approaching the ambient

creative practice and

the ambient mode of being

an essay in three parts

to accompany creative works

by luke jaaniste

submitted for the award of a doctor of philosophy

creative industries faculty, queensland university of technology

2003–2007
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key words

ambience
Martin Heidegger
minimalism
situationist
serialism
installation
visual art
sound art
John Cage
Donald Judd
Daniel Buren
Martin Creed
creative practice
practice-led research
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abstract

This practice-led research proposes, expands upon and presents a mode of being that
has been hinted at within creative practice and intellectual thought, especially within
installation practices in visual and sound arts, since the 1950s. I call this the ambient
mode of being-in-our-surroundings. It involves a way of engaging with our urban
surroundings that eschews the typical logic of foreground and background that grounds
our daily and aesthetic lives. Instead, the ambient mode is an altered state in which we
attune to the all-around-everywhere materiality of the surroundings. This deals with
down-to-earth stuff – how we exist in our surroundings and deal with its pervasive
material excess.

There are four complementary ways of arriving at the ambient mode that are presented
in this research. The first three ways are described in this essay: (I) by way of concepts –
developing a theory of ambience and the ambient mode based on Heidegger’s realms of
world and earth; (II) by way of example – charting practical shifts towards the ambient
mode via minimalist, situationist and serialist strategies; and (III) by way of making –
experimenting in the various moments of creative practice, from in situ making to
documenting, presenting and discussing. Most importantly, we also arrive at the ambient
mode (IV) by way of experience – discovering our surroundings anew through ambient
creative works. To this end, this research includes an exhibition of in situ work
(Approaching the Ambient, October 2006), and photographic and audio documentation
of work made in various places across Australia during the research (Spotting, Surfacing,
Orientating, Tolling, selected works 2004-2006).

The submission is weighted equally between the creative works (50%) and the written
component (50%).
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contents

keywords 2
abstract 3
contents 5
statement of authorship 6
acknowledgements 7

> introduction: getting in the mode 13

I part one: by way of concepts 27

Ch 1 Proposing the Ambient Mode 28

…ambience and modes of being-in-our-surroundings

Ch 2 Fleshing Out the Ambient Mode 45

…the what, how and where of the ambient mode

II part two: by way of example 69

Ch 3 Pre-figuring the Ambient Work (early 1950s – 1970s) 70

…approaches of creative practice from mid-twentieth-century

Ch 4 Verging On the Ambient Work (mid 1980s – early 2000s) 93

…examples from contemporary visual and sound installation

III part three: by way of making 111

Ch 5 Realising the Ambient Mode (mid 2003 – late 2006) 112

…my practice-led research journey

Ch 6 Presenting the Ambient Work (late 2006 – early 2007) 141

…the final creative outputs (exhibition, documents)

< conclusion: new mode, new possibilities 165

references 171
appendices 183

* figures in the essay refer to the separately-bound document (essay images)

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statement of authorship

The written and creative work contained in this thesis has not been previously submitted
to meet the requirements of an award or degree at this or any other higher education
institution. To the best of my knowledge and belief, the thesis contains no material
previously published or written by another person except where due reference is made.

Signature:

Date:
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acknowledgements

There are so many people and organisations to thank for supporting this research. They
have contributed ideas, stories, feedback, criticism and hands-on assistance.

Firstly, thanks to my supervision team. To Adjunct Professor Richard Vella, for assisting
me in entering into this doctoral project. To my principal supervisor Dan Mafé, for many
lengthy discussions, for making space for the daunting and delicious creative unknown,
for letting me cry along the way, for your grace. Also thanks to associate supervisors
Professor Brad Haseman and Associate Professor Zane Trow, to Dr Jillian Hamilton and
Dr Barbara Adkins, and to Professor Jeff Malpas from University of Tasmania.

Deepest thanks to my wife and creative assistant, Nerida Jaaniste. I could not have
completed this research without her. Nor would I have wanted to. Thanks for being there
throughout, for hours of conversations at home and in situ, for fine-tuned feedback on my
drafts in early and latter stages, for drawing meaning from my mutterings, for story-telling
skills honed as a theatre director, for staying up into early mornings to assist on
particular projects. Thanks also for sheltering me for many months, for giving birth to our
daughter, and for being a strong mummy when daddy has been away writing this long
story. Nerida has doubled my thinking, writing and making.

Thanks to Ava Rose Jaaniste for being there, taking us back to little beginnings.

Thanks to my immediate and extended family who live nearby, for your interest in my
creative projects and for many hours of baby-sitting and help supporting Nerida, in
particular Lyndell, Lynne, Keith, Peeter, Dominique, Anouk, Billy and Caleb.

Thanks for the input from many staff and research peers at QUT and elsewhere. Thanks
to QUT Creative Industries Faculty, its Research Office, QUT Visual Arts, QUT Music &
Sound. And to QUT Precincts for support in the final exhibition, and the organisations
that supported projects along the way. All too numerous to mention here.

For a full list of those I wish to thank, see Appendix F: Project Credits.
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It is evidently a question
of bringing one’s intended actions into relation
with the ambient unintended ones.

Before such emptiness, you just wait to see what you will see…
But do we not already have too much to look at?

John Cage (1958, 1961)

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I’d say I had a need to – I wouldn’t call it neutrality –

a need to concentrate on each sound so that every blade of grass
would be as important as a flower.

Arvo Pärt (1999)

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>
introduction
getting into the mode

0.1 Background
0.2 Project Overview
0.3 Essay Synopsis
0.4 Analytical Orientation – Modes of Being
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0.1 Background

Over the past decade or so, something had been slowly nagging away at me. Whether
as a creative practitioner or audience of creative practice, I was becoming increasingly
fascinated and distracted by what is implicated in creative work yet normally ignored:
ambient materiality. By this I mean the material, sensory stuff that is everywhere and all-
around us all-the-time, including when we experience and make creative work. Yet, this
ambience is usually counted as excess or useless or even unwelcome distraction to the
work.

Whenever I go to a gallery, I notice the shadows cast from the edges of paintings and
objects and the delicate complexity of their angles, densities and hues. If there are
multiple light sources, then this forms an avalanche of intersecting shadows. Mix that
with the shadows cast by the architecture, walls, ceiling struts, window rails, furnishings,
labels, and the lighting fixtures themselves. So much colour, light and shape. Then there
is the sheen of the paint, the gloss of a photograph, the glare of glass.

Whenever I go to a concert, it is the creaks of the piano stool as the pianist moves back
and forth, the rustle of the page-turns on stage and the audience programs behind me,
over there, down to the left, at the balcony above. Mutes being placed down, picked up,
placed down. Coughing, sniffing and sighing. A slight hum of the air-conditioning unit,
sometimes in tune with the music. The slight echo of music bouncing off the back walls
and ceiling. Not to mention all the shapes and light throughout the place.

Whenever I go to the theatre, it is all the lights. The stage lights above, with their little
metal blinkers which cut angular shapes and shadows, throwing light over the scaffolding
and struts above. The tiny red, blue and green indicator lights on the stage lights and any
other electrical equipment. Like a multi-coloured starry night. And the exit lights. Then its
the way these lights highlight the black floor paint with its various accumulated layers,
angles and levels of scuff and gloss. Not to mention the multiple shadows which fall from
the actors in their many and various positions over the evening.

This is not to mention all the stuff I notice in all the other places I exist within, as part of
living and working in a city.

How did I get into this distracted ambient state? I blame the avant-garde composer John
Cage, an empty house and installation art.
 15

It all began back in my first year at the Queensland Conservatorium of Music (1995). I
remember chatting for hours one day, with a Masters student, about John Cage and his
so-called ‘silent piece’ 4’33” (1952). About how it invites us to listen all-around instead of
to any framed off, privileged music. About the idea that everything is music and that art
should be about removing one’s tastes and accepting everything as it is. That the job of
composing shifted from making something interesting to shifting our attention to what is
already interesting. Not to talk, but to listen. A meditative practice of opening oneself up
to life as it is, whilst putting aside our desires and intentions. This is a not a matter of
transporting one’s tastes from the high arts to another place in our surroundings. Rather
Cage called for a radical shift – to dissolve hierarchies such that everything all-around is
considered equally beautiful and deserving of attention… It is evidently a question of
bringing one’s intended actions into relation with the ambient unintended ones…

If everything is to be approached as equally interesting, I started to wonder what the

point was of making anything at all, since one can just stand on any street corner and
take in all the sensations around? You could do it right now wherever you are as you
read this… do we not already have too much to look at?… (or hear, smell, touch and
taste for that matter). Cage himself did not provide an answer for me about what the
practitioner should do, since after his silent piece and other experiments in the mid
twentieth-century, his practice settled back to the standard framed settings of the concert
performance, as well as some printed poetry and framed prints.

What started with Cage was amplified in a house. For six months in the middle of my
undergraduate degree (1997) I lived alone in a house and with the place to myself I was
soon making room-based installations. The most important part of the creative process
was emptying out the rooms. I would take out the furniture, only to notice the bits and
pieces on the floor. I would vacuum the floor, only to notice the traces of dust and
cobwebs on the skirting boards. I would clean these boards and then the bumps and
cracks on the walls started to show up. The more I got rid of distractions, the more the
whole room became a distraction/attraction. Within this rich emptiness, I started playing
music very softly on loop for up to a week, at unexpected times of the day or night, and
this would catch my ear or blend into the sonic surroundings. I also started to place
geometric strips of gladwrap on the windows of the house, which were almost invisible in
the day and highly reflective of the house lights at night. Day or night, seeing the strips
was to see the geometries of this domestic setting as well.
 16

More and more, installation art seemed like the biggest tease to my increasingly ambient
sensibilities. In its form, it breaks out of the discretely framed, staged or otherwise
contained aesthetic object and event, to take on the surroundings. Site-specific,
situational, immersive, multi-sensory. Except that, what I came to notice were all the
ways installations set up framing conventions which segregate it from the surroundings,
producing material excess (things-to-ignore) just like traditional framed forms. I have
been to so many installations in arts spaces and public areas where there are cables, or
gaff tape, or plinths, or data projectors, or unfortunately cast shadows, or annoying
reflections, or hums and hisses – all of which we are supposed to somehow ignore for
the sake of the ‘proper work’. Sometimes these material excesses are as great in scale
and perceptual import as the stuff we are supposed to notice. For instance, when plinths
concealing video projectors are as large, or larger than, the image projected onto the
wall. And I came to realise that 4’33”, although a doorway into ambience, belonged to
this tease; it also produces material excess, since its form is a concert performance
which one must give visual attention to at the expense of the visual ambience all around.

Some early installation experiences, however, did pique my distractions/attractions; they

presented material stuff that activated an awareness of the entire ambient materiality of a
place, without producing material excesses in the process. I especially remember a work
by Brisbane artist Sally Cox, who laid rows and rows of almost-invisible blobs of Selley’s
All-Clear (plumber’s sealant) following patterns in the cracks of the floorboards of a
gallery (pardon, Smith+Stoneley, Brisbane, 1997). This was something that I and my
friends only discovered when we accidentally walked on it. The subtly was exciting. I also
remember sitting in a large auditorium waiting for a concert to begin as part of a
children’s festival, performed by community musician, composer and instrument designer
Lindsay Pollock (Qld Performing Arts Centre, c1998). As we arrived, we were each
handed a short plastic tube to blow like a pan-pipe, which were to be used in a single
call-and-response song during the concert. As we waited, the children – about eight
hundred of them – were blowing through these pipes in one massive sea of flute-like
sounds swirling about. In great undulations. There was sound everywhere, all of it to
hear, and none to ignore. Voices, shouts and movements of the audience blended in.
The expansive-ness was exciting. And then, of course, came the concert, which stopped
everything. So the sea of pipes did not last long and, likewise, the network of sealant
blobs were only activating one small patch of the gallery. They also only activated the
surroundings in a general way, without getting into the details which I was
distracted/attracted to. These experiences were but openings to an ambient all-around.
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Slowly, through all these experiences, what was nagging me was turning into a question
of making, one that I have only been able to articulate quite recently:

Would it be possible to make creative work that opens us up to the details and
diversity of ambient materiality all-around, embracing what is there all-along
without hierarchy and judgements of taste, without the work itself producing
material excess or giving itself any material privilege, and achieving this in some
sort of sustained or immersed way?

Answering this question means something – in terms of what we imagine to be the

possibilities of creative practice and of installation in particular, how we think of and
relate to ambience, and how we exist in our surroundings.

Answering this is also the means for me to make sense. As I further dwelled on my
ambient distractions/attractions over the last few years, two memories reached out from
my early childhood spent growing up in a dairy farming community in rural New South
Wales. One memory is of walking up the hillside across the road from our home. It was a
big journey for little feet. When we got to the top, we would turn around, and see the
whole valley with its rolling hills and undulating horizon surrounding us. A panoramic
connection outwards, that was ours to be part of. The other memory is my mother’s to
tell, of how, whenever I got new paints or crayons, I would do page after page of just one
colour. Sensing what was what. Red all-over, again and again, and then blue, and then
yellow. A material connection zero-ing inwards, that was mine to get lost in. As I write
about this, it makes me ache. These memories and, more particularly, the sensibilities
they represent, hold me so captive in my creative practice that it is hard to imagine them
ever falling away.

So the scene was being set, over the last decade and even from early days, for a
practice-led research project that would deal with the nagging of ambient materiality. A
project that would not to get rid of the nag, nor untangle the sensibilities around it, but
would embrace it and see where it would lead me. And over the course of the project,
through making, presenting, reading and reflecting, a thesis formed that would become
the central topic of the research submission: the ambient mode-of-being-in-our-
surroundings.
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0.2 Project Overview

Between 2003 and 2007, I conducted a practice-led doctoral research project at the
Creative Industries Faculty of Queensland University of Technology (QUT) in Brisbane,
Australia. The final submission is titled Approaching the Ambient: Creative Practice and
Ambient Mode of Being.

Topic and contributions of research

This research proposes, expands upon and presents a mode of being that has been
hinted at within creative practice and intellectual thought, especially within installation
practices in visual and sound arts, since the 1950s. I call this the ambient mode of being-
in-our-surroundings. It involves a way of engaging with our urban surroundings that
eschews the typical logic of foreground and background that grounds our daily and
aesthetic lives. Instead, the ambient mode is an altered state in which we attune to the
all-around-everywhere materiality of the surroundings. This mode is presented through
critical discussion and through experience of creative works.

In presenting the ambient mode, several original contributions have been made. First
and foremost:

(1) This research has developed the ambient mode of being in concept and practice,
through (i) constructing a conceptual framework, (ii) mapping prior practice and (iii)
developing a creative methodology and presenting a set of creative works, all in
terms of this mode.

To produce this primary contribution, two secondary contributions have been made:

(2) This research has developed the use of modes of being as an analytical framework
to discuss creative practice, with particular reference to my practice and the
ambient mode.

(3) This research has clarified the notion of ambience, to distinguish the ambience of
the ambient mode from other conceptions of ambience. Discourses surrounding
ambient practices have been surveyed and mapped against modes-of-being-in-
our-surroundings, and a significant theoretical account of ambience has been
developed in the absence of any existing theories of ambience.
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Activities undertaken

Many interweaving activities were pursued in this research project, including: exhibitions
and residencies; audio and visual documentation, archiving and displaying; conference
and artist presentations; field trips to make in situ work and visit experts in the field;
readings and writing; and formal and informal forums for feedback (see Appendices A
and B for a full list and timeline of research activities). These activities were supported by
a range of people and organisations within and outside the university (see Appendix F
for project credits).

Outputs

The outputs of the research are organised in two equally-weighted parts – a set of
creative works and a written component:

Creative works (50%)

(a) A final exhibition of in situ visual and sonic work: Approaching the Ambient,
The Block + surrounds, QUT Creative Industries Precinct, 3-6 October 2006.
(b) Documentation of creative works made in various places across Australia
during the research: Spotting, Surfacing, Orientating, selected visual works
2004-2006 (picture book) and Tolling, selected sound works 2004-2006
(audio discs). Exhibition documents from the final exhibition are also
provided (booklet and audio disc).

Written component (50%)

(c) This essay, examining creative practice and the ambient mode of being,
accompanied by an image gallery.

For a detailed breakdown of the contents of all outputs, see Appendix D.

Methodology – the practice-led approach

The practice-led approach, or creative-practice-as-research, privileges the strategies,

sites and languages of the creative practitioner (Gray 1996:3). It is a relatively recent
development in the history of academic research, which came out of the UK in the early
 20

1990s (see Frayling 1993; Gray 1996; Newbury 1996) and has been taken up by other
countries such as Australia, New Zealand, Canada and some European nations (Sullivan
2005:83). Whilst it has been acknowledged by advocates of this new development that
all research methodologies across the sciences and the humanities are themselves sets
of practices (Frayling 1993:4; Conchubhair 2005:29), the rise of the practice-led
approach has (increasingly) legitimised the set of practices associated with artists,
designers and other creative producers within the context of academic research. It has
been shown that such practices are capable of operating within the intellectual and
resourcing structures of higher research, and of making a unique contribution in what
can be explored and presented within such structures. Previously research was largely
conducted on or about a creative practice, and not through or in creative practice
(Frayling 1993; Sullivan 2005:83-84).

Practice-led approaches share a range of features with other research methodologies,

however, certain attributes have become more central and vital to creative practice. As
discussed in many position statements on practice-led research, such as Haseman
(2006), Sullivan (2005), Carter (2004) and going back to Gray (1996), practice-led
research is experimental and material (things are developed and tested practically with
the specific materials of one’s practice), reflective (practitioners reflect on their processes
and outputs) and emergent (ideas, themes and direction emerge along the way).
Importantly, within practice-led research, the creative and written outputs function
differently to produce different types of knowing. Such a case can be made through
Scrivener (2002:np): the written component discusses some aspect of the world “in order
to gain knowledge and understanding”, whilst creative works are apprehensions that
“offer ways of seeing and being… in relation to what is, was, or might be.” Haseman
(2006) has argued a similar point using Austin’s theory of speech acts that pits
performative utterances against constative utterances: creative works function in a
performative manner, enacting the research themes and findings, via material
presentation, rather than describing them, via discursive prose, as is the case with
written reports. Whilst they function differently, there can be an active relationship
between the creative works and the written reports of practice-led research. Vella
(2005:1) describes this as the “dynamic relationship” between the “exegetical
perspective” and “creative work”, between what Sullivan (2005:xi) describes as the
“critical and creative investigations” of the practitioner.

The active relationship between creative and written components holds for my own
research project. I could not have pursued my research topic of the ambient mode by
 21

either creative works or by critical discourse alone. On the one hand, the conceptual
frameworks and relationships to broader fields of practice I discuss in this essay were
provoked by and tested through the development of my creative processes and works.
And on the other hand, understandings of my creative practice have been enriched and
refined by perspectives developed through my critical writing and reflection. Furthermore,
the creative and written outputs function differently in terms of the ambient mode. The
creative works (in situ and in documentation) perform this mode through an experience
of them, whilst the written component (this essay) describes this mode before discussing
it in relation to my creative practice and creative works.

