walls which throw me challenges of my own, through time via decay. As the bricks sit stagnant in the cold late November air, mould and dust collects, resulting in an exchange of care, a tending to the structure that holds. An exercise, rather, in how the body can serve space, opposed to how space can serve the body.

4. Constructed landing sites which hold a 'deep sense of voicefulness', writes John Ruskin in 1849, watch sternly with a mysterious air of sympathy, maybe even approval or condemnation, walls that have long been 'washed by the passing waves of humanity'.

5. Opposing the idea of deathlessness is the premise that immortality exists not in an undying body, but in the output from our mortal boundary. Not that the trace of memory alone should be what preserves our past perceptions, but that memory itself should simultaneously allow us to face our state of mortality. Though this needs the consideration of what we define memory to be, whether that is something that is held, a mental capacity for retaining and reviving, or is it in fact separate from the corporeal body entirely, and is instead merely the length of time which recollection extends - implying that it is recollection itself that forms the boundaries of the corporeal body.

6. Consequently, as I write, I am constantly thinking on the very instance of writing, evoking the tendency of the human system to maintain a finite internal stability, making it increasingly more ambitious to differentiate between the biochemical weave of the body writing and the surface of page. Which makes this set of propositions in itself a physical sphere, a terrain of inquiry, aiding in demonstrating the blurring of boundaries.

7. The concept of a permeable boundary, the escaped contents of which can exist between and go on to inhabit that of another, when applied to sonic realms, brings to light Guglielmo Marconi's proposed immortality of sound waves. That sound may appear lost to the human ear but that these eternal frequencies exist nonetheless. Marconi and Ruskin alike refer to the traces of time as 'waves', the very matter of memory itself. Though these 'waves' would need to be picked up by a then completely imagined device to tap into the littered lost sounds, lying in wait, to be revived by the right antenna.

8. Today in an era of pervasive sound recording, the resurrection of old sounds is at our disposal, made new again each time with each play, shaped by the ambience, history and dimension of new landing sites.

9. The nature of the ever-changing allotted space that these past vibrations inhabit acts as a filter, sieving out all frequencies, except the resonant ones. So it is not in fact by and through the recorded sound, but instead through the interaction with space that holds the key to unlocking them-feeding sounds back into the environment, in different states of time. So in essence vibration is that which filters itself, as the fabric of said 'allotted space' is the very same thing. This allows the physical dimensions and acoustic characteristics of the space to bring the flattened sounds back to life, providing a method which can be utilised to directly impact an occupant's understanding of the architecture they inhabit and their experiences within.

10. Thinking on the third space between two known things, between translations and transitions by architectural means, could 'immortality' then instead be achieved by exploiting the physical notions of space via the imposition of corporeal matter, which allows the lost frequencies that whir within walls to take on a new form in a new time? Their resonance, as in the natural occurrence of vibrating mass at a specific frequency, suggests that in order to successfully revive a note adrift, a physically external sound source must interact with the properties of the architecture and the bodies within the space, which will inevitably undo such architectural properties to conceive a new variant.

11. So to challenge the tentative symbiosis that Gins and Arakawa speak of, between body and architecture in a bid to live forever, could it be that it is not through our mere corporal receptors, but instead through the sounds they emit, that we can truly live forever? It is apparent that the relations between the sound source and the space destabilise, making one much more aware of the other through the now shared vibrations between them, holding both accountable for an eternal sonic output.

https://arowoftrees.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/Level-1-1.mp3

12. This could generate a self-referential loop between form and context, critiquing the stability of meaning itself, as the matter at hand is constantly in a state of change. Gins was concerned with such a multiplicity of communicational modes with great distances of space, but also small distances, such as the space between a nucleus and electrons, distances which are not ordinarily related to the form of communication used. It is within these states that methods of communication through space can be questioned.

13. This leads me to 1848, a year in which the walls I sit within were realised, and how through this structure and the evocation of sonic memory spatial vibration can, in a sense, break down the boundary of mortality. Using the walls as a means of filtration of the stored sounds enclosed to converse through time via space. Picking up Marconi's lost erratic sounds, defying geographical origin, incorporating the imposition of the historic sonic remnants of the building and the occupant bodies that shaped them.

