Dissolving Dualities: Onto-Epistemological Implications of Ecological Sound Art

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Contemporary Music Review

ISSN: 0749-4467 (Print) 1477-2256 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/gcmr20

Dissolving Dualities: Onto-epistemological


Implications of Ecological Sound Art

Matthew Sansom

To cite this article: Matthew Sansom (2015) Dissolving Dualities: Onto-epistemological


Implications of Ecological Sound Art, Contemporary Music Review, 34:4, 267-280, DOI:
10.1080/07494467.2016.1140473

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07494467.2016.1140473

Published online: 19 Mar 2016.

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Contemporary Music Review, 2015
Vol. 34, No. 4, 267–280, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07494467.2016.1140473

Dissolving Dualities: Onto-


epistemological Implications of
Ecological Sound Art
Matthew Sansom
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This paper discusses the arts practice that emerged during the AHRC funded research
project ‘Landscape Quartet: Creative Practice and Philosophical Reflexion in Natural
Environments’ (2012–2014). The introduction covers the project’s eco-critical basis,
practical methodologies developed during it (including the roles of experimentation and
improvisation), and the particular epistemological value of practice-led research in this
context. A broader theoretical discussion then outlines how non-representational theory
and Tim Ingold’s concept of dwelling help to expand and clarify the argument for
participative environmental arts practice. These ideas are then developed through a
series of examples and a conceptual approach based on notions of working with, of, and
for the environment. It concludes by considering the multifaceted ontological significance
of experiences of ecological arts practice, directly, as an in situ performer on the one
hand, and with subsequent artefacts, performances and installations removed from the
original site, on the other.

Keywords: Landscape Quartet; Environmental Art; Sound Art; Non-representational


Theory; Practice-led Research

Introduction
This paper extends a presentation1 given shortly after the Landscape Quartet research
project had started and now some time after its formal end:2 after contextualising the
project, it combines reflection on practical processes with a consideration of related
theoretical implications.
The Landscape Quartet emphasises practice-led research informed by recent
environmental and eco-critical thinking. Drawing on a number of related intellectual
currents (e.g. actor-network theory, object-orientated ontology, and new materialism) this
thinking, in contrast with Western philosophy’s characteristic mutual exclusion of

© 2016 Taylor & Francis


268 M. Sansom
human and non-human, advocates the ‘interconnectedness of everything’ and
advances related philosophical and practical implications. The meaning of terms
such as ‘nature’, ‘environment’, and ‘landscape’ necessarily shift when the suggestion
of separation between humans and non-humans no longer exists. The Landscape
Quartet seeks to contribute to advancing insights around these kinds of ideas by
exploring the creative possibilities afforded by working in direct dialogue with the
environment and its resulting theoretical implications. Key to the Quartet’s3 approach
are:

(1) participative eco-systemic practices;