The creative and written components also draw on different methodologies within my
overall practice-led approach. The creative works are a result of an in situ installation
methodology, which involves various tactics of making, documentation and presentation.
This is discussed in detail in Chapter Five (see esp Ch 5.4). The written component uses
an analytical framework drawn from phenomenology. In general, phenomenology has
been summed up as the study of lived experience (Seamon 2000), and my discussion is
based on two different styles of phenomenology. The first style is philosophical, drawing
on Martin Heidegger’s existential phenomenology, especially through the interpretations
of Hubert L. Dreyfus. This type of phenomenology is concerned with the general
structures of lived experience, and it has provided me with an overall analytical
orientation concerning ‘modes of being’ (outlined below in Ch 0.4). The second style of
phenomenology is practical and deals with specific examples drawn from histories of
creative practice and my own personal experience. This style can be described as
hermeneutic and first-person (see Seamon 2000), because it relies on the analysis of
texts and documentation on the one hand, and personal experience on the other. 1

0.3 Essay Synopsis

This essay is in three main parts, and each part approaches the ambient mode in a
different way. Each part is itself organised into two chapters, the first of which sets up a
crucial facet of my research, whilst the following chapter expands upon it.

In Part One, we travel by way of concepts, as I develop a conceptual framework of

ambience and the ambient mode through a philosophical-argumentative voice. After

1
Along with hermeneutic and first-person phenomenology, Seamon (2000) also discusses existential-phenomenology
(with a hyphen) which refers to a strand of phenomenology based in psychology, but this should not to be confused with
the Heideggerian strand of existential phenomenology (without a hyphen).
 22

giving definition to ambience and related terms, I map out four modes of being-in-our-
surroundings, the last of which is the ambient mode (Ch 1). I then flesh out this mode, by
drawing on Heidegger and the spatiality of world and earth in his essay ‘The Origin of the
Work of Art’, and end by introducing the possibility of the ambient work to activate this
mode (Ch 2). This sets up a conceptual framework and vocabulary that is used to
discuss creative practice in the remainder of this essay.

In Part Two, we travel by way of example, as I survey models of practice that set up the
ambient work, through a historical-analytical voice. Shifts towards the ambient mode are
traced in three approaches of creative practice found in the 1950s through to the 1970s,
which pre-figure the ambient work: minimalist emptying, situationist drifting and serialist
patterning (Ch 3). I then discuss a range of contemporary work from the 1980s to the
2000s that synthesise these three approaches and verge on the ambient work (Ch 4).
This contributes a practical framework and vocabulary that enables me to show, in the
following part, how my own practice weaves together and extends these prior practices.

In Part Three, we travel by way of making, as I describe my creative processes and

outputs through a narrative-reflective voice. First, I outline the story of how I realised the
ambient mode in my practice, through an interweaving of making, presenting, reflecting
and reading (Ch 5). Then we embark on a journey together, discovering and reflecting
upon my final creative outputs which invite and sustain the ambient mode, namely: in situ
work presented in a final exhibition and documentation containing similar work in the
form of a picture book and audio discs (Ch 6).

Overall, the development of my research project unfolded in the opposite order to that
presented in this essay. First and foremost, I was experiencing and making creative work
(by way of making), which then led me to investigate links with other works, practitioners
and themes of practice (by way of example), before I latched onto ambience as a key
term and then discovered the relevance of Heidegger and his notions of world and earth
(by way of concepts). The contributions my research have been led by my creative
practice. However, for the purpose of the essay I have begun by setting out the concepts
and vocabulary surrounding the ambient mode of being, which have both emerged from
and provide the grounds to discuss the creative workings of this research.
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0.4 Analytical Orientation – Modes of Being

In this essay I use the term ‘modes of being’ in a precise way, to refer to what I have
distilled as a tri-partite structure of human existence proposed by Heideggerian
existential phenomenology. This structure provides me with a set of analytical questions
to work out the ambient mode of being and also captures the range of concerns
developed in my creative work and practice.

The structure of modes of being

I have been led to modes of being, and to the idea of using this as an analytical
orientation, through the philosophy of Heidegger. From his early writings, Heidegger
presents a view that what exists (a question of ontology) cannot be separated from how
we engage with it (a question of phenomenology); neither is prior to the other, but rather
they are two sides of the same coin. But there is also a third side to this coin, namely, its
encircling edge, by which I mean the place where things exist and are engaged with (a
question of topology), which is wrapped up in, and cannot be separated from, such
things and engagements.

This three-sided coin – an inseparable trinity of what–how–where – is expressed in

Heidegger’s underpinning concept that human being is always being-in-the-world; our
being, the beings we engage with, and where this occurs are all fundamentally tied.
Crucial to Heidegger’s explanation of being-in-the-world are modes of being (the two
main ones in his early writings are Zuhandenheit and Vorhandenheit, which I will touch
on later). It can be surmised from Dreyfus’ commentary (1991, see especially the tables
on pp124-125,139) that modes of being also possess a co-constitutive structure of what–
how–where:

The three co-constitutive components of modes of being

What = the things we engage with

How = the ways we engage with things
Where = the place or whereabouts of our engagements with things 2

2
Typically, Heidegger’s modes of being are described in terms of a what and a how, whilst the where is absent. In fact, I
have not found a direct link of where to what and how in the literature. This is not surprising, perhaps, since the how and
what of the modes of being are directly linked in Heidegger’s Being and Time (§15-§16) and also in Dreyfus (1991:ch4-5)
whilst discussions of the whereabouts of these modes of being come later (Being and Time §22-§24; Dreyfus 1991:ch7).
The connection of where to what and how was something I arrived at after considering the link drawn between
 24

The analysis of modes of being

Although Heidegger is generally concerned with the over-arching modes of being for all
human existence, it is possible to articulate modes specific to some part of our existence,
including creative practice. Within existing literature on creative practice, the discussion
of modes of listening by Stockfelt (1997[1988]:see esp diagram on p134) bears out the
structure of modes of being most explicitly. Here, modes of listening are presented as
the intersection of listening situations (where), listening strategies (how) and the music
that is listened to (what). Other writers who map out modes of creative practice, such as
modes of installation (Bishop 2005), screen-based engagements (Ellis 1982; Chesher
2004) and computer-based music-making (Brown 2000), also rely on the tripartite
structure of modes of being, although they do so implicitly. 3

In this research, the tripartite structure of what–how–where provides me with key

analytical questions that enable me to describe the ambient mode (Ch 2.1 to 2.4). Indeed,
these questions can be asked of any mode: what is being engaged with? how is it being
engaged? and where is this occurring? We can also ask: how do we enter into this mode?

Relevance for the contributions of my practice

Over the course of my research journey, it became important to address not only the
forms and things I make (what), but also the experiences they set up (how) and the way
this changes our relationships with our surroundings (where) (see Ch 5.3 for the story of
this). I found I could not talk about my creative practice as if it were a matter of just one
of these issues. Why so? Because, in developing a mode of being, namely the ambient
mode, I was developing all three components together. Change the shape of any one
side of the three-sided what–how–where coin, and the other two change with it. In other
words, the what, how and where of my practice have all been equally the site of my
creative development and, therefore, all require equal analytical attention. While formal

Heidegger’s two types of space and his two modes of being, which Dreyfus (1991:137-140) makes at the close of his
chapter on spatiality and space. From these sources and others, it can also be distilled that for every mode of being there
are also associated identities (who), purposes (why) and affects (mood), however, these terms fall outside of the analytical
scope of this essay.
3
The four modes of installation art in Bishop (2005) involve different types of spaces (where) – dream spaces (ch1),
heightened sensoriums (ch2), engulfing sensoriums (ch3) and political arenas (ch4) – which each contain particular sorts
of artefacts and things (what) that are encountered in particular ways (how). The three types of screen engagements in
Chesher (2004, drawing on Ellis 1982) also describe a what–how–where: a large-screen film is gazed at in a cinema, a
television is glanced at in a home, and a computer console game is glazed over in a home. Finally, Brown’s (2000)
analysis of modes of composing with computers looks at the compositional studios (where) and the types of computer-
based tools (what) that were utilised in various ways (how) by composers.
 25

readings may deal most with what, experiential readings with how and contextual
readings with where, modes of being provides an analytical orientation that deals with all
three of these constituents in a holistic way.
 26

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 27

I
part one
by way of concepts

In this part of the essay, I outline the ambient mode of being-in-our-surroundings. This
mode is proposed in Chapter One before being fleshed out in Chapter Two. Through this
I build a conceptual framework and vocabulary that will be used to discuss creative
practice in the subsequent parts of this essay.

Ch 1 Proposing the Ambient Mode

1.1 A Brief History of Ambient Practices (1970s – 2000s, and back to 1950s)
1.2 Back to Basics – Key Definitions
1.3 Four Modes of Being-In-Our-Surroundings

Ch 2 Fleshing Out the Ambient Mode

2.1 The What of the Ambient Mode

2.2 The How of the Ambient Mode
2.3 The Where of the Ambient Mode
2.4 Entering the Ambient Mode
2.5 Practising the Ambient Mode – Through the Ambient Work
 28

chapter one
proposing the ambient mode

At the end of this chapter, I introduce the central topic of this research – the ambient
mode of being-in-our-surroundings – although several steps must first be taken.

During my practice-led research, I came to realise the notion of ambience was crucial to
the creative works and experiences surrounding them that I was exploring – a delicate
way of existing in our surroundings that shifts away from dealing with discrete things
which set up material excess, to an ambient attentiveness all-around. I went looking for
examples and a vocabulary of ambience within broader domains of practice, to help
understand and position my own emerging research. However, I discovered that, firstly,
there was no articulate conception of ambience in the literature and, secondly, what the
literature did offer was inadequate for my purposes. So, to give myself a language and
provide a place for my own perspective on ambience, I needed to build a conceptual
framework from the ground up. This meant going back to basic definitions, out of which I
developed a taxonomy of modes-of-being-in-our-surroundings that mapped out the
sense I am after in the ambient mode of being-in-our-surroundings. However, before I
begin to build this framework of ambience, I will provide a historical survey of ambient
practices from the latter half of the twentieth-century – something never attempted before
in the literature. This sets up broad issues related to ambience and helps to establish my
connection to, yet difference from, this domain; the ambient sense I am seeking is a
logical part of the possibilities of ambient practice, yet it is the one approach to ambience
that is only very occasionally hinted at.

1.1 A Brief History of Ambient Practices (1970s – 2000s, and back to 1950s)

4
From Eno’s ambience to an explosion of ambience

Ambience was in the air in the mid to late 1970s, the decade in which it began to flourish
as a key term in sound- and visual-based arts. The term Ambient Music 5 was coined in

4
This brief history is almost entirely restricted to English-language sources. How ambience as a term has been translated
and used in other languages is outside the scope of this essay. However, it seems that most of the major contributions
have occurred in the English language – by English-speaking practitioners or by practitioners publishing in English (as the
current lingua-franca of globalism).
 29

1978 by English musician and producer Brian Eno, to refer to music that “must be able to
accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it
must be as ignorable as it is interesting” (Music for Airports liner notes, 1978:np). This
followed a shift in Eno’s listening in early 1975, which he described as “a new way of
hearing music – as part of the ambience of the environment just as the colour of the light
and the sound of the rain were parts of that ambience” (Discrete Music liner notes,
1975:np). Across the Atlantic, and also in 1975, experimental film-maker Anthony McCall
presented a 24-hour para-cinematic work titled Long Film for Ambient Light. In this work,
natural light was filtered through the many windows of a large room, existing as an
installation rather than a film in any ordinary sense of the term (see Walley 2004:65-67).
In both examples, the ambient materiality entering a room comes to be a vital part of the
aesthetic experience and construction of the creative work.

Since the 1970s, Ambient Music has flourished and diversified, becoming a stylistic label
attached to many genres of music. In the 1980s, it shifted into New Age and Relaxation
Music (see Lanza 1994) and, in the 1990s, it merged with mainstream styles
(synthopia.com c2003), due, in part, to the uptake of Ambient and Chill Music in the
Rave scene in the early 1990s (see Toop 1995:36-65; Reynolds 1995). The main
ambient sub-genres include Dub, Space, World, Pop, Electronic and Techno (Barde
c2006) as well as Dark and Acoustic (synthtopia.com c2003). During or shortly after the
1980s, ambient video appears to have been coined in reference to Eno and Ambient
Music more generally, and Eno himself has presented ambient ‘video-paintings’ and
video installations since 1979 (see Tamm 1995:3,134-136). However, ambience did not
become a prominent term in the discourses of visual art or film until the next century.

In the 1990s, beyond entering mainstream music, notions of ambience began branching
out into other domains. Mulholland (2002:np) described this as the emergence of “a
prevalent cultural logic” of the ambient in Western urbanism, which affected commerce,
leisure and public space and related to increased concerns for ecological issues. In the
mid 1990s, the term ambient advertising appeared in the UK, referring to advertising that
pervades urban spaces by being implanted throughout many locations and via a great
range of everyday objects. Since then, it and other similar terms, including ambient
marketing and ambient media, have entered global parlance within their sectors (see
Quinion 1998 and Mulholland 2002). During this period, television was also beginning to
permeate public spaces, as discussed in Ambient Television (McCarthy 2001).

5
Each key ambient term appears italicised on its first instance. They appear capitalised throughout if they normally do so
in the literature.
 30

According to some commentators, in what is linked to the increased pervasiveness of

mass media, a constant low-level ambient fear is seeping into everyday life via mass
media (see Massumi 1993:preface, Doel & Clarke 1997). This notion has gained further
currency since the terrorist events of September 11, 2001 in America (see for instance
Papastergiadis 2003). Towards the end of the 1990s, and counter to these urban issues,
ambience was briefly taken up in environmental aesthetics by Foster (1998).

Looking back, the twentieth century has even been dubbed The Ambient Century
(Prendergast 2000). However, if recent activity is any indication, then this new century
will be The Über Ambient Century as ambient practices and discourses explode in
number and diversity.

At the turn of the millennium, ambience entered the digital and cyber domains. In 1999,
Netherlands-based Philips Research coined the term Ambient Intelligence to expand on
the vision of ubiquitous computing first proposed by Mark Weiser in 1988 (see Wesier
1991, 1996). Ambient Intelligence involves networked devices embedded seamlessly
throughout our surroundings, responding to everyday human needs, often without our
direct prompting or effort (for comprehensive overviews, see Aarts & Marzano 2003;
Riva et al 2005a; Weber et al 2005). Instituted as a major ongoing research agenda by
the European Union in 2001 (Philips Research 2003), Ambient Intelligence is gaining
international momentum and has been taken up by many research institutes across the
globe. As part of this trend, ambient devices have been marketed since 2001
(AmbientDevices.com). To help solve the complex computing issues arising in an age of
Ambient Intelligence, not least the need to manage mobile and inter-connected devices
across large-scale geographic (global) areas, Luca Cardelli and Andrew Gordon at
Microsoft have been developing the primitive computing language Ambient Calculus
since 1998 (see Cardelli 2000). According to Greenfield (2006:24-25), we are entering a
regime of every-ware or ambient informatics as digital information becomes available
wherever we are, which is requiring what Morville (2005) calls the skills of ambient
findability.

Ambience has also been recently embraced in the domains of screen-based arts, visual
arts, architecture and literary studies. Linked to Ambient Intelligence, but also to earlier
ambient video and to the increasing uptake of ambient television, is research into
ambient displays (for instance, Wisneski et al 1998; Lund & Wiberg 2004; Ambient
Displays Research Group 2006). This involves the use of screens and other visual
imaging dispersed in the urban surroundings, which are often linked to interactive
 31

computing and also art installations. Bizzochi (2004a, 2004b) has proposed that the
introduction of domestic large flat-screen televisions in the early 2000s will inspire new
aesthetic paradigms in ambient video. Lev Manovich also recently began to explore
possibilities of ambient cinema (Soft Cinema: Ambient Narratives, Manovich 2003).

Besides the discussion of 1990s ambience by art lecturer Mulholland (2002), the curator
Römer (2004) has argued that the “white cube” of the conventional art gallery was
replaced by the end of the 1990s with “the ambient”, as the corporatisation of public
space saw exhibition spaces re-evaluated in terms of urban design and lifestyles. The
first dedicated discussion of ambience in visual art appears to be a short article on
ambient spaces and site-specificity by Lind (1999) which, although she does not
specifically mention it, links to the atmospheric chill spaces of the 1990s Rave scene.
The growing interest in ambience in visual arts has been reflected in two recent
international survey shows: Nothing Compared to This: ambient, incidental and new
minimal tendencies in current art in Cincinnati late 2004 (see Desmarias 2004), and
Ambiance in Düsseldorf late 2005 to early 2006 (Heynen et al 2005). In 2002, the first
international workshop on Ambiences archtecturales et urbaines [Architectural and
Urban Ambient Environment] was held in Nantes, France. It was run by the research
centre of the same name, established in 1998, which aims to assess and improve
ambient comfort of urban environments (CNRS 2007). An anthology of articles
addressing this domain was published in 2004 (Amphoux, Thibaud & Chelkoff). There
has even been a call for ambient architecture in environmental architecture (Sample
2004). Within literary studies, a discussion of ambient poetics has recently emerged,
which locates an ambient sensibility in eighteenth and nineteenth century Romantic
literature (Morton 2000:ch5; 2001; 2002 and cf Rigby 2004:esp 77-84). Ambience has
also been employed in theories of rhetoric and professional writing (Rickert 2004 and
forth-coming).

All the current ambient terminologies have a lineage that can be traced back to Ambient
Music and Eno’s coining of the term. This is directly acknowledged by many writers
within the creative arts and design (AUDC.org 2005; Bizzocchi 2004a; Desmarias 2004;
Kreuzer 2005:58; Morton 2000:ch5, 2001, 2002; Mulholland 2002; Rickert 2004:904-911;
Römer 2004; Sample 2004; Wald 2005:63), by Quinion (1998) regarding ambient
advertising, and by Morville (2005:178-180) regarding ambient findability. However, to
my knowledge, it has only been acknowledged once by proponents of Ambient
Intelligence in Tscheligi (2005:21), even though this particular term is clearly part of the
general terminological milieu. Eno is thus a chief figure in any discussion of ambience,
 32

and he provides some important points of reference in this essay. There is, however, an
important back-story to ambient practices that introduces other key figures and
emphasises the stakes of these practices within the twentieth century.

Before Eno’s ambience

When searching for the back-story of ambient practices, there are two main areas to
consider. The first concerns the histories that are typically told for the initial types of
ambient practice, namely ambient music and ambient video (which themselves inform
the histories told of subsequent ambient practices). The second concerns the use of the
term ‘ambient’ within discourses of creative practice prior to Eno. I will now address each
of these in turn.

As Kassabian explains (2002:134), discussions around Ambient Music typically link it to

two histories, which both emerge from the 1920s. There is a ‘critical’ or artistic history,
traced back through early American Minimalism in music (1960s) to John Cage’s so-
called silent composition 4’33” (1952) to Erik Satie’s musique d’ameublement (literally
‘furniture music’, used in reference to three works composed between 1918 and 1923,
with the first performance in 1920 – see Orledge 2007). There is also an ‘industrial’ or
commercial history that traces the evolution of the Muzak Company, established in 1922,
and the related forms of elevator and background music. Lanza (1994) has provided a
wide-ranging account of both artistic and commercial strands (see also Tamm 1995:ch2).
Ambient video, however, seems to have only been given an artistic history (in Bizzochi
2004b) that involves the slow-changing long-take videos of Andy Warhol, Michael Snow
and Yoko Ono.