14. Notation which has passed through one's bodily boundary into the shared in-between, now relayed through exact prescribed instructions. Dionisio Aguado's New Method For Guitar, also actualised in 1848, is introduced to the space, opening the composition up to new determinative architectures. Aguado's composition is deconstructed into single prolonged notes and played into the building's old gated lift shaft, an ascending room of sorts.

15. The elevator is a space that Max Neuhaus studied in order to understand an occupant's movement through vertical space. He eventually concluded that such spaces should be fitted with a combination of colour and sound to mark the elevator's position from floor to floor. This idea of understanding and interacting with space is seemingly at the core of everything discussed here and the inclusion of motion is a nod to the grounding theory of Architectural Body.

16. A thing in motion will always defy a thing at rest when it comes to immortality, as that which is static immediately begins the process of decay, while that which is in motion is seemingly eternal.

17. The recordings take place at three intervals of the staircase which spirals around the lift itself, the performer ascending, the sound escaping from the lift onto the surrounding stairs. The inclusion of colour in the form of colourfield lighting assigns each level a primary, in order to fulfil Neuhaus's instruction of dedicated zones for spatial understanding, indicating to the listener that these sounds exist as separate from one another. ¹

18. According to Frank O'Hara, coloured sound comes from a feeling of corruption, in the sense that the obscurity of emotion is simple but simultaneously very definite, a dark and purifying wave, and much like a space, can appear empty but with the promise of refilling. This experience is local and intimate, and within it phrases of old romance are repeated and constantly renewed, locked away for the future revival of the captured time of our being.

19. It seems the foundation of these notes essentially stems from the poetics of space rather than the physics of it, though it would seem that no actual space can satisfy the poetic imagination. Instead, architectural sites with a phenomenological significance exemplify states of unconscious lives; the house for example, which in the same way as those that inhabit it, will be subject to alteration, evolution and decay.

20. My recordings seek to examine the lived space as a significant artefact of, and tool for, the future of human thought, in the same way that the house shelters these possibilities. Once collected they are then played through a series of speakers, which sit at the same intervals that the recordings themselves were conducted. Rather than absorbing sound from the central lift shaft, the steps emit it to a listener, now in the place of the absent performer within the elevator.

21. As the body travels through the structure of speakers, a sense of spatial presence is questioned as the sound lines in the work alter one's sense of space and it becomes uncertain whether sounds are being stalked or abandoned. The sound space itself is defined not by the structure of speakers, but instead by the travelling boundaries of the sound, which alter existing physical fields, suggesting that sound architectures are not concerned with the actuality of space, but the somatic factors that conceive new arenas of sonic presence.

22. Bodies do not exist outside of sound, they instead move through, against and with sound space, extending through physical embodiment. A crossing of boundaries in order to concurrently sustain and augment, and in this extension, a nuanced version of what it means to defy death emerges.

https://arowoftrees.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/Level-2-1.mp3

23. Gins and Arakawa died in New York at the ages of 73 and 72. Their aim to out-design death was a position of action, a longing to dismantle and redefine the logic of architecture, of whom and what it serves. Though Gins and Arakawa's bodies, any body for that matter, have not achieved deathlessness, when their intentions are applied to sound, its fate appears divergent to that of the human body. Perhaps the symbiosis of site and occupant is not the death-defying aggregate, but is instead the marrying of sound and space, activated by mortal passers-by who mobilise history through the sounds they leave behind. These sounds are a spatial event that holds an ephemerality, both in existence and definition. Aiding in the commitment that all art has to acknowledge its own conventions, one which questions perception and ultimately makes one more aware of, connected to, or even confluent with, their environment.

1. Max Neuhaus, Program Notes. Primary Information. 2015.

Shusaku Arakawa & Madeline Gins. Architectural Body. University of Alabama Press. 2002.

Gaston Bachelard. The Poetics Of Space. Penguin Classics. 2014.

Frank O' Hara. Why I'm Not A Painter. Carcanet Press Ltd. 2003.

Wyatt Papworth. Museums, Libraries and Picture Galleries. Book on Demand Ltd. 2013.

John Ruskin. The Lamp of Memory. Penguin Books. 1849.