(2) flexibility and range in mode of realisation; and
(3) transparency of processes;
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with the aim of acknowledging, acting from, and communicating proximity with and
interconnectedness between: each other; in situ environments; audience participants;
and the ‘spaces’ used beyond initial locations (from rural environment to gallery,
concert venue, fixed media compositions, audiovisual works, and so on). In this
context practice-led research is especially significant; as Borgdorff writes, ‘it is impor-
tant to keep in mind that the specific contribution it makes to our knowledge, under-
standing, insight and experience lies in the ways these issues are articulated, expressed
and communicated through art’ (2010, p. 57). The enquiries of the Landscape Quartet
focus on kinds of knowledge accessible as involved participants, as situated performers
working in and through the habitat; and where insights into this relationship present
themselves through artistic expression with its concomitant strengths as a ‘communi-
cator of knowledge’.4 They embody the argument that ‘ways of acting in the environ-
ment are also ways of perceiving it’ (Ingold, 2000, p. 9) and a relational aesthetic where
artistic engagement and expression affects and is affect by interconnection with the
physical world and human and non-human relations (Bourriaud, 2002, p. 135).
Extending this to a more overtly environmentalist perspective it can be argued that
this approach contributes to understanding the underlying roots of the environmental
crisis by virtue of the way art can achieve a ‘sensation of knowing, the sensation of
being part of a known place’ and by making the ‘world personal—known, loved,
feared, or whatever, but not neutral’ (Evernden, 1996, p. 100).
One last introductory comment concerns the need for experimentation in practical
work. The participative and highly relational emphasis requires process-led ways of
working that draw on intuition, embodied knowledge, instinctual impulse and
varying layers and states of consciousness. Alongside these are more considered, devel-
opmental, open-ended, and/or arbitrary procedures and an open attitude to what con-
stitutes music and aesthetic perception; something for ongoing discovery rather than
as overly predetermined and received. Central to this is (free) improvisational practice
enabling us to respond to site and to shifting collaborative dynamics (with the agencies
of place and across different player permutations), often in highly time-constrained
ways.
Contemporary Music Review 269
Prelude
Prior to the Landscape Quartet, an encounter with participative environmental per-
formance was forced upon me, appropriately enough, by the weather. It occurred
during a performance I gave of a project named Mêtis5 at the 2011 World Forum for
Acoustic Ecology conference. The performance was an improvised hour-long multi-
channel collage using field recordings made during three days of listening-led walks
in Corfu town. Halfway into what was a hot and humid midday hour, storm winds
began to rattle the open windows of the Old Fort’s Wheatstore, the venue for the per-
formance. The wind, and then rain, began to weave their presence into the space;
distant rumblings of thunder added their voice to an already electric atmosphere. It
was an exhilarating and arresting intervention that drew attention to my sense of sep-
aration (between the containing architectural space of the venue and the weather-
world outside) by virtue of way, as its circumstances unfolded, it acted to remove
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that sense of separation. It was the fact that the weather at once both highlighted
my sense of separation and was the force for dissolving it, that so marked this experi-
ence as significant: an intervention from without, exposing a larger context and truth
of participative interconnection which my state of consciousness had previously been
inattentive to and unaware of.

Representation, Participation, More-than-representation


Foundational to the conceptual basis of the Landscape Quartet is the way certain
mechanisms of representation, uncritically received, tend to support divisions charac-
teristic of the Cartesian paradigm; for example between mind and body, culture and
nature, and seeing and hearing. For quartet member Bennett Hogg (and Principal
Investigator on the project), this has meant exploring and arguing for modes of crea-
tive practice that are eco-systemic in approach (Hogg, 2013) (Figure 1).
Here Hogg and Michael Bridgewater improvise knee deep in cold Northumbrian
water where river currents are performed with to as the bows for their violins (ampli-
fied and audible to each performer).
In contrast to a more conventionally distanced positioning of the artist, Hogg pro-
vides examples from a number of artists and ultimately his own practice that exhibit
explicitly participative and active sounding relations with the environment through
which he sees ‘a broader set of cultural practices in which the imperial power of
“the human” over the rest of the world is shifting in favour of what we might call a
more eco-systemic engagement’ (2013, p. 1). His argument highlights the way post-
Enlightenment representation, as the West’s culturally accepted normative ‘report
on reality’, elicits an ideologically blind ‘othering’ of Nature (p. 3).
Offering critique via theoreticians such as Morton (‘in a society that took care of its
surroundings in a more comprehensive way, our idea of environment would have
withered away’ 2007, p. 141) and Voegelin (‘there is no place where I am not heard
… a philosophy of sound art [ … ] necessitates an involved participation, rather
270 M. Sansom
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Figure 1 Still from Devil’s Water; audiovisual example 1—https://vimeo.com/64993807.

