A reasonably scary forest
Victoria Ward, Friday, July 10, 2009

Resilience: accounting for the non-computable is an article worth looking through, whether your interest is in ecology and the environment, or in how to assemble knowledge from many sources and use it to sharpen insight. The abstract runs:

Plans to solve complex environmental problems should always consider the role of surprise. Nevertheless, there is a tendency to emphasize known computable aspects of a problem while neglecting aspects that are unknown and failing to ask questions about them. The tendency to ignore the noncomputable can be countered by considering a wide range of perspectives, encouraging transparency with regard to conflicting viewpoints, stimulating a diversity of models, and managing for the emergence of new syntheses that reorganize fragmentary knowledge.

Surprise seems such an important word to me in the kind of work we do. Surprise, interruption, a jolt out of familiarity, the lure of curiosity, wanting to know how things end. I could take a predictable turn here into story and surprise. Instead I’ll tell you about a lucky chance which had me noticing the other week that Tom Stewart was over. As a facebook detective (a nicer word for stalker or snooper), I noticed that he was off to see Arcadia, so I facebooked him to ask how it was. One thing led to another and we found a tiny sliver of time when we were both free and met for a glass of wine at One Aldwych.

We spoke about him at Booz, and about Sparknow’s work since we’d last met (quite a few years back I think). And he was surprised, and delighted, at our experiments with found sound. I told him about the soundscapes and audio-essays we’ve been experimenting with, deliberately positioning them on the uncomfortable frontier between recognisable consulting and artistic endeavour in a way that either delights the listener, or engenders anger and doubt and confusion – all valid responses, and all prompting a surprising encounter with feelings in an organisational setting.

We decided together, all three of us present, that internet-publishing is going to change old-fashioned models of consulting and reporting beyond recognition. This happens to chime with the view that the future of museums lies in publishing.

It does, and it also lies in re-imagining exhibitions as installations and events. A friend who does really interesting work in special needs (of which more another time) is also an accomplished guitarist and composer who’s recently been invited to compose a forest to go with a Russian exhibition at the V&A. He decided not to make one from all the birdsong and leaves rustling he already had to hand and set off, very early one day, to the New Forest and crept about gathering sound. The V&A decided that the forest that he composed was too scary, which put him in a bind, because he’d been out collecting scary at the crack of dawn. Anyway, he toned it down to reasonably scary, and that’s all I’ve heard so far.

Shouldn’t his reasonably scary forest be curated too, not just dressing for something else? What’s the thing and what’s the packaging for the thing? Is the thing the experience? Or the art? Does the forest live as a separate thing, or only when wrapped together with the art at the V&A in that moment?

Same with us? What’s the thing? The soundscape, the fragments of interview and found sound that make up the soundscape? The thoughts and feelings and reactions it provokes in the individual or collective listener? The conversations that follow?

What we need, I’d venture, is a decent multi-disciplinary investigation by the competent rather than the expert, following the article from ecology and society, to help us shape a sharper collective understanding of what this might all mean.