---------------------

(for online installation)

Necessary Equipment

// 3 devices capable of digital sonic output (for example, a computer, an iPad, a mobile phone)

// 3 recordings of drone notes played on prepared guitar ('Ground Floor', 'Level 1', 'Level 2')

// Furniture of differing heights that the devices can be placed on to create the illusion of a spherical listening environment. The dimensions of furniture should be chosen to relatively mimic intervals of a spiral staircase.

// A room of sonic possibilities of which you would like to evoke.

Choose three pieces of furniture, one which will sit close to the floor, a footstool perhaps; one which will occupy a central space, possibly at eye level, maybe the middle shelf of a bookcase; and finally one which will allow the device upon it to feed sound into the realm above ones head; a standing ladder or a tall wardrobe.

Place the three devices on the respective pieces of furniture.

From the lowest height play 'Ground Floor'

From the middle play 'Level 1'

From the highest point play 'Level 2'

Now precede to sit, central, within the sonic sphere of your own making.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Journal of The Sonic Art Research Unit

# data[].attributes.body
I'm wandering round and round nowhere to go
I'm lonely in London, London is lovely so
I cross the streets without fear
Everybody keeps the way clear
I know, I know no one here to say hello
I know they keep the way clear
I am lonely in London without fear
I'm wandering round and round here nowhere to go

While my eyes
Go looking for flying saucers in the sky

While my eyes
Go looking for flying saucers in the sky

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
[1972] Transa - Álbum Completo/Full Album

# data[].attributes.body
NIGHT BUS TO EVERYWHERE: how it feels to close ur eyes and tune in to the pulse of the city, before after during a night out and all the times in between. chipped nail polish and sharing everything x

# data[].attributes.body
I don't live here any more so please don't send me any post! The most beautiful house inside an old school, we hosted a billion dinners and parties and had a beautiful garden and then a SECOND, even MORE beautiful garden out back. We had a mezzanine platform over the living room which had a bed in it, but it wasn't legally allowed to be a bedroom, so we had a spare bed plus two comfy sofas where our friends could stay, and they did all the time. I lived here with my boyfriend (the first time we've lived together), our pet rabbit, and two other people who we found on Facebook(!!!!!!) but they turned out to be our soulmates. Alex was pure Scouser and my family is from Liverpool so we shared an obsession with the Beatles. He would blast their music when cooking and at the end of parties so we all knew the words.

My cousin passed away while I was living here and it was (and still is) a grief that knocked me completely sideways and upside down. This house was the safest place for me to be, gentle and sunlit and a 20 minute walk from the local swimming pool. I had a full time job but I barely remember being there, I just remembering in the house in the sun and looking after each other. There is such a gentleness to chosen family, the way we aggressively cared for each other in the most simple of ways. We got evicted last year and since moving, my flatmate Sarah has moved into a new flat elsewhere, and her girlfriend recently said to me she wished we still lived together. Sarah got a cold and nobody went to the shops for her and made her soup. That house was really, truly my home and I miss it so much.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Golden Slumbers / Carry That Weight - Takes 1-3 / Medley

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.title
Golden Slumbers / Carry That Weight - Takes 1-3 / Medley

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Proclaimers - I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles) (Official Music Video)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Louis Armstrong - What A Wonderful World

# data[].attributes.body
This song has been not only one of the most popular songs in Hungary for many, many years, but it also symbolizes the Hungarian people's struggle against the oppressive powers attacking the country. This song is also about the revolution of 1956. At the beginning of the video, the singer, Zsuzsa Koncz, greets the former Prime Minister of a free Hungary, who has played a significant role in the creation of a democratic Hungary.

Here's a rough translation of the lyrics:

If I were a rose, I would not bloom just once

Every year, four times, I would burst into bloom

I would bloom for the boy, I would bloom for the girl

For true love, and for passing away

If I were a gate

I would always stand open

No matter where they come from, I would let anyone in

I wouldn't ask them, 'So, who sent you?'