The use of the term ‘ambient’ in creative practice prior to Eno provides us with another
back-story, which connects to an era, philosophy and work that has been extremely
important in my own development, namely John Cage’s ambient aesthetic and his ‘silent
piece’ 4’33” from the mid 1950s. This terminological back-story has only been
considered once in the literature on ambient practices (Tamm 1995, see below), yet
through my own key term searches 6 I have found a range of sources prior to Eno that
used the term. Here I focus on the most significant of these, John Cage and Clement
Greenberg, who are major figures in the avant-garde of mid-twentieth-century
modernism.

6
Online full-text archives that I have used in this research include: books.google.com, JSTOR.org, Amazon.com,
NetLibrary.com and Questia.com.
 33

Tamm (1995:17) has suggested that the source of Eno’s thinking around Ambient Music
is located in a passage in John Cage’s book of essays Silence: Lectures and Writings
(1961a). 7 In fact, the terms ‘ambient’, ‘ambient noise’ or ‘ambient sounds’ appear in
Silence on several occasions, within essays published between 1958 and 1961 (Cage
1958a:22,32, 1958b: 80, 1961c:225,239). In these passages, Cage refers to Satie’s
furniture music and to giving attention to unintended sonic details in our surroundings
(ambient sounds or noise), which are pivotal issues in Eno’s understandings of Ambient
Music. It appears, then, that Cage is the source of the ambient practices in the twentieth-
century, although Eno is the one to propagate it.

The visual art critic Clement Greenberg used the term on two occasions. ‘Ambience’
appears in 1949 in ‘Our Period Style’ (1949:324) and ‘ambient space’ appears nine years
later in ‘Sculpture in Our Time’ (1958:60). In both texts, Greenberg was discussing the
opening up of all the Modernist visual arts (“[p]ainting, sculpture, architecture, decoration
and the crafts” 1958:60) to the ambient spaces that surround these art forms, achieved
through a general porosity of forms that “overcome the distinctions of between
foreground and background; between formed space and space at large; between inside
and outside” (1958:60). This porosity was expressed as “the dissolution of the wall”
achieved by architect Frank Lloyd Wright (Richard & Mock in Greenberg 1949:324). 8

Greenberg and Cage’s use of ambience differs significantly from earlier usage. In visual
arts, from the late nineteenth century, ambience had referred to the atmospheric
surroundings depicted within a representational painting (Harper 2001). In music,
‘ambient music’ had been used to refer to film music from as early as the 1930s, which
was not the background music added to a scene, but was music from within a scene, for
instance, in the setting of a nightclub (Johnson 1969:13). But in Greenberg and Cage,
ambience refers to the ‘everyday’ physical surroundings around the presented artwork,
as opposed to a representation of it within the segregated ‘illusionary’ or ‘elevated’ space
of the discrete framed aesthetic object. Furthermore, this ‘everyday’ space is actually
thought to mingle with, and be part, of the structure of the creative work. This links to the
project of architectural and interior design, which, as early as the 1920s, was described

7
For Eno’s stated influence by Cage, see Tamm (1995:18-20) who draws from a range of interviews, including what
appears to be Cage and Eno’s only joint interview (Tannenbaum 1985).
8
It is not clear if Cage and Greenberg were aware of each other’s ideas surrounding ambience and modernist arts.
However, compare the similarity between Cage (1957:8) and Greenberg (1949:324, 1958:60). There is also the question
of what influenced Cage and Greenberg’s use of their ambient terms, and the even larger question of the history of
ambience prior to the twentieth century, but such questions lie outside the scope of this essay.
 34

as seeking to create and influence the ambience of a particular place (see McDonald
1923:359; Robertson 1952:184). Greenberg (1949:324) summed up the situation thus:

The modern [artist] conceive[s] of space more dynamically, as all-pervasive and

all embracing… inside and outside are interwoven. The artist no longer seals his
figure or construction off from the rest of space behind an impenetrable surface,
but instead permits space to enter into its core and the core to reach out into and
organize the ambience.

These mid-twentieth-century sources locate ambience at the crux of issues that were
taken up later in installation art and in the practices I examine in Part Two. In terms of
Greenberg, ambience/installation can be located in the area between building
(architecture), image (painting) and object (sculpture), which joined with a viewer’s own
everyday reach (ambient spaces). In terms of Cage, this ambience/installation can be
located in the area between intentional foreground music and unintentional background
or surrounding everyday sounds.

The lack of a theory of ambience

Despite the rise of ambient practices and the veritable explosion of discourse that has
accompanied this, it appears that no substantial theoretical account of ambience has
ever been attempted. Most writers do not define the term but assume a shared
understanding, whilst some offer a brief definition (such as Meeks 2005:3; Morville
2005:6; Wisneski et al 1998). The few discussions which do broach the notion of
ambience are themselves still quite brief. These are found in the writings of Tamm
(1995:129) and Eno himself (1996, 1978, 1975; Grant 1982 quoted in Tamm 1995:53-
55), in Morton’s (2001, 2002) discussion of ambient poetics which pivots from Eno to
post-structuralist theorists, and in Rickert’s (2004) discussion of ambience that meshes
Eno’s understandings with the theories of network culture and complexity by Mark C.
Taylor and the notion of kairos from ancient Greek thought. Surprisingly, a theory of
ambience is strangely lacking in Ambient Intelligence and ubiquitous computing
discourses. At most, Tscheligi (2005:21) has suggested that looking into what ambience
might or could mean for this field might be worthwhile, though he doesn’t pursue this,
and McCullough (2004:48-49,62-64) mildly addresses notions of surrounding-ness with
regard to ‘habitual contexts’. Within the field of aesthetics, only Foster (1998) begins to
give a thought-out account of ambience, though it is still preliminary and focused on
wilderness environments. She finds subtle hints of concepts of ambience in various
 35

aesthetic philosophers from Schopenhauer through to such contemporaries as Arnold

Berleant (see Foster 1998:133-134). 9 The closest attempt at a theory of ambience
comes out of architecture and urban studies, through the recent work by Jean-Paul
Thibaud who is associated with the research group Ambiences archtecturales et
urbaines. He has written articles on urban ambience since 1997 (see his online
bibliography at Thibaud 2007) and in 2002, in ‘From Situated Perception to Urban
Ambiences’, he sought to “initiate discussion of the possibility of a theoretical foundation
for the notion of ambience” (p11). In this, his only English text, he connects ambience to
theories of situation and embodied actions within the writings or John Dewey, Merleau-
Ponty and James Gibson, but ends by commenting that “[o]bviously there is much more
to be said on the subject” (p11).

Although the notion of ambience in the literature is rarely directly thought about, it is
possible to get a general sense of what is meant by the term, if one reads between the
lines so to speak. Whether implicit or briefly explicit, the understanding of ambience
presented in the literature quite consistently amounts to little more than this: ambience is
the un-obtrusive, normally background surroundings of a place (a spatial sense) and/or it
is the mood or affective atmosphere of the surroundings (an spatio-affective sense). The
spatio-affective sense stands in a complimentary relationship to spatial sense, however,
within the spatial sense there is a subtle contradiction between the spatial sense of
ambience being conceived as either peripheral or enveloping. Within the literature, these
(often implicit) senses of ambience are generally quite workable. However, I want to be
more precise about the definition and concept of ambience, because it provides the
foundation for a taxonomy that I then construct, which proposes the ambient mode of
being and distinguishes the ambience of this mode from other conceptions of ambience.

1.2 Back to Basics – Key Definitions10

To give definition to the notion of ambience, I go to its etymological roots. 11 Ambience

comes from the Latin ambi (‘around’) and ire (‘to go’): to go around. Ambience thus

9
Furthermore, with the exception of Ambient Intelligence, there are no books which survey a particular domain of ambient
practice. Books credited for surveying Ambient Music (Toop 1995, Prendergast 2000) do not; both focus on electronic
music and its various roots, which occasionally intersects with ambient music. There is also very little cross-referencing
between these fields, beyond a quick reference to Eno’s Ambient Music. Given this, it is not surprising that there has, to
date, been no survey of the entire field of ambient practices, as I have attempted in this essay.
10
My thanks to philosopher Jeff Malpas for his assistance in determining the following definitions and their relationship to
one another.
11
Tamm (1995:129) also goes to the etymology of ambience, but his is a more impressionistic account, charting the
multiple meanings and usages of the term to generate an overall multi-faceted impression of what ambience might mean,
rather than attempting to define it in precise structural terms as I am seeking to do.
 36

means encircling, surrounding, that which surrounds. Already there are two subtle
shades of meaning: to surround (to go around something within a place, to encircle)
versus the surrounds (to go all around an entire place, to pervade). I take the second
pervasive sense as the broadest and most fundamental one, which encompasses the
first restricted encircling sense. Thus, ambience is that which pervades the surroundings,
or more simply, ambience is that which pervades a place – that which is all-around,
surrounding us in our surroundings, completely enveloping us. Ambience is not
somewhere within a surrounding, it is that which is pervasive, throughout, everywhere. It
is thus field-like, all around the place.12 In this way, we can have ambient temperature,
ambient lighting, ambient atmospheric weather conditions, ambient sound – these are all
qualities that we think of as permeating a place, enveloping it, rather than being located
in one particular part of a place. Another pervasive quality of place is it ambient
atmosphere or mood. Following some examples in the literature, I will distinguish this
affective quality by the French spelling of ambiance.

Ambience, then, as that which pervades a place, has always been in the air, well before
the 1970s and Eno, and well before the twentieth century. In its basic definition, prior to
any application within a form or style, ambience is a structural condition of our very
existence, as human beings who always exist within the surroundings, always being in
place.13 But despite ambience always being a part of human being, naming it (coming to
distinguish ambience from other things) and noticing it (coming to overtly encounter
ambience) will count for something. For instance, ambient temperature and ambient
sounds have always been there prior to our ability to name, measure and experience
them, but in the naming, measuring and experiencing, we come to appreciate and
engage with these things and the surroundings in a different way. There are two
immediate questions that follow. Firstly, if ambience is all-around, what is not ambient?
This is a matter of naming and distinguishing ambience. Secondly, how do we typically
experience ambience, and what are the possibilities of encountering it? This is a matter
of noticing it (or not as the case may be). I will now address each question in turn.

12
Note that this definition of ambience-as-pervasive refers to ambience as a spatial condition, and not as a stylistic marker
for certain types of creative practice. Some practices referred to as ambient may be a solution to dealing with ambience,
but they may not be necessarily ambient in themselves. Most notable in this regard is the current use of the term ambient
to refer to particular characteristics within genres of music. Being concerned with a certain spatial condition will lead, in the
second part of this essay, to a discussion of practices that don’t ordinarily get described in terms of ambience, although
they are referred to by related terms such as situational, contextual and site-based.
13
On the fundamental relationship between human being and being in place, see Jeff Malpas’ Place and Experience
(1999) and also Edward Casey’s The Fate of Place (1997). This relationship between human being and place is summed
up in maxim of the Ancient Greek Archytus, “to be in to be in place” (Casey 1997:204).
 37

What is not ambient? To answer this, we require the compliment of ambience – salience.
Etymologically, what is salient is that which ‘leaps out’, from the Latin salire from which
also comes salute (the gesture), salmon (the jumping fish) and sally (a military term for
advancing). Salience is what leaps out, obtrudes, becomes conspicuous. Something
salient is that which leaps out from the surroundings, which can, of course, change
depending on our motivations and interests, and on changes in the surroundings. In a
city street, for instance, what is salient to a skateboarder wanting to perform tricks
(angles and textures of building and pavement surfaces) is different to a gardener
wanting to remove weeds (types of plants). And when the skateboarder bumps into the
gardener, other things become salient (ouch!).

Given the definition of both ambience and salience, we would expect that ambience can
never be altogether salient, since this would present a contradiction in terms. After all,
how could the pervasive ambient surroundings be that which leaps out? What would it
leap out from? If it leapt out of itself, then it would leave nothing behind since it is
pervasive, which means it would not have leapt out at all, since to leap out is to leave
something behind. If it leapt out of something else, then it would not be pervasive. In
either case, ambience does not seem as if it could be that which leaps out; it seems
pervasive ambience cannot be salient. Actually, I will come to argue for an ambient
mode that deals in this paradox (pervasive ambience made salient), however, typically,
what is salient is not the ambience of the surroundings, but one thing or set of things
within that surrounding that leaps into the foreground. Thus, typically, ambience is taken
to be and experienced as that which does not leap out but remains as the background,
encircling the foreground (this is the first, restricted sense of ambience). Thus, the
couplet of ambience/salience typically maps onto the couplet of background/foreground
– which accounts for the high degree of interchange between ambience and background,
and also periphery, in the literature (see Wisneski et al 1998 for a condensed example of
a slippage between these terms) – but it will be important to keep in mind that they are
not the same things.

1.3 Four Modes of Being-In-Our-Surroundings

Having defined ambience (along with salience, and the attendant notions of background
and foreground), I will now construct a four-fold taxonomy of what I refer to as modes of
being-in-our-surroundings. This taxonomy is pivotal to this essay, as it enables me to
map out different conceptions of ambience and align various traditions of creative
 38

practice to them, in order to define and position the topic of my research, that is, the
ambient mode of being-in-our-surroundings.

Conceiving of modes of being-in-our-surroundings is my own spatially-orientated way of

considering Heidegger’s general notion of being-in-the-world. To give an account of each
mode, I will need to address their basic components, namely, the co-constitutive what–
how–where which is the basic structure of any mode of being (as outlined in Ch 0.4).

Introducing the four modes

I propose that there are four basic modes of being-in-our-surroundings. Each relate to a
different combination of background and foreground: (1) the background, (2) the
foreground, (3) both the background and foreground, and (4) neither the background nor
the foreground. This exhausts the possible combinations of background and foreground,
expressed algebraically as B, F, (B+F) and –(B+F).

Before I examine each mode below, I wish to consider an early quote from Brian Eno
regarding the ambiguities of the term Ambient Music (in Grant 1982:30). Packed within it
is the kernel of all four modes:

[Ambient Music is] music that allows you any listening position in relation to it. This
has widely been misunderstood by the press (in their infinite unsubtlety) as
background music. I mean music that can be background or foreground or
anywhere, which is a rather different idea.
Most music chooses its own position in terms of your listening to it. Muzak
wants to be back there. Punk wants to be upfront. Classical wants to be another
place. I wanted to make something you could slip in and out of. You could pay
attention or you could choose not to be distracted by it if you wanted to do
something while it was on… Ambient music allows different types of attention. (my
emphasis)14

14
A lot has changed in listening habits over the last two or more decades. According to Kassabian (2002:134), since the
mid to late 1980s, background music, as a particular style of music, has all but disappeared. That is, what has faded is the
style of music also known as ‘elevator music’ – limp pastiches of classical music, soft pop and jazz with muted dynamics
and comforting timbres – exemplified by early Muzak and spoken against by Eno (1975). Instead, what was previously
reserved for foreground music – popular and other music by original artists, such as Punk and Classical – is now the
ubiquitous soundtrack of our lives, heard in the background of daily activities at home, work, play and shopping. This shift,
from background music as a distinct style to foreground music used in the background, has even occurred within the
Muzak company, which shifted in the 1990s to the ‘atmospherics’ of popular and other forms of original music (Muzak
Corporation 2005). These days, contrary to Eno’s quote from the 1980s, it seems that most styles of music could be
“background or foreground or anywhere”. A somewhat opposite case can also exist, in which a style of music designed for
 39

As I will show, the first three modes follow Eno’s typology of background, foreground and
anywhere. The fourth, ambient mode, will extend the sense of anywhere to be
everywhere.

Because the first three modes belong to the same whereabouts, namely, the
surroundings parsed in terms of foreground and background, I will first outline the main
differences – the what and how – of these modes, before addressing their common
whereabouts.

(a) The background mode

If ambience is typically taken to be background, then the most typical mode of being that
relates to ambience is the background mode. What is being encountered is the ambient
surroundings as a background field that encircles a much narrower and more specific
salient foreground. How we encounter this background field is through an indistinct and
somewhat passive engagement and awareness, whilst conducting foreground/focal
engagement and awareness on something else in particular.

We should be hesitant about being able to describe in any clear manner what we
encounter in this background field, since any description of the particulars of the
background is to make those things salient, to take them up away from the background
field. This is something that concerns both William James, in terms of his background
fringe of consciousness, and Susan Langer, in terms of background feeling (see Dryden
2001). For both of them, the background field is affective. We experience symptoms of it
(feeling, mood etc), which attune our behaviour, but its very (fluid, vague) definition, this
background field cannot be put into salient descriptions.

The background creative work operates beneath salience. This is typified by the ideals of
background music and Muzak. It is also deliberately produced (or sought to be
produced) through Ambient Intelligence and ambient displays (Riva et al 2005b:np state
that “Ambient Intelligence should… be unobtrusive, often invisible”). Such practices are

one type of listening does not actually work in that way for some listeners. This idea occurred to me when writing this
section of this essay. I was asked me to turn off some of Eno’s Ambient Music playing on my laptop in a shared office
because it was ‘one of those incessant things like a dog barking’, even at a soft volume. In this particular case, Eno’s
Ambient Music could not be either ignorable or interesting. But as I have previously intimated, what I am concerned with is
not styles of content, but modes of being and Eno’s quote can be read at this level – the mention of styles of music
(Muzak, Punk, Classical) can simply be taken to be emblematic of the types of listening which belong to different modes of
being.
 40

all designed to merge with the pre-existing background field of a place. Background-ness
is also reflected in discussions of ambience (or ambiance) in interior design and
decoration, which refer to the atmospheric “arrangement of accessories to support the
main effect of a piece” (OED, 2nd edition 1989). In is not, however, only things
deliberately designed to be in the background that can involve the background mode.
Things designed for the foreground can slide to the background. This can occur through
deliberate choice (to engage with something designed for the foreground in the
background). It can also happen automatically as part of the increasing busy-ness of the
surroundings (with too much to encounter, some things recede) or the increasing
familiarity with things in the surroundings (the more familiar and usual a thing, the more it
tends to recede, especially in the face of something more unusual).

In terms of Eno’s discussion of ambience, the background mode involves the typical (and
in his view, incorrect) notion of ambience-as-background.

(b) The foreground mode

Because the background necessarily relies on the foreground (one cannot exist without
the other), the background mode necessarily exists with a corresponding foreground
mode. In this mode, what is being encountered is a foreground theme or substantive
focus (salient over and above the background). How we do this is through a distinct and
active engagement and awareness.

The foreground creative work is salient. This puts us in the domain of clearly-framed,
compositionally-discrete, privileged objects and events of art and design, and is typified
in Eno’s terms by Punk and Classical music. Cultural critic Theodore Adorno celebrated
the foregrounded-ness in the Modernist autonomous art object and valorised the sort of
appreciation that goes with it. In such texts as ‘On the Fetish-Character in Music and the
Regression of Listening’ (1938), Adorno praised ‘expert listening’ associated with serious
Modern music, which Stockfelt (1997:141) refers to as “total and continuously
concentrated, completely autonomous listening”. At the same time, Adorno denigrated
the ‘distracted’ and ‘regressive’ background modes of listening, which Stockfelt
(1997:141) describes as “be[ing] seduced and ruled by background music without even
being conscious of its presence”. Foregrounded-ness is also ‘built-in’ to the architectures
and framing devices of the concert halls, theatre stages, cinemas, and galleries that
present foreground works. In ubiquitous computing and Ambient Intelligence, the
personal computer (PC) represents the foreground mode (Weiser & Brown 1996), and
 41

this is reflected in the PC’s main output device, the framed and gazed-at computer
screen.

