8.30 pm. Following breakfast, I headed into the city where I found a Starbucks and a free WIFI, and began planning out my day. I wanted to see exhibition installations associated with the Audiograft festival, beginning with one in the grounds of the 03 Gallery that proved so subtle as to be indiscernible. Mercifully, the other venues were close by. No time or energy was wasted. On, then, to the Modern Art Oxford to see a music/image video installation:

Later. Outside: What happened to her next?:

This was followed by a view/audition of a piece about a whale’s voice box, hidden in a darkened room in a motorcycle repair shop at the back of The Story Museum. One had to touch a metal rod and knob together in order to hear the sound and to see the filaments of light bulbs glow:

From there, I walked to OVADA — an independent art studio/project space situated in a 1920s industrial building, which had also been a market and then a garage in its day. Wisely, the curators hadn’t scrubbed up the interior too much. Instead, they’d occupied it like a hermit crab a vacant shell:

By lunchtime, I was ready to return to the WIFI zone in order to process my experiences. 2.00 pm. I had intended to travel out towards Headington to visit Oxford Brookes University, where a further two sound works installed. But the buses never turned up. So, I headed back to base camp (it was getting cold) to recuperate, cogitate, and prepare for my evening of hardcore noise making. I have a room by the riverside:

6.20 pm. Dinner: I found an un-busy pub offering an acceptable lasagne. 7.00 pm. Back at The Story Museum:

The doors weren’t yet open due to the technical preparations still underway in the upstairs room, where tonight’s performances would be given. We were offered earplugs, with the warning that some of the artists would be playing very loud:

This had the feel of a rave for the intellectual and cultured, where we would stand around nodding our heads approvingly, rather than banging them in ecstasy. The event was being live-streamed. Camera operators, like benign Daleks, scanned and scrutinized the performers and the audience’s reactions.

The first artist’s work was very quiet. We were encouraged to sit on the (hard) floor:

(I don’t think that I’ve sat cross-legged for quite so long since primary school.) It was a longish piece, which if I was listening to it at home on a comfortable couch would have been entirely acceptable. As it was, my backside yearned for it to end long before my mind did. How long should a sound work last in public performance? Listening shouldn’t have to be a feat of endurance, always.

Being an audient is an important aspect as being an artist. We need to be aware of what it’s like to be on the receiving end, even as we deliver. (The same principle pertains to teaching and learning.)

Professional musicians are trained in the protocols of walking on and off stage, acknowledging the audience, and carrying them along. Too much informality in the performance on the part of the artist encourages a too casual attitude to hearing on the part of the listener. Some sound artists don’t do enough in situ to justify — and appear uncomfortably self-conscious about — being the focus of visual-perceptual attention. Like the Wizard of Oz or a cinema projectionist, they’d be better placed engineering the occasion while hidden.

I stood next to a larger thunderous subwoofer. When the sound was very loud, my trousers rippled as the air pressed past them; my bones trembled. The abstract turntablist (Maria Chavez) was last on. She was neither too long nor too loud in her operations, but never really got into the ‘groove’, as it were. In improvisation, sometimes the creative imagination doesn’t find a pattern to follow or the internal logic of the moment. Nevertheless, she delivered a performance that was engaging and technically dexterous. That’s professionalism. (She was audience aware too.):

The proceedings concluded after 11.00 pm. What a rich day.