I would be happy if everyone came

If I were a window

I would be so large

That the whole world could become visible

With understanding eyes, they would see through me

I would be happy if I showed everything

If I were a street

I would alwazs be clean

Every blessed evening, I would bathe in light

And if a tank's cogwheel ever stepped on me

Even the earth belowm me, would crumble in tears

If I were a flag

I would never fly loose

I would be angry towards every kind of wind

I would be happy if they stretched me out

And I wouldn't be a plaything for any kind of wind

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Touchstones Tapes Episode 1 - Queer People, Places & Things

# data[].attributes.body
I have lived here all of my life but my mind has been caught between lands and spaces, countries and colonies far beyond the small village I occupy. My ancestors moved and migrated, from India to Kenya, from Kenya to U.K. and without all of that movement, all of that lineage I would not be here, occupying the physical space I call home. But home for me is split between countries and colonies, lands and spaces, between India, Kenya and Britain and somehow I have to figure out how and where I fit, how I can be brown and British, how I can be an outsider and insider, how I can belong to a lineage of movement and yet remain still.

Although I have always lived in the same place, my mind and my grandparents stories have taken me on a number of journeys to the other lands I call home. I have chosen the spoken word piece 'broken english' by rupi kaur to express how I feel about my home but most importantly to express how in awe I am of my grandparents, for the journey they took, for the lives they created and for the struggles they faced with broken english pouring out their mouth and they still created a place for me to call home. My grandparents and my ancestors before them are always my muse and my inspiration when it comes to my poetry and spoken word, so I wanted to put them and their story on the map...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
rupi kaur  - broken english (official lyric video)

# data[].attributes.body
where i was raised, suburb i love to hate, the edge of london, grey and stupid and all mine. Freedom is the victoria line first and then the busses to dalston. now i love the forests and the empty quiet and going to see my mum and dad

# data[].attributes.body
Má Vlast (My Homeland) is a set of six symphonic poems inspired by the Czech historical context, myths and nature, composed between 1874 and 1879 by Bedřich Smetana, one of the greatest Czech classical music composers. Smetana composed Vltava (Moldau), one of the six symphonic pieces named after the Czech's longest river, while he was completely deaf. This work is one of the many things that make me proud to be Czech.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.authors[].name
Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra - Topic

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Má vlast, JB 1:112: No. 2, Vltava (My Country: Moldau)

# data[].attributes.body
I moved to Brighton when I was 18 from Grantham in Lincolnshire. It was my choice. 9 years before that, my father died and we left our house and friends to move to Grantham, which was my mum's birthplace. I knew no-one and felt alien and that feeling continued even after making some friends there. Brighton, when I first set eyes on it, was a cultural Wonderland to me. The song I have picked is one that lifts me every time I hear it. It speaks to me of sunsets and the sea ebbing and flowing, of nights out dancing with friends, and of dancing alone in my flat. I have loved it for 24 years and will continue to do so, just as I love Brighton 35 years after moving here.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Energy 52 - Café Del Mar (Nalin & Kane Mix)(1998)

# data[].attributes.body
The solitary but happy song of curlews, now extinct in many parts of the UK - not here where I live! Wild, windy and unblemished by man, this part of the world is closest I can find in the global north to other places I'm equally at home south of the equator.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The wonderful sound of Curlews circling overhead.

# data[].attributes.body
this is how i would feel when i visit my grandparents in the countryside, sleeping on the heated floor, watching morning soap operas, the aroma of veggie stew and side dishes, grandpa's calligraphy display on the walls

# data[].attributes.body
I live by the moors and run up to the top whenever I want a bigger view :)

Millie x

# data[].attributes.body
dancing around the living room barefoot to my mom's soul and funk records--although things were tumultuous, turning the volume way up and dancing always brought us back together, for a song at least

-- Kelly <3

# data[].attributes.location_name
Padiglione della Germania, Giardini della Biennale, Venice, Metropolitan City of Venice, Italy

# data[].attributes.headline
Padiglione della Germania, Giardini della Biennale, Venice, Metropolitan City of Venice, Italy

# data[].attributes.subject
Padiglione della Germania, Giardini della Biennale, Venice, Metropolitan City of Venice, Italy

# data[].attributes.body
Ain't Got No Home, Nina Simone

# data[].attributes.body
"Oh lovely Abidjan, you have it all, your people are so loyal."

# data[].attributes.body
Rebento, substantivo abstrato
O ato, a criação, o seu momento
Como uma estrela nova e o seu barato
Que só Deus sabe lá no firmamento

Rebento, tudo que nasce é rebento
Tudo que brota, que vinga, que medra
Rebento raro como flor na pedra
Rebento farto como trigo ao vento