than a detached viewing position’, 2010, p. xii) and artist Long (‘my art is the essence of
my experience, not a representation of it’, 2007, p. 26), Hogg presents eco-systemic
engagement as a move from representation to participation, where the involvement
of the improvising listener/maker resists at ‘every possible register the split between
subject and object, culture and nature, splits that are played out in representation
over and over again’ (p. 7).
A counterpart to these ideas can be found in the theoretical and methodological for-
mulations of non-representational theory originating in the work of human geographer
Nigel Thrift. Arising, in part, from a similar dissatisfaction with the privileging of the
visual, and failure to problematise representation (Thrift, 1996, p. 4), it conceives the
world in practical and processual terms as something in a perpetual state of becoming
(Waterton, 2012, p. 67). More a style of thinking, than a single theoretical framework,
it is not against representation per se6 but rather argues that in order to take represen-
tation seriously, we need first to understand it ‘not as a code to be broken’ but as
instances, events, and practices that are performative in and of themselves (Dewsbury,
Harrison, Rose, & Wylie, 2002, p. 438, cited in Waterton, 2012, p. 67). Instead of pri-
vileging the visual, all the senses are foregrounded, with an emphasis on ‘embodiment,
encounters, performances and practices, and an understanding of objects and contexts
as active constitutive elements in all actions and interactions’ (Waterton, 2012, p. 68,
citing Thrift, 1996, 1999, 2003, 2008). Additionally, affect, and related pre-conscious
and pre-cognitive intuitive triggers also play important roles in this realignment of
ways of knowing, doing, and making sense of our place in the world (Pile, 2010).
As Hogg among others points out, notions of landscape and environment have for
some time been understood in terms of representation: as things somehow to be
Contemporary Music Review 271
captured and understood through sight. In the realm of landscape aesthetics this
appears, to quote Neil Evernden again, as the ‘assumption that there is something
out there which, when seen by us “in here” produces a pleasurable effect’ (Evernden,
1996, p. 96). Non-representational theory offers a commanding remodelling of
notions of landscape and our relationship to it that help further define Hogg’s
notion of ‘eco-systemic engagement’. As Waterton explains, landscapes, re-imagined
as capable of affecting, provoking, stimulating, and doing, become fluid and animating
processes rather than static backdrops (2012, p. 70). Landscapes not only surround us,
but they ‘force us to think—through their contexts, prompts and familiarity (or not)’
(Waterton, 2012, p. 69); body and landscape are recursively entwined, constitutive
and constituting, always in a process of (re)formation (p. 70). This perspective parallels
many of the reasons for and relevance of practice-led research argued above and
affirms the epistemological import of arts practice more generally.
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In a similar way, anthropologist Ingold, in his confrontation of the division between


the ‘two worlds’ of nature and society and his impressive assault on reductivism more
generally, argues for what he calls a dwelling perspective that views ‘the immersion of
the organism-person in an environment or lifeworld as an inescapable condition of
existence … [where] the world continually comes into being around the inhabitant’
(2000, p. 153). From within this perspective the human being is necessarily conceived
not as a ‘composite entity made up of separable but complementary parts, such as
body, mind, and culture, but rather as a singular locus of creative growth within a con-
tinually unfolding field of relationships’ (2000, p. 4). The unfolding of these relation-
ships—and arguably the forms of practice, performance, and eco-systemic engagement
already referred to—is theorised by Ingold in relation to movement (Ingold, 2007,
p. 76). ‘Life on the spot’, he writes, ‘surely cannot yield an experience of place’,
because ‘every somewhere must lie on one or several paths of movement to and
from places elsewhere’ (2007, p. 2). And the movement of dwellers is defined by
Ingold in the act of ‘wayfinding’ where people ‘“feel their way” through a world that
is itself in motion, continually coming into being through the combined action of
human and non-human agencies’ [emphasis in the original] (2000, p. 155). And ‘far
from being ancillary to the … collection of data … for subsequent processing, move-
ment is … the inhabitant’s way of knowing’ [emphasis mine] (2011, p. 154).
To summarise: knowledge and meaning emerge by virtue of movements and
practices performed within and through our relational and situated contexts of
being. Experience of the landscape is fundamentally multi-layered and multi-
sensual, more-than-representational, and perceptions of and insight into both
the landscape and ourselves, knowing and being-known, are forged in the inescap-
able interconnectivity of the two. On this basis, useful methodological parallels
exist for the Landscape Quartet with social science research where corporeal
knowledge, feeling, and sensuous engagements are drawn upon in relation to
how identities are shaped and triggered by acts of being and doing (Waterton,
2011). Reformulating the introduction’s emphasis on practice-led research, we
can argue that in the formulations of being and doing specific to participative
272 M. Sansom
environmental arts practice exist research processes and outcomes uniquely posi-
tioned to explore and interpret such relationally constituted and experientially
rooted forms of knowledge.

