Flashbacks «back next»

Page 3

Balmoral Room Photofeature| All photography courtesy of Brock Yates

Frequencies video documentation : Sound Art

Pages: 1| 2

Balmoral Room, City Hall, Brisbane, Australia

From these he wants us consider both the veracity of their claims, as well as the ethical, moral, aesthetic, and political implications they have for communities. By selectively employing the conventions of film making, interactive gaming and broadcast media to further activate these psychological zones, Howlett produces a transformative, meditative space from which to explore the complexity of these often-competing discourses.

In the other body of work in Flashbacks called Frequencies, Howlett has reconfigured, or hardware hacked, iPod FM Transmitters to modify their capacity to receive and transmit information. Like the video and game works, this soundwork also calls into play the logic of technology as it was designed, and extends his exploration into the construction and dissemination of meaning.

However rather than call attention to the truth or otherwise of the symbolic representations presented in Metropolis I, II, and III, Howlett carefully extracts fragments of "speech", specifically the vocalised expressions that include moans, screams, grunts, groans, laughter, sighs, and silent gaps between words, in order to examine how these elements become part of the abstract structures of communication.

By transmitting these as radio waves to the array of radio receivers in the installation, these formless fragments construct machines for glossolalia that displace and disrupt the familiar narratives of the airwaves. What is encountered instead is a soundtrack of transitory and sensuous grains of the voice, at once referencing the textures, timbres and affects of the corporeal, but at the same time highlighting the liminal nature of their origins.

Alongside Flashbacks, the work in Frequencies establishes another site for reconsidering the transformative potential of digital media, but one that emphasises its poetic possibilities rather than it's social or political dimensions.

This work also points to how the ongoing redeployment of technology in Chris Howlett's practice develops a range of dialogues across the conceptual and material processes he examines. And that is what will be further explored in the next installation of Flashbacks at Metro Arts in September 2009.

Mark Webb

REFERENCES: 1. Feenberg, A. Critical Theory of Technology. New York, Oxford University Press. 1991 pp. 140-143 2. ibid. pp. 97-98. 3. Bittanti, M. All too urban: to live or Die in SimCity. in Atkins and Krzywinska eds. Videogame, Player, Text Manchester, Manchester University Press. 2007

Special thanks to Mark Webb for writing the essay, Brock Yates for documenting the exhibition, MAAP for their generous loan of their audio visual equipment and the support from two brisbane artist run spaces Boxcopy and Accidentally Annie Street Space (AASS).