This kind of playful approach to field recording is compositional and gestural. One thing I absolutely love about these pieces by Ka Baird is how bizarre they must look to an onlooker with no headphone cable to plug into the sounds Ka Baird is hearing. For that reason, the visual aspect of this work is great. I realise the term ‘swooshing’ to a Deaf person might not make much sense, a visual comparison to the sounds we hear as Ka Baird rapidly orientates the hyper directional microphone creates sounds similar to 90s film credits speeding past the screen, the invocation of movement is not only present from the visual, but these extremely transient fragments of sound that the microphone switches rapidly between amongst the occasional brush of the microphone covering against the grass or the handling noise. The bane of a classic field recorders life turned into material (or the qualities of an instrument.)

We often in modern society witness people in a state of listening without being able to hear what they are listening to, or reacting to the visual but unable to see what they are looking at. This has become even more apparent in the last ten years with things like noise cancellation and mass availability of tablet style phones. In a way modern society is much more attuned to things like the sonic arts or a visual language cut off from sound (i.e someone like Stan Brakhage who’s films rarely had sound) because we are used to utilising these technologies and their affect on the other senses. I enjoy this kind of performance because of it’s disconnect from reality. It’s purely a performance for a virtual space and as a consequence has a very abstract meaning when recontextualised. Like stumbling on someone miming to a camera for a music video.

“For me, the goal of painting is to have light penetrate matter and dematerialize it. It’s truly the redemption of matter.” – Jean Yanco in Agnes Varda’s “Uncle Yanco”.

I watched Uncle Yanco the other day and this quote sprung to mind. I think that like Yanco describes painting, field recordings are like a kind of dematerialisation where space/time becomes a texture.