With, Of, For


From the outset of the project I had a mostly private fantasy that we were developing
a new kind of art practice, that as well as people walking their dogs on Sunday after-
noons they would being going out to do some ‘Landscape Quarteting’. Fantasies
aside, there is a sense in which what we were doing, and continue to do, is an activity
shared with other (non ‘art’) ways in which we exercise our participative presence in
the world. It is a methodological approach for ‘participative environmental arts prac-
tice’ arguably accessible to anyone sufficiently interested, yes, but significantly one
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also containing elements that are fundamental to many other activities (perhaps
including dog-walking, and others such as gardening, constructing and using a
tree-house, wild running, or even something as everyday and apparently inert as
ten minutes sat on a park-bench). As interesting and distinct as ‘Landscape
Quartet art’ may be, as a practice it has as much to do with the multiple kinds of
activity, where, as we move through the world, we seek to locate and re-locate our-
selves as dwellers. In this sense Landscape Quartet activities are successful to the
extent they help recalibrate and re-envision our connection to the environment: a
determining qualitative presence implicit in our activities to passers-by and audi-
ences, and in subsequent artefacts, performances, compositions, and installations
one-step removed from those in situ.
It is a methodology that aims for a multisensory fusion of being and doing to bind
feelings of place and self across a variety of registers (including not only sound, but
also, for example memory, physicality, encounters with non-human animals and veg-
etation, imagination, smell-sound-sight, pre-cognitive and pre-conscious intuitions,
and so on), and initiates a process of attunement from which artistic responses
arise. Amongst a good deal of shared vision and artistic consensus, the reality was posi-
tively complicated by our individual skills, musical and artistic experiences and prefer-
ences, already developed and evolving ways of conducting such work, and a good
degree of informed thinking. As well as working in and through the environment con-
sidered earlier in relation to practice-led research, the process can also be usefully con-
ceptualised as being with, of and for the environment.

With
The central basis of the practice is to occur with the experience of the landscape or
environment as a form of participation. As already described, preparation and per-
formance, conceptual and practical, are initiated through performative participation
with the landscape (the relational context of a processual unfolding and situated imme-
diacy), and emanate from attentiveness to sensations and their emergent meanings.
Contemporary Music Review 273
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Figure 2 Set-up for improvised location-specific electronic performance, taken at Wicken


Fen, Cambridgeshire, 31 December 2012.