Not only is the clearly-framed art or design object foregrounded against a background
context, its internal composition is typically built up in terms of foreground against
background, with its themes, focal points, highlights, areas of interest, subjects, major
and minor characters etc. This tends not to be the case with things deliberately designed
for the background mode. For instance, much is made of the flattening or smoothing over
of volume, timbre, harmonic movement and structural differentiation in background music
(Lanza 1994, Stockfelt 1997). (And as I discuss in the next chapter, a reduction in the
internal compositional hierarchy of proto-Minimalist and Minimalist works in the 1950s
and 1960s is part of an approach to shifting creative works out of the foreground mode
and into the ambient mode.)

In the foreground mode, ambience is that which takes a back seat, ambience-as-not-the-
foreground. This means that the ambience of the foreground mode is actually the same
ambience found in the background mode; we are still in the territory of ambience-as-
background. But Eno stated that ambient music can be foreground, though it should not
demand to be foreground. Such an oscillation between background and foreground
suggests a third, ambivalent, mode of being.

(c) The ambivalent (back-and-forth) mode

Another mode of being is produced in the combination of the background and foreground
modes. It is ambivalent because what is engaged with can be taken as the background
or the foreground, oscillating between both, without demanding to be either. Our
experience of how we engage in the ambivalent mode likewise oscillates, from vague
indistinct and passive engagement and awareness to distinct, active clear engagement
and awareness.

The ambivalent creative work moves in and out of salience. This is typified by the ideals
of Eno’s Ambient Music: “to be as ignorable [in the background] as it is interesting [in the
foreground]”. This is also the goal of ambient video (Bizzocchi 2004a) and some work in
ambient displays (for instance, Vogel & Balakrishnan 2004).

In terms of Eno’s discussion of ambience, this is ambience-as-background-and-

foreground, which is anywhere, which “allows different types of attention”. Such
 42

ambivalence is also the state of what we might call everyday furniture and furnishings –
humble designed objects that sit within the background of everyday life, then come to the
fore when we use them, only to go back again. Think of a cutlery set or wall calendar or
lounge, which, just like Ambient Music, is designed to be as ignorable as interesting
(interest here might be aesthetic and/or utilitarian), to sustain attention but also to blend
in with the surroundings. Note that this is the ambition of Erik Satie’s ‘furniture music’,
which is taken to be a direct ascendant of Eno’s Ambient Music. In this sense we can
think of the ambivalent mode as the typical everyday mode. Even Ambient Intelligence
has been expressed in these ambivalent terms, as seeking to embed intelligence in the
background that comes into our foreground only when we need it (Gaggioli 2005). This
was also expressed in Weiser and Brown’s (1996) key paper on ubiquitous computing as
‘calm technology’ which comes in and out of foreground attention.

The whereabouts of the first three modes

I am now in a position to account for the whereabouts of the first three modes of being-
in-our-surroundings. Notice that all three modes involve both background and
foreground. The background assumes the foreground and vice versa, whilst the
ambivalent mode hovers between both. By involving both background and foreground,
all three modes belong to the same overall whereabouts or surroundings – the
surroundings parsed or prioritised in terms of background and foreground that I will call,
for the moment, the prioritised surroundings. Not only do the modes belong to the same
whereabouts, they occur together; background and foreground modes are extremities
within the ambivalent back-and-forth of daily life (Stockfelt 1997:140-141 touches on this
regarding sonic experience). If this is the case, and the ambivalent mode is our typical
everyday mode, then we can predict that the prioritised surroundings is our usual
surroundings (something I take up in the next chapter).

Ambience has been located in two places in the prioritised surroundings. As background
(in the background mode and in the foreground mode), and as both background-and-
foreground (in the ambivalent mode). But as I described when outlining its basic
definition (Ch 1.2), ambience is not just the background, nor the background and the
foreground; ambience is that which pervades, all-around – neither background, nor
foreground nor anywhere (as per Eno), but instead pervasively everywhere. And if
ambience is that which pervades the surroundings, how can we engage with it in its
pervasiveness (and not as ambience-as-background, nor as ambience-as-background-
and-foreground)? This would involve dissolving the very structure of foreground and
 43

background and removing priority in the surroundings, which results in a fourth and final
mode.

(d) The ambient (neither-back-nor-forth) mode

There is one more possibility of our relationship to our surroundings, and that is to relate
to the surroundings outside of the logic of foreground and background, dissolving such
distinctions. Here we would relate in an ambient manner, in the pervasiveness of the
surroundings, since what pervades is neither background nor foreground. This would not
be a typical everyday mode, since it is clearly not part of the typical prioritised
surroundings. Here, then, is my proposal:

The ambient mode involves engaging with our surroundings as an ambient

pervasive all-around field, without anything being prioritised into foreground and
background. Without the salience of the foreground, what would need to become
salient is the pervasive ambience itself. 15

The ideal of the ambient mode seems to be implicit in the ‘enveloping’ and ‘non-
conceptualised’ nature of the ambient in Foster’s environmental aesthetics (1998), and
explicit in the brief statements by Morton (2002) about the ‘non-dual’ character of
ambient poetics. However, Morton’s reference to Eno as a representative of this ‘non-
dual’ ambience mis-reads Eno’s contributions to ambient practices and discourses; Eno
was most interested in the ambivalent mode. In Chapter Three, I will show that the
ambient mode is more typified by the ideals of John Cage surrounding his non-
hierarchical, all-around listening exemplified in 4’33” (1952).

But this is to get ahead of myself. To begin with, one may well ask: is this ambient mode
possible at all? and what would it entail? To answer this, we would need to determine the
what–how–where of this mode, because if we cannot address these basic co-constitutive
components, we have no mode. Furthermore, what creative practices would be involved
with the ambient mode? how would the ambient creative work function? In short, is the

15
In the order that I have presented them, the four modes can be understood as a succession of complimentary
opposites: background opposes foreground, foreground opposes background, ambivalent opposes the priority of either
solely background or foreground, and the ambient opposes priority (background-foreground) altogether. This is a structural
series of oppositions, rather than moral or historical one. That is, I do not make claims for one mode being any more basic
or prior or worthy than another. However, these oppositions have been put in moral terms by various proponents of each
mode. As mentioned above, Adorno was against the background, and sometimes Eno’s discussions of Ambient Music
have been against the strictures of solely background or solely foreground.
 44

notion of a salient ambience a deft paradox (a contradiction with possibilities) or just a

daft oxymoron (an impossible contradiction)?

Answering these questions is no simple matter; because the ambient mode is so a-

typical (not part of everyday modes), it does not have an ample range of literature to
consult (as is the case for the notions of background and foreground). Therefore, what is
needed is a framework and vocabulary of ambience to achieve several things: describes
ambience in terms of our lived experience; distinguishes between the ambience of the
prioritised surroundings (as background or as background-and-foreground) and the
ambience of the a-prioritised ambient mode (as pervasive); and gives a place to the
creative work in this ambience. Since the literature on ambient practices (surveyed in Ch
1.1) lacks any framework of ambience, I obviously need to look elsewhere. In the
following chapter, I will draw on the philosophy of Martin Heidegger to construct the
necessary framework and vocabulary.
 45

chapter two
fleshing out the ambient mode

Having proposed the ambient mode of being-in-our-surroundings, I will now provide an

in-depth conceptual account of this mode, in order to develop a framework and
vocabulary to discuss and unpack creative practice in the remainder of this essay. This
will involve constructing a phenomenological framework of ambience and the ambient
mode, through examining four aspects of this mode in terms of four questions. The first
three relate to its structure, namely, the co-constitutive what–how–where that structures
any mode of being (outlined in Ch 0.4):

(Q1) What do we engage with in the ambient mode?

(Q2) How would we engage with things in the ambient mode?
(Q3) Where would the ambient mode occur?

Further, if the ambient mode is a-typical (because it is not part of the everyday prioritised
surroundings), then another key question is:

(Q4) How would we enter into the ambient mode?

After fleshing out the ambient mode by addressing these questions, I conclude the
chapter by considering how we might practise the ambient mode. This leads to
introducing, and outlining the general conditions of, the ambient work – the creative work
of inviting and sustaining the ambient mode.

In this chapter, I employ the existential phenomenology of twentieth-century German

philosopher Martin Heidegger, especially in reference to the writings of the most
prominent English-speaking interpreter of Heidegger, Hubert L. Dreyfus. In particular, I
draw on the ontological realms of world and earth presented by Heidegger in ‘The Origin
of the Work of Art’ (1935-36, hereafter OWA), his first and most well-known essay on art.
In effect, I produce an ambient reading of OWA; I use OWA to develop a theory of
ambience in terms of world and earth, and to discuss the place of creative work in this
ambience. But whilst Heidegger is concerned with work in the foreground mode (his
examples are a Greek temple, a painting by Van Gogh, and a poem by Meyer), I am
 46

concerned with creative work that deals in the ambient mode, work which I will come to
describe as ambient work.16

2.1 The What of the Ambient Mode

(Q1) What do we engage with in the ambient mode?

To answer this question, we need to determine what is it that is pervasively ambient and
could be engaged with as an all-pervasive ambient field and not as that which is parsed
into foreground and background. Determining what is pervasively ambient is more
difficult than determining what is background. What is background is what is there but
not in the foreground – the sunset behind the fireworks I am looking at, the landscape
around the trees I am looking at, the fridge hum beneath the conversation I am listening
to, the conversations away from the radio I am listening to etc. But neither sunset nor
landscape nor fridge hum nor conversations are in-and-of themselves all-pervasive. Just
what is pervasively all-around, all-encompassing?

To answer such questions, I turn to the realms of world and earth presented by
Heidegger in OWA: world is the context of all our contexts of meaning and activity, which
is pitted in primordial conflict with the earth, the material stuff that supports and is prior to
world and any meaning; and these two realms and their conflict with one another are
revealed afresh in (what Heidegger calls) the work of art. I will argue that both world and
earth are fundamentally ambient, forming the ambience of our existence which is

16
Dreyfus represents one of four strands of Heideggerian scholarship identified by Sheehan (2001:184-185). Dreyfus
occupies the ‘centre left’ of Heideggerian scholarship, which looks to apply Heidegger’s ideas to contemporary issues and
thinkers, which may even involve correcting Heidegger. In contrast, the ‘far left’ seeks to un-do Heidegger (much inspired
by Heidegger’s involvement with the Nazis), whilst the ‘centre right’ and ‘far right’ represent orthodox strands of strict
commentary which seek to interpret Heidegger correctly. Sheehan also suggests there is a fifth strand, in which Heidegger
gets applied, often ‘creatively’ to the arts, literary criticism, ecology, and so forth. I suggest that my use of Heidegger sits
somewhere between the Dreyfian approach and the ‘creative’ approach. My use of Heidegger to discuss ambience is
unique. There are only two precedents I am aware of which link Heidegger and ambience, however, these do not go into
any detail (one sentence in Wesier 1991, a paragraph in Rickert 2004:913) and neither makes use of OWA and the pairing
of world and earth. My use of OWA to discuss specific instances of creative practice is also somewhat unique. Nearly all
discussions of OWA by philosophers are concerned with Heidegger’s larger philosophies or eco-philosophy, and specific
recourse to creative works within such discussions is almost entirely lacking – at most they rely on Heidegger’s three very
brief examples of creative work. For a list of the philosophical accounts of OWA, see the section below on ‘The Ambience
of Earth’ and especially Footnote 23. Discussions of OWA by creative practitioners and theorists of various domains of
creative practice are also scant. This is not surprising since OWA is much more concerned with onto-philosophical
concepts than with specific histories, practices and theories of the creative arts, and it is also a difficult read – even a
Heideggerian philosopher has called the essay a “tortuously enigmatic work” (Young 2001:5). Recent examples include
the philosopher Shapiro’s reading of Smithson’s earthworks (1995:44,126-139,159), the work of Australian practice-led
theorist Barbara Bolt (2004a, 2004b, however her writing is largely theoretical with little reference to actual examples of
practice), and the Australian conceptual painter Mark Titmarsh (forth-coming PhD). An earlier exception is the debate
about what Van Gogh’s painting is said to refer to (see Schapiro 1994[1968], and Derrida 1987[1978]).
 47

experienced locally as the surrounding-world and the surrounding-earth. But crucially,

the ambience that can be engaged with as pervasively ambient (and not parsed into
foreground-and-background) is that of the surrounding-earth.

The ambience of world

World (Welt) is already at play in Heidegger’s philosophy in the decade leading up to

OWA, occupying a pivotal place in his masterwork Being and Time (1927, hereafter BT,
see footnote regarding page numbering). 17 It is a key constituent in the unitary
phenomena of being-in-the-world, a phrase Heidegger uses to describe the essential
characteristic of human being – namely, that any experience, understanding or theory of
things we encounter (whether everyday items like hammers or scientific items like
electrons) is always already reliant upon the larger context of the world within which such
encounters take place. This world is one in which humans always already find
themselves and which they can never get outside of. Importantly, the way we are ‘in’ the
world is not one of inclusion (a ball in a box, a subject surrounded by objects) but one of
existential involvement (a person in a home, concernful dwelling) – so much so that
Heidegger uses a special term, Da-sein, whenever he speaks of human being (literally
‘being-there’).

What then is world? Heidegger devoted considerable attention to the character of world
in BT (esp §14-24, ‘The Worldliness of World’), and in OWA it retains the same basic
sense and only receives a summative treatment.18 In both texts, Heidegger emphasises
that world must not be thought of as the universe or totality of all entities, nor a map of
such a universe, nor an entity itself (see OWA:23; see also Dreyfus 1991:89-91), but
rather, it is the “always-nonobjectual” to which we are always subject (OWA:23). In
particular, Heidegger states that world is

17
BT was first published in German in 1927 as Sein and Ziet, and had two major divisions. It was first translated into
English by Macquarrie and Robinson in 1962, which is the source that is most often quoted in English-language texts.
However, I am using the more recent translation of Stambaugh from 1996. As is common practice, the page numbers in
my citations refer to the original German publication, which are present in the margins of both English translations. There
are many overviews of BT, the most widely respected is Dreyfus’ Being-In-The-World (1991), although it is only a
commentary on Division One of BT (the division most useful to this essay).
18
Some commentators note a small shift in emphasis in world from BT to OWA – to that of the world of a whole
community rather than an individual (Dahlstrom 1993:57) and to the moral and political destinies of this world/community
(Haar 1993:57). Also, note that in essays after OWA, world becomes the one-fold of the four-fold of earth-sky-mortals-
divinities, as presented in Heidegger’s The Thing (1971[1950]).
 48

[t]he all-governing expanse of [an] open relational context… of [a] historical people.
(OWA:21)19

By all-governing expanse, Heidegger means world governs and determines our being
and the beings we encounter. It provides the general ways of being or limits within which
any being in particular occurs. Because world is where things turn up or are disclosed,
one of the metaphors Heidegger gives is that of light (Lichtung, which also means an
Open or clearing); the being of the world lights up beings within it, making them
intelligible to us.

Further, by linking world to a historical people, Heidegger means world is not universal
and infinite, but is historical and therefore contingent and evolving, such that “worlds
come and go” (Young 2001:19). What was intelligible and meaningful – what was ‘lit up’
– was different for Ancient Greeks compared to Medieval Europe compared to the
Modern West. Like language that is a part of it, world is always shared, of a people, of a
(sub)culture and not solely of a person.

What Heidegger means by open relational context requires a little more explanation. In
BT (§16, see also Dreyfus 1991:ch4-5) Heidegger explains that the world is something
we are involved with, and these involvements are orientated around the things of the
world, which are available as useful things (tools, equipment, Zueg) that we take care of
in concernful dwelling. Useful things for eating, working, shopping, writing, etc.
Heidegger calls this general mode of being Zuhandenheit, which has been translated as
readiness-at-hand and handiness, but in this essay I will use Dreyfus’ term availability.
Importantly, useful things are never encountered alone but in an ever-expanding context
of interrelations with other useful things, and with the tasks, purposes and significance
with which such things are involved. In BT Heidegger calls this relational context of
availability the referential totality.

(Nothing exists for us outside of this context of availability. When useful things stop being
useful – if they breakdown, or are lost, hindered or pondered over – and become un-
available, they are still operating within the referential totality, since un-usefulness is but
one particular relation of use. Even the second general mode of being in BT, called

19
This is Heidegger’s most succinct and perhaps only definition of world in BT and OWA. The statement is paraphrased a
little more obliquely several pages later: “The world is the self-disclosing openness [expanse] of the broad paths of the
simple and essential decisions [relational context] in the destiny of an historical people” (OWA:48). In BT it is Heidegger’s
style to let the reader slowly follow his line of argument, and by the time of OWA world is largely assumed. However, see
the first three paragraphs of §69(c) in BT for some summative remarks about world.
 49

Vorhandenheit, exists as a form of availability. This mode has been translated as

presence-to-hand or objective presence, but in this essay I use Dreyfus’ term
occurrentness. Occurrentness refers to the traditional philosophy of substances, isolated,
objective and removed from human concern that is the purview of the rational sciences.
But Heidegger argues (as reiterated by Dreyfus 1991:79-83) that the theoretical
speculation involved in the occurrent mode is itself a special type of practical
involvement and taking care: it takes care of things through scientific and theoretical
methods and by making assertions about such things. So, even the occurrent is still a
form of availability.)

To summarise: world is the entire context of associations and relations between the historical
things, practices, meanings and significance which is made available to and encountered by
humans, which we are always being within.

I am now in a position to comment on the relationship of world to our being in it, in terms of
ambience: world is the transcendental or ontological ambience within which we and other
things always already exist. World is often expressed in terms of a ‘background’ or ‘horizon’
(ambience as encircling, such Dreyfus 1991 and Young 2001:23) but, more broadly, we can
also think of world as a network or web that pervades our existence and any particular things
within our existence (ambience as pervading). World is everywhere and anywhere humans
are. The ambience of world, implicit in Heidegger, is occasionally made explicit by
commentators, such as Casey (1997:265) who describes the cleared Open (Lichtung) of the
world as a “cleared ambience”. 20

So, world is ambient, everywhere and anywhere humans are. But is this the ambience that
can be engaged with as an ambient field in the ambient mode? To answer this, we need to
consider our particular local engagement with world.

The surrounding-world

Although world is the ultimate context of our existence, we are always located within a
specific place in the world with its own particularities. Heidegger calls this local world
within which we find ourselves the surrounding-world (Umwelt, also translated as
environing world or environment, discussed in BT §15). Heidegger says the surrounding-

20
See also Casey (1997:279, 293); Blake (2003:338); the remarks on Heidegger’s world by Emmanuel Levinas in
Discovering Existence with Husserl (1949, translated 1998) quoted in Caygill (2002:21); and Graves-Brown (2000:4)
regarding James J. Gibson’s (related) notion of world.
 50

world is simply that which is nearest to us. However, in keeping with our being-in-the-
world, the nearness of the surrounding-world is not a matter of geometric distance
(inclusion, taking measurement) but is instead a matter of existential dealings
(involvement, taking care). That is, what is near is what is within range of our
involvement with it, or simply, what is most available to us. Heidegger gives two
examples of the difference between nearness and geometric distance: the painting I look
at is nearer than my glasses used to see it, and the people across the street I want to
meet are nearer than the pavement upon which I walk to get to them.