Outras vezes rebento simplesmente
No presente do indicativo
Como a corrente de um cão furioso
Como as mãos de um lavrador ativo

Às vezes, mesmo perigosamente
Como acidente em forno radioativo
Às vezes, só porque fico nervoso
Às vezes, somente porque eu estou vivo

Rebento, a reação imediata
A cada sensação de abatimento
Rebento, o coração dizendo: "Bata"
A cada bofetão do sofrimento
Rebento, esse trovão dentro da mata
E a imensidão do som
E a imensidão do som
E a imensidão do som desse momento

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Young Fathers - 'I Saw' (Official Video)

# data[].attributes.body
Born in England, I moved to the land of opportunity when I was 7, and thought every day of malteasers, smarties and chocolate buttons. Life changed dramatically three years later when my brother was born - "Einstein couldn't talk until he was three" we'd say [and then four, five, six...]. 38 year later he still cannot speak, except perhaps in his dreams and so I often go to find him there https://www.alexanderschutt.art/. Can one ever really be with the incrowd?

# data[].attributes.attachment_caption
Consider yourself well in Consider yourself part of the furnitureThere isn't a lot to spareWho cares? Whatever we've got, we share

# data[].attributes.body
The first 15 seconds will transcend you spiritually <3

-Tahir x

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Weeknd - Is There Someone Else? (Audio)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Theme From New York, New York (2008 Remastered)

# data[].attributes.body
Riding over Ally Pally on the upper deck of the W3 bus sounds like this <3

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Kokoroko - ABUSEY JUNCTION // WE OUT HERE

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Space Afrika - "yyyyyy2222" (Official Audio)

# data[].attributes.body
My dad's hobby was remixing music, and this was his favourite song as a teen. The result is I spent my childhood listening back-to-back to near indistinguishable remixes of this song and now I know it beat for beat. It was only much later I realised what it was about! It always reminds me of him whenever it comes on TV or radio.

# data[].attributes.body
This song started just as the doors slid open to reveal Central station at rush hour and pushing past the thousands of other people rushing to get out, as my feet matched the beat, I finally felt I fit in in Hong Kong. Cos we're all impatient to get home!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Joni Mitchell - California (Official Audio)

# data[].attributes.body
I live in Machynlleth for now. I'm a love child to a man called Randy. I'm currently writing from New York, where I'm visiting him for the ninth time in my forty year old life. I have a deeply conflicted and complicated relationship with him. There is pain and pleasure, co-mingled from the source, and the present moment. He is American, I am British. I feel deeply curious about my American roots, and also scared, because he has a deeply traumatic family history, that I have been shielded from, due to not knowing him. I have moved over 36 times in my life as a renter, and moved a lot with my mum growing up - we moved for work as we didn't have a lot of money, and having work that paid her more was a priority. I have recently managed to save enough to buy a small terraced house. I run this house as a single woman, and I feel such a deep sense of relief to have space that I can retreat into alone, as I've never had this privelege. Of course, I like to be able to invite friends and family round - but the quietude that I have agency and control over, is something that means homeliness to me; in other words, a safe, quiet place to retreat to, think-feel in, and contemplate what I do out in and with the world...

# data[].attributes.body
Acasă, or home. I cannot listen to this song without tearing up. It makes me think of summers spent at my grandma's house in Romania, and all the family there I long to see.

# data[].attributes.body
Having only lived in Tokyo as a child, I am unable to fully form an audible perception of home in my birthplace. I now attempt to find a sense of belonging remotely through art and music. "Sasurai", or "wandering" in English, depicts the longing for a place and people to call home, and finding comfort in being a wanderer, a stranger.

# data[].attributes.body
Reminds me of my mom x

# data[].attributes.location_name
Springfield, Baltimore Pike, Springfield, PA, USA

# data[].attributes.attachment_caption
I was born in the States but moved to England a few years after this picture was taken.  I've just come back from the Easter egg hunt and am holding my findings proudly in my hand. (Marilyn)

# data[].attributes.headline
Springfield, Baltimore Pike, Springfield, PA, USA

# data[].attributes.subject
Springfield, Baltimore Pike, Springfield, PA, USA

# data[].attributes.body
I grew up here. I remember my older brother playing this song and loving it.

(Marilyn)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Beat - Stand Down Margaret (OTT 1982)