From the ‘skills, musical and artistic experiences and preferences’ I brought to the
project and as a result of its collaborative opportunities, a number of practical and
technical approaches were developed. A particular challenge was to incorporate a
greater degree of participative intervention. Although something I had deliberately
avoided in previous installation work for the sake of allowing materials and individual
experience to ‘speak for themselves’, the Mêtis project had already initiated a change by
exploring ideas around how and what my presence might contribute something in per-
formance-installation contexts. As a complement to the listening-led walks integral to
Mêtis, and arising specifically from my experiences in Corfu, I developed a perform-
ance set-up for improvised location-specific electronic performance. Requiring perfor-
mative immediacy, it comprises vibrational transducer speakers that play through any
suitably resonant material in the environment, and iPad-based live sampling/sound
modification with additional sound processing using a Korg Kaoss Pad (Figure 2).
Resulting improvisations are intended as direct and holistic responses to my experi-
ence of and engagement with place (including all that contributed to the point of per-
formance as well as the performance itself) and which in turn feeds back into the
environment as a sonic component within it. Coupled with this, field recording and
videography were employed as further means of engagement with place, to facilitate,
direct and record my participation, and as source material for subsequent works. As
the project progressed combinations of field recording and videography were com-
bined in increasingly direct ways. The following example is an audiovisual piece com-
bining recordings (audio and video) of a solo performance conducted in a bird hide on
Wicken Fen (a nature reserve in Cambridgeshire, UK) with additional field recordings,
videography and text from Ingold’s essay ‘Landscape or weather-world?’ (2011)
(Figure 3).
274 M. Sansom
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Figure 3 Still from East Mere Hide, Wicken Fen (2013); audiovisual example 2—https://
vimeo.com/57530086.

Of
Extending this, the practice is of the landscape through processes of wayfinding where a
‘way through’ is felt and intuited. This includes waiting and simply not knowing what
the next step might be (across widely ranging timeframes), alongside clearer kinds of
directive (often apparently immediate) insight as well as other more questioning kinds
of active practical exploration. In a more plainly material sense, this of-ness is apparent
also in the recycling of the air, reeds, leaves, animals, as they sound and return modi-
fied, placed within other materials already of the environment, with their own specific
connections and connotations of shape, density, weathering, purpose, history, and so
on.
Already referred to, and part of environmentalist critique, is the theme that our
status as (Westernised) dwellers is something prone to slippage with a tendency to
absent itself from consciousness, and which requires recovery and renewal. Interest-
ingly, assumptions born of familiarity with place, or with previous ways of working
either with a collaborator or a particular location, often worked to subtly counteract
the integral dialogical quality, the of, of working with the environment. In parallel
with aspects of freely improvised music making, a certain fluidity of consciousness
is required to guard against the comforts of reductive fixity associated with repetition
of known, or at least predictable, outcomes and for the sake of achieving what feels like
and may well be (for artist and audience/participants alike) genuine responsiveness
and participative integrity. It is a ‘style of thinking’ required to establish the kinds of
performative onto-epistemological zones that facilitate ‘fluid and animating [artistic]
processes’ that are ‘recursively entwined’ and which arise ‘around the inhabitant’.
Contemporary Music Review 275
In April 2014 the Quartet visited Sweden for a series a projects. It included a return
trip to Klagshamns Udde, a nature reserve on the coast of the Baltic Sea near Malmö.
The previous trip in the summer of 2013, which I was unable to attend, had yielded a
good range of creative work, and we were keen to revisit and investigate how these pre-
vious experiences would inform our approach. Although repeat visits to locations are
common to the way in which we work (often involving even more long-term responses
and multiple visits), on this occasion, after some hours of ‘tuning-in’ and an attempt at
a group performance, it eventually became clear that we had to rid ourselves of the
ideas and assumptions we were carrying and to rethink our strategy. The resulting
notably simpler approach, each of us with an Aeolian instrument, allowed for a new
and more genuinely responsive performance even though it adopted an already estab-
lished ‘technique’ of the Quartet. The resulting audiovisual work not only communi-
cates a strong sense of the experience of performance but also the participative integrity
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recovered as part of this process (Figure 4).