Furthermore, as both Dreyfus (1991:ch6) and Arisaka (1995:8) clarify, there are two
spatialities at play in the near-far structure of the surrounding-world: shared regions
(Gegend), and the various individual perspectives that we can take up within them.
Shared regions include built infrastructures (such as a kitchen or hallway, Ariska
1995:4,8) and social infrastructures which Spinosa et al (1997:16-17) call sub-worlds
(such as professional domains, disciplines, discourses or even family units). These
regions, by giving things a functional place within them, present a general shared
structure of what is near and far to all those ‘plugged in’ to them (Arisaka 1995:8). But
within such shared regions, we can take up various perspectives that are nearer to and
farther from the order of things within that region. A short example of mine will make this
clear. Consider a parkland. If there is the region of a soccer field mapped onto it, then
this holds certain things nearer and other things farther away for those plugged into it
whether playing or watching the game. And within the region of the soccer pitch, there
are of course a range of positions to take up, near one set of goals or the other. But for
those plugged into the parkland as a region for bird-watching, then the things that are
generally nearer and farther away for bird-watchers, and the perspectives they can take,
are different to those participating in the soccer game.

I am now in a position to connect the ambience of world with the taxonomy of modes of
being-in-our-surroundings presented in Chapter One (Ch 1.3). Heidegger’s existential
definition of nearness is exactly the definition of foreground that I have assumed so far in
this essay, but which I can now make explicit: the foreground is what is near to us;
foreground is what is most available to be actively dealt with (what is highlighted, what is
central, what is the dominant content etc), which may only sometimes be what is nearest
in measurement. Note that what is nearest to us might be by choice (choosing to walk to
a person across road), by convention (following the conventions of looking at a painting
in a gallery) or by chance (the car that screams to a halt as I cross the road will suddenly
 51

become very near to me as I am forced to deal with it), so it need not be a matter of
conscious intentionality (choice alone).

Therefore, to say that the surrounding-world and its regions are structured upon and
structure our nearness-and-farness is to say that the surrounding-world and its regions
structure and are structured upon foreground-and-background relations; through the
world, things gain their nearness and farness, in other words, their foreground and
background. In OWA, Heidegger puts it this way: “[b]y the opening up of a world, all
things gain their abidance and urgency, their remoteness and nearness, their scope and
limits” (OWA:23, using the translation given by Canán 2000, my emphasis). Therefore,
whilst world is ambient, any engagement with the world within our specific surrounding-
world can only ever be in terms of foreground-background (nearness-farness).
Consequently, the surrounding-world is not the ambience that can be engaged with as
an ambient field outside the logic of foreground-background; world is ambient but it
cannot be the ambience of the ambient mode. In fact, since world is that which produces
the priorities of foreground-background, the surrounding-world must be the ambience
that we engage with in the three modes of being which belong to the prioritised
surroundings – the background, the foreground and the ambivalent. That is to say, what I
called our prioritised surroundings in Chapter One are our everyday familiar surrounding-
worlds.

Thus, the first question I posed regarding the ambient mode – what is ambient that can
be engaged with as a pervasive ambient field without foreground and background? – still
remains unanswered. (Though understanding the ambience of world is not in vain, since
notions of world will return at various times in this essay.) There is, however, another
ontological realm introduced by Heidegger in OWA, which does present the possibility of
engagement with it as an pervasive ambient field in the ambient mode. This other realm
is the earth.

The ambience of earth

Earth is introduced for the first time by Heidegger in OWA,21 in the middle period of his
philosophy, and OWA is its main text.22 Given the brevity and ambiguity of Heidegger’s

21
OWA was presented in seminars between 1935-36 in three versions, before being published in German as Der
Ursprung des Kunstwerkes in 1950 in an anthology of Heidegger’s essays titled Holzwege. The essay was first published
in English in Poetry, Language, Thought (1973), which is the source most often quoted in English-language
commentaries. However, I am using the recent translation by Julian Young, published in Off the Beaten Track (2002),
 52

comments about earth in OWA, compared to the substantial treatment of world in BT, it
is not surprising that there is significant divergence amongst Heidegger’s commentators
regarding the sense(s) and meaning(s) of earth (the more recent writers include
Kocklemans 1985; Haar 1993[1987]; Foltz 1995; Dreyfus 1997, 2004, 2005; Canán
2000; Young 2001; Moyle 2005; Malpas 2007). 23 My interpretation of earth below, as
concealed material, sits closest to Young and somewhat close to Haar, Canán and
Moyle. Because, as I will discuss, earth is outside of the familiar intelligibility of world and
is very unusual, I will need to labour over its characteristics. Yet, the spatiality of earth
will be found to be far simpler (smoother) than that of world and its regions.

What, then, is earth? Heidegger emphasises that earth is not “a mass of matter” nor “the
merely astronomical idea of a planet” (OWA:21). Rather, earth is formulated as an
opposing ontological realm to world; whilst world discloses beings, earth is the realm that
is prior to and supports (materially sustains) world. It provides the stuff out of which the
world is established:

On and in the earth, historical man [human being] founds his dwelling in the world.
(OWA:24)

which contains the original collection of Holzwege texts. As a useful starting point to understanding the various issues
related to OWA, I recommend Young’s Heidegger’s Philosophy of Art (2001).
22
Canán (2000) has noted that the word ‘earth’ – not the concept – appears on three occasions in BT, and he also
provides a brief summary of the life of earth in Heidegger’s thinking after OWA. In particular, earth becomes part of the
four-fold of the one-fold of world – compare with Footnote 18. For how earth in OWA fits into the overall arc of Heidegger’s
philosophy, see Moyle (2005) and Malpas (2007:esp 219-229 ‘The Happening of Place’).
23
Haar (1993[1987]:54-67) is the only author to have deliberately articulated a taxonomy of multiple senses of earth. He
has identified four senses of earth in Heidegger’s thinking, outlined in the forward by Sallis (1993:xii): concealment, physis
(nature), the material in art, and homeland (Grund). Haar (1993:95-96) links two of these senses to artworks in OWA: the
material and homeland, the latter of which he states is implicit rather than explicit in Heidegger. Other writers identify
multiple senses, but without being as deliberate as Haar. Moyle (2005:45-58) identifies an ambiguous, even contradictory
threefold use of earth in OWA which match Haar’s first three senses: as ontological concealing, sensuous materiality in
the artwork, and physis (blossoming nature). Young (2001:49) identifies two senses in OWA: the concealed, which is his
primary focus, and the material, to which he gives only brief attention. Foltz (1995) is concerned with ‘nature’ in Heidegger,
and of the seven senses of nature, he identifies two for earth: the material, and homeland, though none are directly linked
to OWA. Canán (2000) identifies two senses in OWA: firstly earth linked to ‘heritage’ in BT (on which he does not
elaborate), and earth as transcendental constituent further split into the material and a ‘presentational achievement’ of
presenting concealment. Both Kocklemans and Dreyfus distinguish between the earth of OWA and the earth of the later
‘fourfold’. For Kocklemans (1985:151-152) the difference is between earth as the concealed and then that which serves
and bears. For Dreyfus, the earth of OWA is, roughly, concealment (earth is defined as the way something refuses
totalisation or rationalisation, Dreyfus 2005:2005:411) whilst the earth of ‘the fourfold’ is made to sound rather like world
(“the taken-for-granted practices that ground situations and make them matter to us”, Dreyfus & Spinosa 1997), but,
confusingly, Dreyfus equates these (in Dreyfus & Spinosa 1997, where earth and world in OWA are equated with earth
and sky in ‘the fourfold’). The anthology of essays edited by McWhorter (1992), despite the title, Heidegger and the Earth,
is not clear on the matter, the most clear being Maly (1992) who poetically explores earth as connectedness and Stenstad
(1992) who ponders the earth as hiding (concealment). One difficulty is that, except for Canán and Kocklemans, most
commentators do not directly articulate the shift from the earth of OWA to the earth of the fourfold, though Foltz (1995:150
n61, 151 n63) senses this difficulty, and Young (2001:72) notes the difference but does not explain it. On this point,
compare with Footnote 22.
 53

Earth is “that which bears all” (OWA:38); it is a founding well-spring. But this well-spring
is prior to any worldly intelligibility, remaining “undisclosed and unexplained” (OWA:25).
As Young (2001:40) explains, it is the necessary dark-side to the light of the world. That
is, to light up certain beings (in the world) must keep something other in the dark (in the
earth). Thus, like world, earth is also a transcendental constituent (Canán 2000), but one
of mysterious concealment rather than intelligible disclosure, without the practices,
purposes, regions and history of the world. A straightforward reading of earth in OWA, is
that earth is the terrestrial stuff that forms the material basis of culture, stuff which we
fundamentally need to exist. 24 This may make world/earth seem like the equivalent of
culture/nature, but we need to be cautious here, since, as Overgaard (2004:123-124; cf
Dreyfus 1991:109-112) explains, most accounts of nature, including the few times nature
is mentioned in BT, are already within the intelligibility of world. Nature is either available
(used within our practices – like rain harnessed for drinking), or un-available (as
impinging on our practices and therefore still part of those practices – like rain to shelter
from), or occurrent (as encountered and examined by the practices of science – like
precipitation to chart and study). Overgaard mentions that there is, however, one
passage in BT that hints at a way of thinking about nature outside of worldly intelligibility:
nature as “what ‘stirs and strives,’ what overcomes us, entrances us as landscape,
remains hidden” (BT:70, my emphasis). Between BT and OWA, Heidegger comes to
describe nature as “what attunes human being ‘through and through,’ and what Dasein
[human being] cannot master” (Heidegger quoted in Overgaard 2004:126, my
emphasis). Only this hidden, un-mastered, unintelligible sense of nature is the earth.
This is, nature prior to any naming, meaning or use, or in Foster’s (1998) terms, prior to
any narratives applied to it (whether in terms of scientific processes and descriptions or
social and mythological histories).

Although beyond intelligibility, Heidegger explains that the earth, to be that which is
withdrawn, needs the world to appear as withdrawn. This means that earth, in some
paradoxical way, appears in the world. Earth is “the coming-forth-concealing” (OWA:24).
“World is grounded on earth, and earth rises up through world” (OWA:26). So, what of
this concealed-earth could, strangely enough, appear to us? The answer in OWA is the
material of earth, the terrestrial stuff as made available to the senses, prior to any
determination of it as possessing any meaning or form or function. For Heidegger, this

24
Earth in OWA is more complex than portrayed here – since it also includes language and poetry (OWA:17,23,44-47)
which seems aligned with the meaningfulness of world – but it is not necessary for me to explore this complexity is terms
of a model for the ambient mode of being. In short, there could be other things besides terrestrial stuff that earths our
existence; regard this terrestrial stuff as paradigmatic of, but not exclusively, the earth.
 54

earthy materiality is showcased by the work of art, which does not use up and forget its
earth in useful things (availability) nor in scientific measurement and study
(occurrentness), but lets it be seen/touched/heard as strange and ungraspable. 25 In other
words, the materiality of earth is only graspable as an ungraspable material quality – the
“massiveness”, “heaviness” and “firmness” of tactile objects, the “shine”, “lightening and
darkening” of colour/light, and the “ringing” of sound (OWA:24-25).26 Moyle (2005:49)
calls this “the palpable presence of a uniquely formed sensuous materiality”. 27 Since this
material is sensed and is therefore partly disclosed (shiny colour is seen, heavy mass is
felt, sounding tone is heard), we could think of this material-earth as a shadowy
intermediary between the light of world and the complete darkness of concealed-earth.

If the material-earth is something we could encounter, then what are the contents of
material-earth? If the world involves useful things, that is, things we care about, then
what are the things of the material-earth prior to such care and use in the world? Could
there be earthy things? From OWA, we might gather that the things of earth include
stones and soil, or colours and sounds, but this is already to convert the earth, through
naming it and appropriating it, into the world. To question the contents of material-earth, I
employ ideas of formal ontologist Brian Cantwell Smith, who, using other terms, achieves
the difficult task of imagining the material-earth without world. Through Smith, we
discover the content of material-earth is not a collection of things, but is just one field.
According to Smith, most philosophers make the mistake of assuming that fundamental
to the “physical substrate” of the universe (what I have been calling terrestrial stuff) is the
existence of objects – discrete, isolatable things which are called substances in classical
philosophy. In On The Origin of Objects (1996), Smith argues that objects are not
ontologically basic, but are achieved (registered, made out) by humans in our interaction
with the universe, whether doing science, philosophy or everyday activities. He first
considers that objects are individual particulars, that is, they are individual (countable,
discrete from other things) and particular (concrete instances), which are also
traditionally called “bare particulars” (p123). But Smith shows that it is possible to have
individuality without particularity (numbers and abstract types for example). Also, and of

25
The artwork (though Heidegger is never that specific on this) achieves the presentation of material-earth by existing
outside of usefulness – the work of art is not a piece of equipment. In this sense Heidegger aligns with traditional notions
of the purposeful purposeless-ness of the aesthetic object that one disinterestedly admires for its sensual beauty In OWA,
Heidegger expresses a great suspicion of traditional aesthetics (see OWA:50-51; Young 2001:8-12), but only Young
(2001:49) seems to have noted Heidegger’s ‘lapse’ into traditional aesthetics.
26
In this passage, Heidegger also talks of “the naming power of the word” (OWA:24), which is not a matter of sensuous
materiality, but suggests that language to is also an earth of our existence – see Footnote 24.
27
The sensuousness of material-earth evokes the body, even though Heidegger, as often-mentioned by commentators, all
but ignores the body in OWA and BT. As Haar (1993:5) has commented, “[earth] appears as the most elementary ground
of the world, as its body, to which our body is necessarily connected.
 55

more relevance to this discussion, it is possible to have particularity without individuality,

which refers to fields of concrete materiality prior to individualising or objectifying this
material. Everyday examples of particularity without individuality involves fields with
features that are themselves not objects, such as fog or rain (p124-128). This
particularity without individuality is most basic in Smith’s ontology, since individuality
occurs as we register things in the fields of particularity. Smith concludes that prior to
differentiated objects (this object, that object etc), what is ontologically basic to the
physical substrate is just an “infinitely extensive continuous field” (p176) of “pure
particularity” (p199) – a differentiated field of density gradients or flux (see especially
Smith 1996:ch4,7,8). Instead of identifying objects, the most we can say about the
differences within this flux is that there are various peaks or pockets of intensity. In
Heideggerian terms we could say objects are disclosed as part of our being-in-the-world,
whether in practical engagement or theoretical, scientific speculation; objects are worldly,
rather than earthy. Thus, Smith shows that within the material-earth there are no things,
but simply a continuous field of earthy material stuff.28 Note that this field is highly
differentiated (although a continuous field, it is rough, textured, rather than smooth and
consistent) and is finite (it is highly determinate and concrete) rather than homogenous
or infinite.

To summarise: material-earth is dumb, mute, unintelligible material stuff in one

undulating, differentiated field, registered in terms of sensuous qualities – the heaviness
of mass, the shine of colour, the tone of sounds – prior to being named, measured, dealt
with intelligibly and taken up as an object in our world.

I am now in a position to comment on the ambience of earth: Firstly, concealed-earth is

ambient in the sense of encircling, since it is an ontological darkness that surrounds the
Open lit clearing of the world (see OWA:30). Secondly, the shadowy material-earth is
pervasively ambient, as an infinitely extensive continuous field of physical densities
(some of which we can register with our various senses) that supports the ambient world
wherever it is.

28
This view of material-earth-as-field seems to already linger around Heidegger’s philosophy. At the time of writing OWA,
his teacher Edmund Husserl was expressing the ‘non-substantial’ (non-object) view that “all the earth is the same earth”
which parallels Hegel’s determination of it as “the universal individual” (in Haar 1993:xii). I read ‘universal individual’ to
mean particularity without individuality – earth is just one total individual, one clump/field, with no individuals/objects within
it. Also, one comment in OWA suggests the earth as single field: “All things of the earth, the earth in its entirety, flow
together in reciprocal harmony” (OWA:25).
 56

Thus, earth, like world, is also a fundamental ambience of our existence, everywhere
and anywhere humans are. But is the material-earth the sort of ambience that can be
engaged with as a pervasive ambient field within the ambient mode? We might expect
so, since earth is prior to any of the intelligibility of world including the world’s nearness
and farness (foreground and background), but to be sure, we need to examine the
spatiality of the earth that we (might) engage with in our immediate surroundings.

The surrounding-earth

We do not engage with the earth at large; what ungraspably appears is always in some
particular place. Just as we encounter the world in the surrounding-world, we can also
think of any possible encounter with earth being in the surrounding-earth, where we
happen to be. This is not a term used by Heidegger, but it is implicit in his general
discussions in OWA and in his three examples of an ancient Greek Temple (OWA:20-
22), a Van Gogh painting (OWA:13-15) and a poem by Meyer (OWA:17), where
material-earth is always something and somewhere in particular, albeit ungraspably
there. 29 But if the surrounding-world is marked by a spatiality of nearness, what is the
spatiality of the surrounding-earth? Certainly, the surrounding-earth cannot be near,
since nearness involves what we are most concerned with and the earth is prior to any
human concerns. The surrounding-earth is there regardless of us and our activities. It
has a “dumb lethic [concealed, lethagic] ‘thereness’” (Sheehan 2001:193), a there-ness
that is outside the history, time, concerns, near-ness and far-ness of the world. This
there-ness is pervasively everywhere as an ambient ground that has neither foreground
nor background. That is, whilst the spatiality of the world is near-ness, the spatiality of
the earth is an ambient there-ness. There is, therefore, only one region of the material-
earth – all of it – which, to distinguish this from the multiple regions of the world, I will
refer to as the earthy terrain. Any surrounding-earth (wherever someone happens to be)
is simply a local part of this greater terrain. This means that the surrounding-earth has a
far simpler spatiality (of one earthy terrain) compared to the surrounding-world (with its
many worldly regions and sub-worlds of varying types and scales).

Material-earth, although one basic earthy terrain, is registered differently by the different
senses. In particular, I am interested in those sensory domains that are most available to
take in the surroundings all-around-at-once, namely, the visual and the sonic. To

29
Earth / surrounding-earth is similar to the use of upper-case, for earth in general, and lower-case, for earth in particular,
by the translator of Haar (1993, see translator’s note on page xvi), except that I wish to explicitly refer to the surrounding-
ness of the material-earth.
 57

emphasise that such visual and sonic fields are before any differentiation into objects
and things, I refer to them as scapes. 30 Furthermore, we can distinguish the material
qualities that belong to each:

visual-scape = colour–shape
sonic-scape = timbre–envelope

In other words, the visual-scape of the material-earth is registered in terms of the colour
and shape of its illumination, and the sonic-scape in terms of the timbre and envelope of
its sonority. Note that these qualities are not given in the plural, as this would be to
assume multiple individuated instances. That is, there are not sounds or sound objects in
the sonic-scape – just one sonority as a scape of undulating timbre and envelope. Nor
are there visuals or visual objects in the visual-scape – just one illumination as a scape
of undulating colour and shape. This may be a slightly forced way of phrasing things, but
I wish to keep the sense of object-less-ness in the material earth. 31

I am now able to sum up the answer to the first question I posed about the ambient
mode, regarding what we would engage with in the ambient mode:

• The pervasive field we engage with in the ambient mode is the surrounding-earth,
registered in terms of undulating material qualities of the visual- and sonic-scapes
– prior to any determination of it into near-far (foreground-background), that is,
prior to any one part being any more salient than another.

