Skimming over my blog post titled ‘An audio self portrait’ I realised that I hadn’t written much about my motivations for creating a self portrait, so this post will elaborate on that.

This piece of work is intended to bridge a slowly widening gap between me and my work; I’ve been struggling to feel a personal connection to my ‘sound arts’ work, and yet I think that there are a few things that I would like to express within that context (as opposed to a music context, which is a side of my art that I’m now digging my teeth into again). For example, one of these things is the overall peculiarity of life and the sense of quiet amusement that I find almost everywhere in the absurdity of all of the little systems, situations and processes that make up modern living. Another, touched upon during first year, is an interest in liminalism, liminal spaces and what we do with spaces once we no longer have a use for them, leading into some psychogeography research. Figuring out how to express some of these ideas within a sonic context (especially because some of them are not initially grounded in audio, but rather in vague undefined feelings) has proved tough, so the decision to strip things back and create something more personal is one that I hope will fit into my own catalogue of work as a turning point, enabling me to better identify methods of expressing ideas that initially seem scatterbrained.

I see it as a first thread to pull, that will hopefully lead on to more experiments. Following some comments on process made by Milo during Studio Praxis lessons I’ve decided to experimentally readjust my process to be less precious about everything being a means to and end, and rather focusing on being proactive in a manner that will lead on to the next step, following through with these explorations and welcoming that I’ll likely end up somewhere that is distant from my initial ideas. There are many potential routes splaying outwards: there is a certain element of ASMR to some of these sounds that I’ve been recording, there are notes of sound therapy, how sound dictates my purchases and clothing, shoe choice, finding rhythm in everyday life, recording my personality through time, how the space in which I live influences the sound of my life (psychogeography again), and there are probably more elements that I’ve not even noticed yet.