For
Finally, from the perspective that it affirms the dialogic, constitutive and constituting,
relations between the landscape and self, environment and body, it can be understood
as for the landscape. To explain, experientially these performances inhabit a kind of
liminal and shared space that ritualises the ontological reality of this reciprocity
where ‘energy, matter, and ideas interact’ (Glotfelty & Fromm 1996, p. xix).
There are two further suggestions pertinent here that help unpack this point: one is
the significance of performing or making an installation in situ without any sense of

Figure 4 Still from Landscape Quartet, Klagshamns Udde (2014); audiovisual example 3—
https://vimeo.com/91443152.
276 M. Sansom
‘audience’ other than the reciprocal context for it as an expression of relationship. In
this sense, its justification is equal to that of a conversation, where no further witness is
necessary or perhaps even wanted. The ontological status of the act itself is sufficient.
Again, the dynamics of free improvisation come into play, in that the distinctions
between ‘performing’ and ‘rehearsing’ or ‘not performing’ are weaker if not wholly
absent. Reminiscent of Long’s statement from earlier, ‘my art is the essence of my
experience’ (2007, p. 26).
Secondly, there is the more-than-representational status of subsequent artefacts. As
Crouch writes,

Representations are borne of the performativity of living, Matless (1992) noted. The
livingness of performativity is available to individuals who encounter these represen-
tations. Thus in no sense are representations fixed or closed to change. They are
open to further interpretation and feeling. Representations and their projected cul-
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tural significance remain open too, “available” for further work. (2012, p. 123)

Subsequent ‘representational’ works are born of and exist in ongoing processes; dialo-
gic, constitutive and constituting, relations inform not only the ‘original’ participative
act but also initiate and contribute to a cycle of interconnected relational performative
acts that follow. In a similar way, Bolt argues for art’s performative potential against it
as merely a signifying representational act, that through ‘creative practice, a dynamic
material exchange can take place between objects, bodies and images’ (2010, p. 8).
Such a materialist ontology of the work of art, with a mutual reflection between the
‘work’ and reality (p. 10) that combines imaginative power with the form of artistic

Figure 5 Still from Landscape Quartet Installation (July 2013); audiovisual example 4—
https://vimeo.com/77138252.
Contemporary Music Review 277
expression, underscores the broader relevance and communicative qualities of the
Quartet’s multi-modal approach as ongoing participations with and for the environ-
ment: reconfiguring (by imaging, sounding, spatialising, etc.) the ontological realities
of reciprocity (Figure 5).

Conclusion
This with/of/for characterisation follows Ingold, following Merleau-Ponty, in his claim
that light, sound, and the weather-world of earth and sky are ontologically prior to the
visual, the aural, and the landscape. Ingold writes:

To regain the currents of life, and of sensory awareness, we need to join in the move-
ments that give rise to things rather than casting our attention back upon their objec-
tive and objectified forms. We need, in a word, to undo the operation of inversions,
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abandoning the fixities of genes, images, recordings and landscapes for the genera-
tive movements, respectively, of life, light, sound and weather. [my emphasis] (2011,
p. 97)

My performance practice as it developed within the Landscape Quartet and to a good


extent of the Quartet more generally can be understood as an experimental arts prac-
tice seeking to ontologically realign with such generative flows and the threads of per-
ception and feeling issuing from them. To join in these ‘movements that give rise to
things’, that open us out and up to the world, as perceiver/producer and listener/
maker, yield particular kinds of meaning and links back to my experience in Corfu.
When the ready boundaries of perception and consciousness are loosened, we find
our ego-selves taking off for a while to allow for more expanded states of conscious-
ness. This, we might argue, is the prized goal of many a practice rightfully carried
out, be it in sport, cooking, intimacy, meditation, and so on. As Crouch writes in
relation to the concept of ‘spacing’ (an active verb he uses to contrast the static
noun of ‘landscape’):
To ‘feel’ landscape in the expressive poetics of spacing is a way to imagine one’s place
in the world. The individual can feel so connected with space that s/he no longer is
aware, momentarily, of being (merely) human; we may become the event, become
the landscape. (2010, p. 14)