30
The use of the suffix ‘scape’ comes from considering the terms soundscape and landscape, which are themselves,
however, slightly inappropriate for my description of the field of material-earth. Landscape connotes a portion of land,
which does not locate it in the sensorial domain. When landscape does connote the visual, by referring to a section of the
land chosen to be depicted through an image (this is its original sense), this sections off some part of the surroundings
and loses the sense of an all-around surroundings. For an overview of the term ‘landscape’ and the creative arts, see
Jackson (1998[1984]:3-5) and Dean & Millar (2005:13). Soundscape, coined by composer and audio ecologist R. Murray
Schafer in 1969, is closer to my requirements, because it locates the scape in a sensory domain (the aural) and because it
is used to emphasise the all-around envelopment of the sonic environment. However, discussions of soundscape
generally presuppose that it is populated with different sonic and acoustic objects that are differentiated and interact, that
is, a field or ecology made up of many individuate sounds, which is something I wish to avoid in my sense of sonic-scape.
On ‘soundscape’, see Schafer (1994[1977]).
31
Why would the visual- and sonic-scapes be made up of these and not others? Because other distinctions (like ‘line’ or
‘form’ in the visual, or ‘melody’ in the sonic) already assume an individuated and sectioning off form the greater field (a
‘line’ is an abstraction, a ‘melody’ begets accompaniment and a start and stop).
 58

2.2 The How of the Ambient Mode

(Q2) How would we engage with things in the ambient mode?

I have just argued that the surrounding-earth is the sort of ambience that we could
engage with in the ambient mode. But what would characterise such an engagement?
How can we engage with the surrounding-earth? If the surrounding-earth is not full of
any things, but is a rich differentiated field of material densities, then how can we engage
with such non-things? Such engagement would amount to a being-on-earth. But OWA
was never written to consider such questions about the characteristics of engaging with
the ambient surrounding-earth, so I will need to search elsewhere to answer them.

There are already several predictions we can make about the engagement of the
ambient mode, which will give a guide about where to look to provide a more detailed
account of it. These predictions are: an earthy engagement would be unusual, since it is
not part of our everyday being-in-the-world; it would be without any cares in the world
since being-in-the-world involves our caring, concernful dwelling; it would be unplugged
from worldly regions; and it would involve encountering the fields of sensorial-scapes in
the one earthy terrain. Already, these predictions suggest a type of engagement that
involves sensory curiosity that drops out of world onto material-earth, and I find a model
of such an engagement in certain ideas of Dreyfus.

The first clue regarding the engagement of the ambient mode comes from Dreyfus’
(1991:60-87) interpretation of the two overall modes of being presented in BT (availability
and occurrentness – see Ch.1 ‘The Ambience of World’). Dreyfus explains that to move
from the available to the occurrent, there needs to be a process of de-worlding (taking
something out of normal activity and familiarity). However, there is also a process of re-
worlding (taking something into the special practices of science and theory, which are
themselves another sort of availability). Yet Dreyfus also introduces a special type of
occurrence that involves a de-worlding without the re-worlding into science, which he
calls pure occurrence (a type of occurrence he finds occasionally in Heidegger). It is the
engagement suggested in this mode – a sensorial curiosity that drops out of world – that
I will re-appropriate for the ambient mode. Dreyfus states that pure occurrence involves
the disposition of “pure, disinterested [or]… mere contemplation” meaning “the curiosity
that just stares at [perceives] things” (Dreyfus 1991:83). By linking mere contemplation to
 59

curiosity, Dreyfus draws on Heidegger’s discussion of curiosity in BT. 32 Heiddegger

explains that for human being (Da-sein)

[curiosity] provides new possibilities of de-distancing for itself, that is, it tends to
leave the things nearest at hand for a distant and strange world. Care turns into
taking care of possibilities, resting and staying to see the ‘world’ only [in] its
outward appearance. Da-sein seeks distance solely to bring it near in its outward
appearance. Da-sein lets itself be intrigued just by the outward appearance of a
world, a kind of being in which it makes sure that it gets rid of itself as a being-in-
the-world, get rids of being with the nearest everyday things at hand.
When curiosity has become free, it takes care to see not in order to
understand what it sees, that is, to come to a being toward it, but only in order to
see. It seeks novelty only to leap from it again to another novelty. (BT:172, original
emphasis)

Heidegger concludes that curiosity is both “not-staying” (to take care of something) and
“distraction” (by new possibilities) which results in “never dwelling anywhere” (instead,
one is everywhere and nowhere, constantly uprooting oneself) (BT:172-173). If we are
going to have any engagement with the strange material field of the surrounding-earth,
then surely this description of curiosity is close to the mark – never dwelling in a region of
the world, but shifting around in an undisciplined way around the material-field, any of
which is equally novel. There is, however, a sense in which this curiosity is from afar, set
at a distance – contemplating, staring – and this curiosity can equally be read as a
worldly affair – a voyeuristic staring at what others are doing but never getting involved.
So I need to augment this Heideggerian account of a never-dwelling-anywhere curiosity
with an account that is far more sensual and connected to the material-earth.

A type of never-dwelling-anywhere that is sensual and material can be found in the

nomadic engagement of smooth space described by Deleuze and Guattari in A
Thousand Plateaus (1987 [1980]:ch12,14), which I will discuss via the place-focused
overview by Edward Casey (1997:301-308). Smooth space is contrasted with striated
space, terms that Deleuze and Guattari borrowed and expanded from composer Pierre
Boulez (1971[1963]). Striated space is space divided up into a fixed, measurable,
universal schema which allows for things to be reproduced throughout it – such as the

32
Dreyfus (1991) uses the concept of curiosity in a neutral way, whereas Heidegger’s discussion on curiosity comes from
the section in BT that deals with the ‘falling prey’ of human being, which also includes idle talk and ambiguity (see BT:
§34-38).
 60

sound spectrum divided into the musical scale which allows the transposition of melodic
units, or landscape mapped against lines of latitude and longitude which allows for the
plotting of regular parcels of land. Such a space takes on a homogeneous quality which
can be overseen and even centrally controlled from a distance – such as the codified
rules of counterpoint and harmony in scale-based music, or the arbitration of land
ownership by the state. On the other hand, smooth space is not a space of
measurement, dimension and universal schemas, but is a space that is describable only
in terms of localised shape and difference, without it being mapped into an abstract
universal schema. It is irregular and heterogenous, resisting universalisation, abstraction,
reproduction and centres. In music, this complete heterogeneity is found in the sound
spectrum as spectrum, which has unique qualities and characteristics at any location
within it and transposition is a non-issue. In the landscape, this is found in deserts,
oceans and open fields without any grids, divisions, permanent tracks, segregated
ownership etc applied to it. 33 Smooth space is unlimited, without the limits of a schema,
without the boundaries imposed on it, going beyond the horizon. Yet it is also completely
local, possessing only one vast region of continuous variation and pure connection. Such
continuous variation means, ironically, that smooth space is undulating and highly
textured (rough), whilst striated space is what ignores (smooths over) local difference.

Whilst striated space is clearly worldly, since it is a product of our categorisations of a

space, smooth space is notably earthy. In fact, the material-earth is not just like smooth
space, it is smooth space par excellence – the original smooth space without any of the
striations (categorisations, abstractions, codifications, dividing into objects etc) applied
by world. The question then of how smooth space is navigated and engaged with, as
considered by Deleuze and Guatarri, is therefore also the question of how we might
navigate and engage with the surrounding-earth. Their answer, in short, is that we
operate in smooth space through tactile nomadicism that involves small-scale, local
operations that are close to the ground, haptic and body-based, “felt fully with the
aesthesiological and kinaesthetic body” (Casey 1997:307). This is the only way to get
around in smooth space, since there is no distant or central view of things; one finds
one’s direction through the flows and changes in the variation of the space wherever one
happens to be. Wandering and drifting, travelling and traversing, this tactile nomadicism
is always somewhere in particular, yet at the same time distended everywhere in the

33
The examples from music and landscape that I give here are a simplification and extension of those provided by Casey.
The examples of smooth and striated space in Deleuze & Guatarri (1980:ch14) are more varied and complex, based
around various models including: fabric (technological), musical, sea travel (maritime), mathematical, physical (physics),
warfare, the arts (aesthetic) and board games.
 61

region, potentially any place in it (since there are no centres to settled on and no fixed
pathways to follow). Casey concluded that wandering through smooth space is a
dwelling upon the terrain, that radically differs from a dwelling within that occurs through
sedentary settling. 34

To summarise: I said we should expect that an engagement with the surrounding-earth

in the ambient mode would be unusual, without cares and incessantly drifting all-around.
I found models of this in Dreyfus’ pure occurrence and the nomadic in Deleuze and
Guatarri, which combine to describe a sensorial nomadic curiosity.

There are several more traits of the engagement of the ambient mode to be distilled. To
begin with, getting around the surrounding-earth (sensorial nomadic curiosity) involves
two complimentary phenomenal procedures. One procedure is a continual drifting across
the terrain (kinaesthetic), which in Heidegger’s description of curiosity is “not-staying”,
“distraction” and being “never dwelling anywhere”. The other is a momentary pausing on
the particularities of a part, or node, of the terrain where one is at, which is “resting and
staying to see the ‘world’ only [in] its outward appearance” and “lets itself [oneself] be
intrigued”. Taken together, this is a curious practice which “seeks novelty only to leap
from it again to another novelty [and so on]”. Both procedures are needed – if we just
paused, we would cease to be involved in the field and instead settle down on some
centre or foreground, and if we just drifting without pausing we would lose touch (quite
literally) with the particularities of the field. Within the visual domain, this can be
expressed as a combination of scanning and spotting. The scanning is a continuous
sliding between the raft of nodes and pockets in the whole surrounding field whilst the
spotting momentarily holds onto details of nodes and pockets of intensity within the
differentiated material-field. In the aural domain, we could liken this to the combination of
global listening (to the immense distended field) and focal listening (to particular
moments) that composer Pauline Oliveros’ has described and encouraged since the
1970s: “[f]ocal listening garners detail from any sound and global listening brings
expansion through the whole field of sound” (Oliveros 2000:1, see also Oliveros
1979:185-189). 35

34
Casey (1997:307) suggests that Heidegger has a sedentary bias, which helps explain why the curiosity which is “never
dwelling anywhere” could be thought of so negatively. But nomadicism is also a dwelling that is somewhere, just not in the
same way as a centred, settled rootedness. For an overview of the history and differences between sedentary and
nomadic theories of space, see Cresswell (2002).
35
Listening for Oliveros, however, goes well beyond listening to the material-earth or sonic qualities of sound. Instead she
embraces the semiotic, symbolic, social and spiritual dimensions as well, which clearly belong to the world rather than
material-earth. However, her structure of global and focal listening can work at the level of sensuous material-earth, and is
sometimes discussed in this way – I take this up within the second part of this essay (see Ch 3.2).
 62

The phenomenal procedures I have just listed are hardly out-of-this-world. They involve
everyday perceptual apparatus and practices – scanning and spotting, focal and global
listening – which are used, as is typical, to make out foreground-background relations in
the surroundings. At the level of momentary pausing on nodes in the terrain, these nodes
become salient within the larger background sensorial field, which follows our typical
foreground-background perception. But by never settling, and continuously drifting our
attention across the sensorial scape (since there is no reasons for any one spot to be
anymore interesting than another), what is salient continuously changes. The continual,
all-over-the-place shifting of what is salient occurs to the point that the entire terrain
begins to hover in our engagement with it, such that all of it, in its sensorial undulations,
starts to become salient. In this way, the ambient mode does not dissolve the typical
foreground-background perceptual structure of our attention, but changes how we parse
the surroundings, unplugging from the foreground-background (near-far) of worldly
regions to the one a-prioritised earthy terrain (with its lethic thereness).

One final comment on an engagement in the ambient mode. Any ongoing long-term
being-on-earth in a state of sensorial nomadic curiosity, without heeding any
associations of the world, would be the end of a human existence – leading to death or
coma or recursion to the state of a fully dependent newborn – since we need to navigate
the terrain in terms of worldly associations to survive, to eat, to avoid the car on the road
etc, let alone to thrive.36 Human being is, after all, being-in-the-world; without any world
we are not human. This means that if this engagement of the surrounding-earth were to
be practically possible, it would only ever be partial and temporary. Our normal worldly
mode(s) of orientating and navigation ourselves in the surroundings would still occur in
some way alongside the ambient mode.

In answer to the question of how we would engage with things in the ambient mode:

• The ambient mode involves the engagement of sensorial material curiosity, all-
over-the-place, without any cares in the world, orientated to the features of the
earthy terrain. This engagement, albeit partial and temporary, involves a double
procedure of continual drifting and momentary pausing, which relies on ordinary
sensing, but which dis-engages from the ordinary regionality and meaning of the
surroundings. Such an engagement seems distracted and aimless when

36
This is to say, approaching the earth is approaching our finitude, our limits. Although it falls beyond the scope of this
essay to consider, this hints at the relationship between ambience and altered states of consciousness, such as trance
(see Toop 1995 for instance) and meditation (see Foster 1998:136 fn19).
 63

considered from the standpoint of the settled dwelling in the world, but it is
attracted and aimed, towards the local contingencies and surface fluctuations of
the material-earth.

2.3 The Where of the Ambient Mode

(Q3) Where would the ambient mode occur?

In answering the question regarding what and how of the ambience of the ambient
mode, we have already answered the question of the whereabouts of the ambient mode.
This is not surprising since the what, how and where of any mode of being are
fundamentally intertwined.

So, based on previous sections in this chapter (Ch 2.1 & Ch 2.2), the answer to the
question of where the ambient mode would occur can be summed up thus:

• The ambience of the ambient mode occurs in the surrounding-earth, which is part
of the material-earth prior to any nearness-farness (any foreground-background),
wherever we happen to be. I have also described such a place as the one single
earthy terrain. In the ambient mode, we are placed at a shadowy ontological
threshold between the light of the world and the darkness of concealed-earth,
between the everyday prioritised surroundings and the completely ungraspable
surroundings; the whereabouts of the ambient mode is a strange, unusual place. 37

Note that, in my discussion, the earthy terrain, surrounding-earth and material-earth are
ways of referring to the same place, although from different perspectives. Which of the
three terms I use at any point in the remainder of the essay is determined by context.

Because the material-earth is everywhere we are, the ambient mode could be anywhere
on earth, whether in a wilderness, rural or urban setting. Although the urban is a very
striated, worldly place, filled with many overlapping grids, series, delineations, regions
and sub-worlds, yet it is also is the place of the smooth space of material-earth; urban
surroundings are just as full of sensuous ambient earthiness as any other surroundings.
In fact, I will eventually show that the urban is the place that affords the ambient mode

37
See Canán (2000) for a discussion of the strangeness of earth, and Fell (1992) for a discussion of the strangeness of
nature (which makes Fell’s nature read like material-earth).
 64

because of its striations, series and grids. But it will take all of Part Two of this essay to
arrive at this point (see Ch 4.3).

2.4 Entering the Ambient Mode

(Q4) How would we enter into the ambient mode?

As I have discussed, the ambient mode is not part of our usual prioritised surroundings
and our familiar being-in-the-world. Therefore, to enter into the ambient mode requires a
form of de-worlding, dropping out of the familiarity of everyday availability and onto the
strangeness of the material-earth. Heidegger does provide accounts of de-worlding out
of availability (Zuhandenheit) in BT, however, this is coupled with a re-worlding into the
theoretical stance of occurrentness (Vorhandenheit) which is itself a special form of
availability (see ‘The Ambience of World’ in Ch 2.1). We need to find a form of de-
worlding that does not involve re-worlding. This I find in Dreyfus’ account of de-worlding
into pure occurrence (without re-worlding into occurrentness), which I appropriated for an
account of the sensorial nomadic curiosity involved in the ambient mode (see Ch 2.2). In
other words, an account of dropping into pure occurrence would suggest the way of
entering into the ambient mode of being. Dreyfus does not provide such an account in
his commentary on pure occurrence in his Being-in-the-World, but it appears in a later
essay co-written with Charles Spinosa (‘Coping with Things in Themselves’ published in
1999). 38

Dreyfus and Spinosa describe de-worlding into pure occurrence as a “radical switch-
over” (p56). Everyday sensory encounters become so strange or defamiliarised39 in
“everyday breakdown[s] of reference” (p65) that we become unaware of what we are
encountering, even though we know such an encounter is taking place, below or beyond
the purchase of language. "[W]e are not encountering [sensory material] in the way that
enables us to understand it" (p62). A startling experience. A strange way of being.
Dreyfus and Spinosa provide several different examples of dropping out of world into
strange sensations of the material-earth, which include both accidents and planned
actions or games: strange taste – “[w]e ask for a glass of water and someone gives us a
38
Dreyfus and Spinosa do not use the term pure occurrence in this essay, however, their argument relies on it, because
they are attempting to describe experiencing things with a sensory curiosity that occurs before these things are re-worlded
into scientific understanding.
39
Dreyfus and Spinosa do not reference the Russian formalist and literary critic Viktor Shklovsky who formulated de-
famimilarisation or estrangement (making-strange) between in the late 1910s, expressed in ‘Art as Technique’
(1988[1917]). Shklovsky referred to de-familiarisation as an aesthetic tactic that renewed our engagement with the world
and with techniques of representation.
 65

glass of milk. We take a gulp, and until we can get a grasp on what is in our mouths, we
have no idea what, if anything, we are experiencing" (p65); strange hearing – “we say a
familiar word over and over, we eventually hear the word switch over into a strange
acoustic blast” (p61); and strange vision – “[r]ecall staring at a flame until it seems so
strange it can hardly be called even a shifting shape” (p61) and “the first time that while
cooking we crack open a fertilized egg… [w]e cannot make sense of the bloody
monstrous mess until the proper identification clicks into place” (p65).

In answer to the question of how we would enter into the ambient mode:

• We enter into the ambient mode though dropping out of world onto strange
material-earth, through a radical defamiliarisation of our everyday sensorial
practices.

Dreyfus and Spinosa’s examples, however, involve contained moments of earthiness

rather than an experience of the entire material ambience – a word dissolved into
sonority, a flame and egg dissolved into visuality, a taste without identification.
Furthermore, these examples involve very brief accounts of strangeness; the switch over
into strange sensation does not tend to last more than a few seconds. For a full entry into
the ambient mode, the dropping out of world that Dreyfus and Spinosa describe must
expand to the entire ambient surrounding-earth for a sustained period of engagement.
For this we need an ambient work, a way of returning and hovering within the ambient
mode. This is an issue of practising the ambient mode facilitated by the creative work, to
which I now turn.

2.5 Practising the Ambient Mode – Through the Ambient Work

At the beginning of this chapter, I posed four questions that needed to be addressed in
order to un-earth the ambient mode of being-in-our-surroundings. These questions were
concerned with the characteristics of this mode of being: its what–how–where and our
entry into it. Having answered these questions, my goal for the remainder of the essay is
to consider how we might go about practising the ambient mode in a deliberate and
consolidated way. As I aim to show in Parts Two and Three, this is facilitated by what I
refer to as the ambient work. But before I begin to locate examples of ambient work in
practice, I will first outline its overall ontological dynamics. In doing so, I will recap the
relationship of earth and world in terms of the creative work, linking the spatial account of
earth and world in OWA with the place of the work of art in OWA. The descriptions below
 66

are voiced in future tense, because I have not yet shown that such ambient work actually
exists.

The ambient work

I call ambient works those creative works that invite and sustain the ambient mode of
being-in-our-surroundings.40 That is, ambient works would make pervasive ambience
salient, dissolving foreground-background in our surroundings. By inviting and sustaining
a mode of being, the ambient work is an ontological work. It changes our mode of being,
enabling us to enter new modes of being, transforming what is possible to experience,
how we experience things, and where such things and experiences exist.

The key dynamic of the ambient work is the dynamic of earthing. It would drop us out of
world and reveal to us the ambient material-earth. That is to say, the ambient work would
bring the surrounding-earth out of background inconspicuousness into salience. In the
ambient work, the material-earth would not be used up in availability as it normally is, but
would be presented in a sensuously tangible, although unintelligible, way. Thus, the
ambient work would have a mysterious, sensual quality.

To produce an earthing, the ambient work must perform a work of defamiliarisation or

de-worldling, dropping us out of our familiar dealings and cares within the world in favour
of a strange, startling and sensorial contact with the material-earth. This would result in a
residual dynamic of the ambient work, namely worlding. A brief explanation is in order. In
BT, Heidegger describes how disturbances in the surrounding-world make us become
aware of things in our surroundings. For instance, it is only when the hammer breaks, or
is lost, that we come to notice it and start to consider the place of the hammer in the
workshop (BT §16). Disturbances make things salient and enable a critical distance from
things that are otherwise so familiar as to be forgotten. Given this, the defamiliarisation of
the ambient work would produce a disturbance in the surrounding-world that would then
make certain things in the surrounding-world more salient and intelligible. Thus, the
ambient work would have a residual critical, intelligible quality.

40
What I call ambient work does not refer to creative works within particular domains such as Ambient Music, ambient
video, ambient paintings, ambient displays, ambient devices, and ambient spaces in installation art. At most, these refer to
works that dissolve foreground-background within the discrete boundaries of their medium or format of presentation, but
this medium/format operates in the ambivalent mode in its situation of presentation. These are ambivalent works
(externally back-and-forth) with internal compositional structures that have some ambient tendencies (internally
pervasive). What I refer to as ambient work transcends these limits.
 67

By revealing something of the earth and world, the ambient work would share the two
main conditions of the work of art proposed by Heidegger in OWA. According to
Heidegger, the work of art is to reveal and reconfigure our relationship to world and the
earth – “[t]he setting up of a world and the setting forth earth” (OWA:26). Such a
revelation occurs “as if for the first time”, in “pristine freshness” (Young 2001:32) and
“charismatic salience” (Young 2001:38). By revealing the earth and world afresh, we
come to experience the fundamental or ‘primordial’ condition of our existence – that we
are caught up in the disclosing of the world and the concealing of the earth – which is
normally forgotten in our everyday to-ing and fro-ing. “[T]o transform all familiar relations
to world and to earth, and henceforth to retrain all usual doing and prizing” (OWA:40).
This revelation of our existential limits is what Heidegger calls the ‘happening of truth’
(OWA:from 16) which takes us back to the ‘origin’ of our existence. At the end of his
essay (OWA:49-50), we discover that this is what is meant by the origin of the work of
art. So the ambient work would follow the structure of the work of art in OWA, with the
condition that the ambient work reveals the ambient-ness of the material-earth, the
quality of being-surrounded. To experience an ambient work would be to come in contact
with the mysterious earth in its awesome surroundingness, and to come in contact with
some part of the intelligible world in its meaning-giving surroundingness.

Besides the earthing and worlding, there is a third condition of the work of art in OWA
called preserving (cf Young 2001:65). The work of art brings together a community that
is orientated around and preserves the work. If it is not preserved, then it is not a work
(since it is no longer working for anyone). How should the work be preserved? Heidegger
refers any attempt to preserve a particular work to the qualities of that work. That is, the
manner of preservation should be determined “only and exclusively by the work itself”
(OWA:42). But what should be preserved? Heidegger sets up the distinction of a work’s
‘object-being’ (OWA:20) and its ‘work-being’ (OWA:from 15) which helps sort through the
question of preservation. The object-being of a work is its space-time form, the art object
which becomes the goods of the ‘art business’ such as museums (OWA:19,42). But
Heidegger claims that when we care about preserving the object-being of a work, its
work-being starts to fade away. This work-being is the work that the work of art does, its
ontological work of revealing earth and world. For Heidegger, the work-being is by far the
more important aspect to preserve, since without it, the work of art ceases. Without
preserving it, there is no happening of truth and no revelation of being. This has
implications for the ambient work. What would need to be preserved in the ambient work
is not, first and foremost, its object-being, but its primary work-being: the work of
revealing the ambient surrounding-earth.
 68

= = =

Where have we arrived after going by way of concepts in this part of the essay? In
Chapter One, after glossing the history of ambient practices and several basic
definitions, I mapped out four modes of being-in-our-surroundings. I claimed that the
fourth and final mode – the ambient mode – involves engaging with an all-pervading
ambience (that which is prior to foreground-background) in a way that made it salient.
Then in Chapter Two, I constructed a phenomenological framework and vocabulary to
flesh out this mode of being, which addressed the what–how–where and entry into this
mode through Heidegger’s concepts of world and earth. I proposed that this mode
involves a nomadic sensorial curiosity of continual drifting and momentary pausing (how)
around the undulating material-scapes (what) of the surrounding-earth (where). As such,
this is an unusual and extra-ordinary mode of being, out-of-this-world, if only partial and
temporary. It requires dropping out of the world and its nearness and farness, via acts of
defamiliarisation (entry), onto the strangeness of earth. I concluded by stating that the
ambient work would invite and sustain the ambient mode, a work that reveals the
ambient earth, which would also, as a by-product, reveal something of the ambient
world, and which would need this ontological work to be preserved in a manner befitting
the work.

But this is all in theory, achieved by way of concepts. Is such a mode possible in
practice, or is it simply some unattainable idea? To answer this, I will need to locate
practical examples that set up the possibility of ambient work and of entering the ambient
mode. This will be the focus of the next part of this essay, in which the framework and
vocabulary, developed so far, is applied to creative practice.
 69

II
part two
by way of example

In this part of the essay, I chart how the ambient mode of being can be arrived at through
creative practice, through the ambient work which invites and sustains this mode. By the
end of Chapter Four I am able to summarise traits of the ambient work drawn from
contemporary installation practices. But first, in Chapter Three, I chart three approaches
which enact the shifts in being-in-our-surroundings that must be achieved by such
ambient works.

Ch 3 Pre-figuring the Ambient Work (early 1950s – 1970s)

3.1 Three Necessary Shifts Towards the Ambient Mode

3.2 The Approach of Minimalist Emptying
3.3 The Approach of Situationist Drifting
3.4 The Approach of Serialist Patterning

Ch 4 Verging On the Ambient Work (mid 1980s – early 2000s)

4.1 Towards Ambient Visual Works

4.2 Towards Ambient Sonic Works
4.3 General Traits of the Ambient Work
 70

chapter three
pre-figuring the ambient work
(early 1950s – 1970s)

In this chapter, I outline how we can shift towards the ambient mode of being-in-our-
surroundings through creative practice. I first outline the three necessary shifts that must
occur to arrive at the ambient mode, which takes us out of the familiar world to the
strange ambience of the surrounding-earth. I then trace the three approaches in creative
practice that enact these three shifts, which I source from the mid-twentieth-century.
These approaches pre-figure the possibility of ambient work, that is, the work of inviting
and sustaining the ambient mode. As such, this chapter sets up the basic paradigms of
practice that together underpin the discussion of contemporary work and my own
practice undertaken in subsequent chapters.

3.1 Three Necessary Shifts Towards the Ambient Mode

As I proposed in Part One, the ambient mode would involve engaging with an all-
pervading ambience (that which is prior to foreground-background) in a way that makes
it salient. This would involve a nomadic sensorial curiosity of continual drifting and
momentary pausing (how) around the undulating material-scapes (what) of the
surrounding-earth (where), and in doing so, we are taken out-of-this-world, albeit partially
and temporarily. To enter this mode would thus require dropping out of the surrounding-
world and its related concerns and nearness-and-farness, via acts of sensorial
defamiliarisation, onto the strangeness of the surrounding-earth.

What is being described here is a transportation of our being, but we do not move from
one place to another in the usual manner, such as traversing from one suburb or house
to another. Rather, we are transported whilst remaining in the very place where we are,
descending to the earth that is always already there and all-around us. That is, in order
to enter the ambient mode, we must experience an ontological shift, from worldly matters
to earthy fields. This overall shift requires three practical shifts which are achieved
through different approaches of creative practice:
 71

1) Since the ambient mode involves experiencing the sensations of the material-
earth, we must first start with practices of deliberate sensorial material
engagement. This puts us within the domains of the creative arts and aesthetic
approaches that have developed and refined this sort of engagement. However,
the sensorial material engagements associated with the creative arts are normally
applied to special parts or regions of the surroundings, traditionally demarcated by
formats of presentation such as the stage, the page, the plinth, the frame, concert
hall performance etc. Therefore, the first shift that is required is one that moves
away from one dedicated region for aesthetic engagement, to arrive at a sensorial
material engagement with the all-around in an impartial manner. This is not just an
aesthetic interest in the surroundings, but a serious commitment to appreciating
the all-around with utter impartiality, without foregrounding or valuing one part over
another. As I will discuss, this is achieved through the approach of minimalist
emptying.

2) If we come to engage aesthetically with the always all-around material

surroundings, we should expect that, since we are always being-in-the-world, there
is great inertia towards approaching the surroundings in terms of worldly regions
and the associations and behaviours connected to them. That is, there is inertia to
approach the surroundings as surrounding-world, rather than surrounding-earth.
Therefore a second shift is required, one that moves away from worldly regions, to
arrive at the one single earthy terrain encountered in a way that is unstructured and
unencumbered by the frameworks of worldly regions. This shift deals with the
regionless-ness of earth. As I will discuss, this is achieved through the approach of
situationist drifting.

3) Even if we engage aesthetically with the earthy material terrain, without worldly
regions, there is still another inertia to overcome. This is the perceptual inertia of
habitually registering objects out of the surroundings (and as discussed in Chapter
Two, the ontology of Brian Cantwell Smith shows that objects are worldly and not
earthy). If we want to remain in an engagement with surrounding-earth, we need to
deal with the terrain as a continuous undulating material field, and not as a bearer
of objects here and there. Therefore a third shift is required, one that moves away
from registering objects to arrive at perceiving differences in the various material
fields of the surrounding-earth, without parsing these fields into (worldly) objects.
This shift deals with the objectless-ness of earth. As I will discuss, this is achieved
through the approach of serialist patterning.
 72

As I will explore below, the three approaches to the ambient mode enact a three-part
shift in the type of surroundings we relate to, and, in doing so, this opens upon some
form of inversion of each particular approach that is taken: emptying opens up to the
ambient fullness of the all-around material surroundings, then drifting opens up ways of
being anchored to the earthy terrain, and finally the strict regularity of serial patterns
highlights particular irregularities and differences of the earthy terrain.

Each approach begins with a classic moment in avant-garde creative practice midway
through the twentieth century, spanning 1949 to 1953 – Cage’s proto-Minimalist 4’33”,
the Situationist dérive, and Total Serialism. However, each of these examples come up
against certain limits in terms of the particular approach I wish to traces, which are then
addressed by various practices in the 1960s and 1970s. While I begin each of these
approaches within particular arts movements, I am not interested here in the historical
rise and fall of these movements but how their approaches can be applied more broadly.

3.2 The Approach of Minimalist Emptying

The approach of minimalist emptying it is take deliberate sensorial material engagement,

and shift it to an all-around attention to the material surroundings. To explain how this is
achieved, I will first invoke the concept of a ‘format of presentation’ as defined by art
historian David Summers, although I extend it to apply to non-visual domains as well.
This concept is useful to my discussion, because it provides a more precise definition of
what is often described as frames or mediums in creative arts and other cultural
domains, which are contexts of deliberate sensorial material engagement.

As Summers (2003) discusses, a format of presentation is a material artefact (p685) that

establishes a framed-off space, within which certain types of contents are presented
within cultural settings. Associated with formats and settings are particular conventions
and patterns of behaviour which determine the ‘right’ (genre normative) relationship to
the format (p18,35). Examples of these formats include wooden panels and canvases in
European art, and screens and scrolls in Far Eastern art (p685), however we could
expand this to include the book, the concert hall performance, the television, and so
forth. Ordinarily, a format is taken to be neutral as attention is focused on relationships of
the content within it (p28). Thus, formats establish their own ‘virtual’ space and time
(p414) to the denial of the ‘ordinary’ material conditions in which the format is located
(p431). In Heideggerian terms, a format of presentation is a special type of region that
functions within larger sub-worlds, and this region holds things both near (inside the
 73

format) and far (outside the format), for all those ‘plugged in’ to it (cf my comments on
‘The Ambient of World’ in Ch 2.1).

How then does the approach of minimalist emptying shift sensorial material engagement
to the all-around material surroundings? As I will discuss in more detail below, it works
by emptying out formats of presentation, so that, in the absence of any content within
them, the types of engagements associated with these formats are shifted to the
contents of the ambient surroundings. I begin this approach with a classic ‘empty’
moment from the early 1950s within John Cage’s music, then proceed to another classic
moment in Robert Rauschenberg’s paintings, before outlining the particular limits of this
approach and extensions to them found in practices within the following two decades.

So-called silent piece (Cage, 1952)

Created in 1952, 4’33” (usually pronounced four-minutes-thirty-three or four-thirty-three),

is the most (in)famous work by American composer John Cage (1912–1992). It
represents a turning point not only in Cage’s practice but also in avant-garde music and
the wider arts. As Solomon (2002:np) declares

[4’33”] forms a point-of-no-return from the conventional communicative, self-

expressive and intentional purpose of music to a radical new aesthetic that informs
the field of unintentional sound, interpenetration, chance, and indeterminacy.

The structure of 4’33” is very simple. It is piece of total musical silence, in three
movements, lasting the length of time indicated by its title. It can be performed by any
instrumentalist (although, because it was premiered by avant-garde pianist David Tutor,
it is often incorrectly described as a piano work). During the performance, the performer
makes no deliberate sounds at all, and their movements are usually kept to a bare
minimum – just enough to mark the beginning and end of the movements.41

41
The score of 4’33” exists in several different notated forms, which has been charted by Solomon in The Sounds of
Silence: John Cage and 4’33” (2002). In what is a refreshing degree of scholarship regarding these matters, Solomon
shows that there are actually six different versions of the manuscript of 4’33”, ranging from the first lost manuscript to the
latest published edition in 1993. All are slightly different and even contradictory. Most notably, there are two different
durations given for the three movements (30”, 2’23”, 1’40” and 33”, 2’40”, 1’20”) and there are three ways the musical
silences are notated (as blank measures, as empty areas on the page, and by the word ‘tacit’). There are also various
contradictory accounts given by Cage and early performers regarding how the work was initially composed, and how it
was ‘re-composed’ after the loss of the first manuscript. Such discrepancies have led to confusion within the secondary
literature, of which the reader should be wary. My comments here pertain to what is common amongst these scores,
deferring when need be to the original version.
 74

In the absence of intended music, one is led to listen to the ambient sounds in the
situation of presentation that are normally either masked by the typical foreground
musical performance, or ignored in the background of day-to-day activities. That is, 4’33”
invokes the aesthetic sensorial listening practice associated with the concert hall format
only to shift it to the surroundings. This expansion to our listening is reflected in
Solomon’s (2002:np) paraphrase of Cage’s account of the premiere performance:

Tudor placed the hand-written score [now lost], which was in conventional notation
with blank measures, on the piano and sat motionless as he used a stopwatch to
measure the time of each movement… Tudor signaled [sic] its commencement by
lowering the keyboard lid of the piano. The sound of the wind in the trees entered
the first movement. After thirty seconds of no action, he raised the lid to signal the
end of the first movement. It was then lowered for the second movement, during
which raindrops pattered on the roof. The score was in several pages, so he turned
the pages as time passed, yet playing nothing at all. The keyboard lid was raised
and lowered again for the final movement, during which the audience whispered
and muttered.

In describing the experience of the work more generally, an admiring critic of the work
has stated that

[y]ou soon become aware of a huge amount of sound, ranging from the mundane
to the profound, from the expected to the surprising, from the intimate to the
cosmic – shifting in seats, riffling programs to see what in the world is going on,
breathing, the air conditioning, a creaking door, passing traffic, an airplane, ringing
in your ears, a recaptured memory. (Gutmann 1999)

Cage’s ambition in this work is for im-partiality, to hear all-sounds all-around as

themselves, without our intentions (desires, meanings, worldly stuff) interfering. As Cage
(1958b:80) put it: “it is evidently a question of bringing one’s intended actions into
relation with the ambient unintended ones.” Douglas Kahn (1999:200) has described this
as Cage’s “indiscriminate pan-aurality”. (However, whether or not this ambition is
realised in 4’33”, is something I will take up below.)
 75

Not silent

By opening up the opportunity to listen to ambient sounds, 4’33” shows us that there is
no such thing as silence or emptiness. The format may have been emptied, yet we are
left to deal with the sonic activity always already all-around, the sonic ambience of our
material surroundings. Cage experienced the dramatic proof of this a few years prior to
composing 4’33”, in his oft-told experience of an anechoic chamber (see, for instance,
Cage 1955a:13-14, 1957:8, 1958b:51, 1989:241). This chamber is specially designed to
be as silent as technologically possible – an acoustically dead space. Cage visited one
such chamber at Harvard University in the late 1940s. 42 Expecting and hoping to hear
absolute silence, Cage was surprised to hear two sounds. Quizzing the engineer, he
discovered the high sound was his nervous system (which most people can hear on a
quiet night) whilst the low sound was his blood circulating. Cage understood that without
anything else to listen to, the body cannot help but hear itself. This experience had
radical implications for Cage’s ideas on silence. In short, silence no longer existed. There
are always sounds to hear as long as we are alive. “These [ambient] sounds… may be
depended upon to exist. The world teems with them, and is, in fact, at no point free of
them” (Cage 1958a:22-23). We only describe things as silent when we do not bother to
listen; when we listen, we discover there is no silence. 43

Cage thus shows that silence is impossible, but we should re-think this. After all, his
understanding on this matter needed an act of silencing to realise this. In Heideggerian
terms, silencing and silence are very possible within the world; the world includes
silences because its spatiality, predicated on nearness and farness, includes peripheries,
margins and absences. Silencing, essentially worldly, involves denying or marginalising
one form of social practice. Cage silenced the musical content of the concert hall format
– a very worldly intervention. The anechoic chamber silenced the acoustics as much as
possible. The act of silencing is also paramount in another of Cage’s precedents to 4’33”
from the late 1940s, his un-realised ‘Silent Prayer’. Cage’s idea was to sell a short piece
to the background music company Muzak, made up of complete silence (no signal on
the audio tape), in effect, silencing Muzak (see Cage 1948:43; Kahn 1999:183-189,
Visscher 1991:118). But, silencing and silence are impossible on earth. What pervades
in the one field material-earth is always undulating stuff and, in its there-ness, there are

42
Cage (1955) and Solomon (2002) give 1951 as the year of the visit to the anechoic chamber, however most texts state it
was the late 1949 or sometime in the late 1940s.
43
On the relationship between Cage’s (non)silence and the philosophy of Henri Bergson, see Joseph (2000:106-121), and
between Cage’s (non)silence and Zen Bhuddism, see Visscher (1991:120-123,131).
 76

no dichotomies and therefore no negations such as silence. That is to say, sounds are
always all-around us.