Such experiences, interconnecting ontologically charged encounters where more


objectively perceived states of consciousness fluctuate and give way to a loss of self,
are integral to the performance practice of the Landscape Quartet and serve to conflate
notions of ‘with’, ‘of’, and ‘for’ still further. It is perhaps as a practice circulating
around experiences where dualities dissolve that the Landscape Quartet’s ecological
activist credentials reside most fully. As Ingold suggests, we can view the activities
leading to the production of what we call in the West ‘art’ ‘not as ways of representing
the world of experience on a higher, more symbolic plane, but of probing more
deeply into it and discovering the significance that lies therein’ [emphasis mine]
(2000, p. 11).
278 M. Sansom
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Funding
The artistic research this paper is based on was carried out as part of the project Landscape Quartet:
Creative Practice and Philosophical Reflexion in Natural Environments, supported by the Arts and
Humanities Research Council RC id: AH/J004995/1.

Notes
[1] A position paper entitled ‘Landscape Quartet: strategies for ecological sound art’ given at Music
and ecologies of sound: theoretical and practical projects for a listening of the world, University of
Paris 8, France, 27–30 May, 2013.
[2] ‘Landscape Quartet: Creative Practice and Philosophical Reflexion in Natural Environments’
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was a research project funded by the UK Arts & Humanities Research Council during 2012–
2014 (Hogg, 2015).
[3] Although a Quartet, it is a mistake to assume that we always work as a strict foursome. The term
is employed more loosely to imply a team with four members working variously in twos, threes,
at times individually and only occasionally as a full quartet but always under the umbrella of the
Quartet’s conceptual framework and methodological approaches.
[4] There is a connection here with Haseman’s proposal for ‘performance research’ (alongside
qualitative research and quantitative research) which
holds that practice is the principal research activity—rather than only the practice of per-
formance—and sees the material outcomes of practice as all-important representations
of research findings in their own right. [ … ] Its plurivocal potential operates through
interpretative epistemologies where the knower and the known interact, shape and inter-
pret the other. (2006, p. 7; see also 2010, pp. 147–157)

[5] A multi-channel durational performance piece constructed from field recordings made in and
around the local of the performance’s venue. Mêtis explores the interface between installation
art, sonic art, and improvised electronic performance practice (the work’s structure, sound diffu-
sion and processing constituting its improvised elements). The World Forum for Acoustic Ecology
performance was one of six carried out during 2011 based on three locations (Guildford in the
UK, Corfu, and Prague).
[6] Lorimer (2005, p. 83) uses the qualifier more-than-representational to make this point. A useful
and wholly appropriate counter to the binary otherwise implied and something Abram does
also for the term and idea of the non-human world (The spell of the sensuous: Perception and
language in a more-than-human world, 1997). Not to be left out, I have argued for the modifi-
cation of Bailey’s widely used term ‘non-idiomatic improvisation’ in that ‘“more-than-idio-
matic improvisation” offers a more accurate description of music making that extends its
identity and motivation beyond expression of an idiom, and which although “can be highly sty-
lised, is not usually [only] tied to representing an idiomatic identity” (Bailey, 1992, pp. xi–xii)’
[emphasis and addition mine] (Sansom, in press).

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Videography
Hogg, B. (2013). Devil’s water [audiovisual work]. Retrieved October 20, 2015, from https://vimeo.
com/64993807
Hogg, B., Österjö, S., Sansom, M., & Vogel, S. (2014a). Landscape Quartet, Klagshamns Udde (2014)
[audiovisual work]. Retrieved October 20, 2015, from https://vimeo.com/91443152
Hogg, B., Österjö, S., Sansom, M., & Vogel, S. (2014b). Landscape Quartet Installation (July 2013)
[audiovisual work]. Retrieved October 20, 2015, from https://vimeo.com/77138252
Sansom, M. (2013). East Mere Hide, Wicken Fen (2013) [audiovisual work]. Retrieved October 20,
2015, from https://vimeo.com/57530086
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