So, on earth, there is always sonic stuff to hear. For Cage, it was just a matter of turning
one’s attention to this not-silence, of being sensitised and sensitive to the ambient noisy
surroundings. The role of creative practice could be “to quiet and sober the mind” (Cage
1961c :226) in order for this to happen. 4’33” provides a practical way to do this. It
functioned as “a quick way of hearing what there was to hear” (Cage 1971 in Kostelanetz
1989:208), making the ambient sounds salient. But what of our visual surroundings – is
there a way to approach the visual-scape of the surrounding earth? Visual speaking,
4’33” is a foreground work, since it has a framed performance on stage, in the concert-
hall format. That is, in 4’33”, the visual foreground remains which has not been emptied
out. For an example of the minimal emptying approach in the visual realm, we must go to
another work – to the work that gave Cage the final resolve to create 4’33” (see Cage
1973 in Kostelanetz 1989:67).

So-called white paintings (Rauschenberg, 1951)

During 1951, the American visual artist Robert Rauschenberg (born 1925) made a series
of all-white paintings, usually presented in the form of multiple panels, either in squares
or rectangles. Collectively, they are called his White Paintings [Fig 1]. These were made
whilst both he and Cage were teaching at the progressive arts education facility Black
Mountain College in North Carolina in the United State.

In a recent essay, Joseph (2000) charts the shifts in Rauschenberg’s understandings of

the paintings, which I recount as a shift in the perceived meaning or function of the
‘white’ expanses of the painting. In this account, we begin in the realm of the foreground
representational painting, and end with an ambient reading of the work that was provided
not by Rauschenberg but by Cage.

As Joseph (2000:90) notes, the White Paintings were created at a time when
Rauschenberg was shifting as a painter from a short religious phase to a more modernist
formalist position. In a letter to a gallery dealer in 1951, Rauschenberg expresses both
these viewpoints. On the one hand, Rauschenberg’s describes the paintings as infused
with a religious impulse: “1 white as 1 GOD… presented with the innocence of a virgin”
(in Joseph 2000:91). Here is a representational understanding of the paintings: white as
a symbol of the infinite or divine. It represents, or alludes to, another world within the
 77

framed canvas. On the other hand, Rauschenberg’s understanding was also infused with
a modernist formalism that is linked to Greenberg and the late Modernist project of
reducing elements in a format of presentation such as painting to its (apparently)
essential qualities. In the same letter Rauschenberg speaks of “silence”, “restriction”,
“absence” and “nothing” (quoted in Joseph 2000:92). After viewing the paintings in their
first public exhibition in 1953, a critic confirmed this understanding, stating “they are a
climax… to the esthetic [sic] of the purge, with its apparatus of elimination, its systems of
denials, rejections and mortifications” (Hubert Crehan in Joseph 2000:94). Here, the
paintings are understood as a strategy of reduction and emptying which, like 4’33”, relies
on creating a disruption within a pre-existing format of presentation.

There was one further shift in Rauschenberg’s understanding of the White Paintings,
which was inspired by Cage’s reading of it in an ambient light (Joseph 2000:from 96). In
1961, a decade after they were created, Cage wrote that “[t]he white paintings were
airports for the lights, shadows, and particles” and they “caught whatever fell on them”
(Cage 1961b:102,105; see Joseph 2000:97). 44 This is what Joseph (2000:115) describes
as “the reception of contingent visual sensations… no longer impeding perception of the
actual shadows cast across its surface”. 45 Here we have an understanding of the
paintings as receptacles for ambient, material details and differences. In this way, the
White Paintings function like 4’33”: a standard presentational format is emptied out – in
this case, the wall-hung canvas painting – so that ambient materiality is made salient,
coming into view when it is otherwise masked or ignored.46

Not white

Like 4’33”, the White Paintings reveal “the strict impossibility of silence” (Joseph
2000:105), or in this case, blankness and whiteness. If silence becomes noisy, and
emptiness becomes richness, then through the White Paintings, white becomes full of
shifting hues and shape, blank becomes inscribed with ephemeral marks. In other words,

44
Joseph (2000:98, 102-103) mentions two prior works that were given similar ambient readings to Rauschenberg’s White
Paintings – Kasimir Malevich’s earlier white painting White on White (1918), as interpreted by László Moholy-Nagy, and
French artist Marcel Duchamp’s Large Glass (1915-23), as commented upon by Cage in 1973.
45
Joseph is actually referring to Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953), in light of the logic played out in the
White Paintings.
46
Having charted this three-part journey in Rauschenberg from spiritual symbol to reductive strategy to receptacle of
positive ambient difference, we find a similar three-part journey in the three ‘silent works’ of Cage described above. Firstly,
there is silence as a representation or symbol of nothing in a spiritual context, in the ‘silent prayer’. Secondly, there is the
strategy of reducing sound that is borne in the architecture of the anechoic chamber. But by noticing this reduction does
not result in silence, Cage moves into the third understand of the work of silence, as a receptacle of the sounds of the
ambient environment that is consummated in 4’33”.
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white is not really white, and blankness not really blank – they are abstractions or mental
conveniences that do not exist in the ambient undulations of our surroundings. As
Rauschenberg quipped in 1959: “A canvas is never empty” (quoted in Cage
1961b:99,103). Joseph (2000:113) concludes that the white paintings belong to

an aesthetic paradigm in which difference is conceived not in terms of negation at

all [silence, emptiness, blankness], but rather as an ontological first principle, the
positive and productive motor force behind the dynamic conception of nature
[earth]. (my gloss in square brackets)

Limits and extensions

Whilst 4’33” and the White Paintings approach the ambient mode by inducing an
impartial sensorial material engagement with otherwise ignored ambient details, there
are two significant limits in terms of the approach of minimalist emptying towards the
ambient mode. Firstly, the works are still partial in their opening up to the ambient
material surroundings, and secondly, they present a limited ability to deal with the
material surroundings in terms of its earthiness rather than its worldiness. I will address
each limit in turn.

As I have discussed, both 4’33” and the White Paintings empty out foreground formats of
presentation in order to enact the shift to ambience that they do. However, because
these works fundamentally rely on a format, they are inevitably limited by the partiality
inbuilt into these formats. The concert hall performance of 4’33” is not all-the-time; there
is a time limit applied to the work marked by its start and stop, as is typical of musical
performances. The White Paintings are not all-around; there is a spatial limit applied to
the work marked by the frame of the painting, as is typical of wall-hung paintings. It is
notable that Cage never remarked on the dust landing on the surroundings walls, nor on
the shadows cast by the paintings on those walls. As a result of their formal limits, both
Cage and Rauschenberg’s works only deal partially with the ambient all-around, all-the-
time surroundings. To approach the ambient mode beyond this first limit requires the
removal of the partiality of such formats of presentation. This can occur in two ways,
through a process of either internalising or dispersing the emptied work.

One way of removing the partiality of 4’33” and the White Paintings is to internalise the
emptied work. This solution removes the format of presentation altogether, so that one
takes the all-around attention where-ever one goes. The work becomes an instruction or
 79

idea for a particular type of attention that can be applied anywhere, anytime. Cage
himself took this path. In the decades after composing 4'33", Cage explained in
interviews that he longer needed the format of the concert hall. Rather, he took
4'33" wherever he went. He spoke of 'performing' or 'realising' his work whilst walking in
the forest for many hours (Cage 1955b:276), or whenever he was about to compose a
new piece (Cage 1982 in Kostelanetz 1989:66). The work is then “not a closed work of
art, but rather a manner of experimenting with one’s relation to the external world – an
experience that can take place anyplace and anytime” (Visscher 1991:127). Composer
and performer Pauline Oliveros took this internalization of the emptied work and
formalised it, by creating instructions for sonic meditations for listening all-around from
early 1970s (see Oliveros 1974[1971], 1973; Osborne 2001). Max Neuhaus’ series of
walks called LISTEN, conducted on fifteen occasions in the United States and Canada
between 1966 and 1976, also belong to this internalisation of the emptied work. Neuhaus
would stamp the word “LISTEN” on people’s hands (as an instruction or score) and then
led them on a walk around a particular place, to listen to all the sounds around (Neuhaus
2004). I am not aware of any equivalent move within the visual realm, except for Cage's
own comments about how the White Paintings opened up his seeing in everyday
situations. Cage (1961b:103) wrote that through these paintings, Rauschenberg
presented him with ‘gifts’ whilst working down the streets – the gifting of seeing what is
ordinarily forgotten.

Another way of removing the partiality of 4’33” and the White Paintings is to disperse the
creative work across time and space, throughout the ambient surroundings, so that the
formal limits of the work become indistinguishable from the surroundings; instead of
existing inside a place, the work exists as a seamless part of that place. Further, this
dispersal needs to continue the ambition of impartial engagement by not having any
zones of privilege (in the foreground) nor zones to ignore (in the background). This
formal extension takes us into various types of minimal and post-minimal installation art
spread out over time and space. Here I mention two examples, which achieve their
dispersal in one of the two available ways – dispersed in a series of units, or by blending
throughout the place. In 1965, in the heyday of the movement of Minimalism in visual
arts, Robert Morris created an untitled installation of four cubes about two-feet in
dimension, which were completely clad with mirrors. These cubes were presented on the
floor, spread out in a square formation [Fig 2]. The ambient materiality, which is reflected
in the cubes, is not located in one discrete area, but is now dispersed in three
dimensions across four forms. Room and cubes start to bleed into one another. To see
the cubes is to see the surroundings, all-the-time and (unlike the White Paintings) all-
 80

around. In the late 1970s, Brian Eno started producing Ambient Music works which he
specifically requested should be played at very low levels so that the music completely
blends with the sonic surroundings, as an aural tint (Eno 1978). To listen to these works
as subtle sound installations with continuous playback, rather than discrete pieces of
music, is to begin to listen to the surroundings all-around and (unlike 4’33”) all-the-time.
The early drone-like installations of Max Neuhaus are also examples of this blending of
work with surroundings (such as Times Square from 1977).

By removing the partial limits of the format of presentation, either by internalising or

dispersing the work, we can approach the ambient material surroundings both all-around
and all-the-time. However, there is another, final limit to the approach of minimalist
emptying to the ambient mode. When dealing with the material surroundings all-around,
we come up against the limits of everyday habitual ways of dealing with things. That is,
we will tend to deal with things in terms of their familiar worldly meanings, identities and
the regions within which they belong. Consider, for instance, the descriptions of sounds
and sound events by Cage and others regarding 4’33”. These descriptions are accounts
of the ordinary functional identity of sounds (rain and whispering for instance); they never
describe the brute materiality (timbre-envelope) of the sounds all-around. This is
surprising, perhaps, since Cage had the technical musicological vocabulary and prior
compositional experience to discuss ambient sound in terms of basic material elements
such as timbre, duration, and pitch-distributions (see, for instance, Cage 1957:9).
Likewise, I have not come across any suitably earthy descriptions of the minimalist visual
installations mentioned above.

Given these limits, the approach of minimalist emptying hardly gets us to perceive the
earthiness of the surroundings. Yet this is required for the ambient mode of being. Thus,
the deliberate sensory material engagement with the always all-around material
surroundings (opened up by minimalist emptying) needs to drop away from orthodox and
habitual ways of orientating to the surroundings, in order to deal with the earthy terrain.
This is addressed in the following two approaches to the ambient mode. The first deals
with particular type of drifting over the terrain (that relates to the form of internalising the
emptied work) and the second with a particular sort of serial installation art (that relates
to a form of dispersing the emptied work).
 81

3.3 The Approach of Situationist Drifting

The approach of minimalist emptying empties formats of presentation in order for the
engagement associated with that format to be shifted to the material surroundings all-
around. However, this does not counteract the great inertia towards approaching the
surroundings in terms of its worldly regions and the associations and behaviours
connected to them. A second shift is thus required, one that drops us out of worldly
regions to engage with the one single earthy terrain. This shift towards the earthy terrain
is achieved in what I refer to as the approach of situationist drifting. The potential for this
shift is found in the classic moment of the dérive practised by the Situationists in 1950s
Paris, which is extended by various practices from the 1960s.

Drunken dérives in Paris (Situationists, from 1953)

The dérive is a practice of urban drifting that was developed and theorised by
Frenchman Guy Debord (1931-1994) and other Parisian bohemians associated with the
Lettrist International (LI) and Situationist International (SI) movements in the 1950s. 47 It
belongs to a larger critique of what they thought were repressive socio-spatial politics
associated with the urban renewal and flowering of suburbia in Paris after the second
world war (see Pinder 2005:ch3-4). The members of LI/SI had aspired towards a non-
segregated urban milieu or “unitary urbanism” achieved through “constructed situations”
(Debord 1957). These situations involved a playful active engagement in urban life,
outside of banal consumerism and the individuated arts, through new modes of
experimental behaviour. “For the LI the city had to be reinvented on a personal level, to
be reconfigured along the lines of a new nomadic lifestyle” (Ford 2005:34).

The dérive exemplified the LI/SI call to an experimental and personal nomadicism in the
urban environment. Literally ‘drifting’, the dérive was a way of traversing the city-scape
outside of the typical pathways, performances and regions of city life that emerged from
the drunk wanderings of Debord and others. Indeed, the earliest reported dérive,
between Christmas and New Year’s Eve 1953, has as its home base a bar in Paris

47
For a history of these groups, see Ford (2005). A vast range of texts from the LI/SI era have been translated into English
and are archived on several dedicated websites, including ‘Situationist International Anthology’
(http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/), ‘Situationist International Archives’ (http://www.nothingness.org/SI/), and ‘Situationist
International Online’ (http://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/). Many of these texts first appeared in one of a number of journals
and magazines produced by the groups and have been collected in the Situationist International Anthology, edited and
translated by Ken Knabb (1981). However, access to a copy of the anthology was not available during my research, and
thus my sources are all online, which means they do not include any page numbering.
 82

(Debord 1956). 48 The first text to mention the term was Dérive by the Mile (Berstein
1954), which describes its nomadic spirit: “true freedom of movement… automatic
disorientation… no destination, diverted arbitrarily en route… [an] essentially random
itinerary”. The term was then given its fullest articulation in Debord’s Theory of the Dérive
(1958[1956]) and by 1958 the dérive was simply defined as

A mode of experimental behavior linked to the conditions of urban society: a

technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances. (Internationale
Situationniste 1958; cf Debord 1957)

In practice, the dérive involved wandering the streets and public and semi-public places
by foot and sometimes by taxi, usually in small groups, for several hours and even days.
The pathways that were followed were never based on normal routes nor normal
reasons for moving about the city. Sometimes chance encounters led the way. Other
times the dérives were planned-out games that cross-cut typical modes of navigation,
such as using a map of a different city (Debord 1955) or travelling along a line of latitude
as strictly as possible (Debord 1956). It is also worth noting that altered states of
consciousness via intoxication were also a key catalyst (although little discussed) and so
too wanton rebelliousness and playfulness which Debord(1958[1956]) briefly discusses
in terms of “certain amusements considered dubious”.

Two overlapping reasons were given for pursuing a dérive (Debord 1958[1956]). One
was leisurely, in which one attempted to disorientate oneself simply to get “outside one’s
usual surroundings”. The other was to conduct the (pseudo)scientific study of the terrain
through what the Situationists called psychogeography, “[t]he study of the specific effects
of the geographical environment (whether consciously organized or not) on the emotions
and behavior of individuals” (Internationale Situationniste 1958). Both reasons involves a
“letting go” of our usual motives for movement, action, work, leisure and social relations,
which Wollen (2001:125) describes as a letting go of everyday identity. In the absence of
normal proceedings, one is simply “drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the
encounters they find there” (Debord 1958[1956]). McDonough links the disorientation of
the dérive to depaysément, a term from Levi-Strauss’ theories on anthropology that
refers to “the conscious cultivation by the anthropologist of an attitude of marginality
toward all cultures, including his [sic] own” in order to discover something anew

48
One might think to call this pathway ‘lettrist drifting’ since the practice of the dérive began during the Lettrist years.
However, as I explain below, it is a strategy of urban intervention taken up as a key trope in the discourse of the
Situationists; the dérive is attached to the ‘situation’ rather than the ‘letter’.
 83

(Jacobson & Grundfest in McDonough 1994:73). We get lost, in a social sense if not
geographically, and become homeless (see Hartman 2003:2).

The dérive is an experience of drifting about and losing our normal modes of being, yet,
just as emptying turns on to ambient richness, drifting turns out to be anchored. The
anchor points are the “attractions of the terrain”, the material ambience of the city.
Ultimately, however, the Situationists did not leave the world for the earth; they did not
vacate a worldly dwelling in the urban for an earthy dwelling in the urban. Their
orientation was worldly, caught up in critiques of the world (urban-politics) and study of
ambiance (psycho-geography). If situationist drifting is to be an approach to the ambient
mode, we need to go elsewhere for examples of drifting which gravitate to the sensuous
materiality of the earthy terrain. These come from post-Minimalist art practices that get
out-and-about.

Adhering to the soundscape (Oliveros, 1968)

The first example of an earthier drifting comes from Pauline Oliveros (born 1932), an
American composer and performer who began working in the early 1960s. Her practices
picks up on Cage’s expanded listening through scores for sonic meditations from the
early 1970s, and expanded in the 1990s into a workshop and retreat program called
Deep Listening (www.deeplistening.org; www.pofinc.org). Central to all her activities is a
call to expand our listening inwards and outwards, combining both focal and global
attention (see, for instance, Oliveros 1979:185-188).

In an article written and also first read as a performance in 1968, titled Some Sound
Observations (republished in Oliveros 1984), Oliveros presents an account of meditative
listening which goes beyond Cage’s descriptions of all-around listening in both its detail
and sensuality. Oliveros presents two sorts of sound observations in this article. She
observes the sounds she was immersed in whilst writing the article, and these are
interspersed with observations and quotes about sound phenomena and sounds arts in
general. It is the immersive observations that I am interested in here, since they provide
a first-hand, embodied phenomenology of drifting in the sonic-scape:

As I sit here… my mind adheres to the sounds of myself and my environment. In

the distance, a bulldozer is eating away a hillside while its motor is a cascade of
harmonics defining the space between it and the Rock and Roll radio playing in the
 84

next room. Sounds of birds, instances, children’s voices and the rustling of trees
fleck this space.
As I penetrate the deep drone of the bulldozer with my ear, the mind opens
and reveals the high-pitched whine of my nervous system. It reaches out and joins
the flight of an airplane drone, floats down the curve of Doppler effect.
Now, fifteen minutes since the beginning of this writing, the bulldozer has
stopped for a while. The freeway one-half mile away, unmasked, sends its ever-
shifting drone to join with the train whistle from Encinitas. (1984:17)

The breeze is rising and blowing my papers about the table. The rustling in the
trees sounds like tape hiss until it mixes with the next plane overhead. (1984:20)

Outside, sounds are attenuated by the insulation [of my house]. I hear a dripping
faucet and the ticking of my cuckoo clock. They combine and are joined by the
refrigerator. The planes from Palomar Airport dwindle in through the furnace
openings. (1984:22)

In these passages, Oliveros gets in touch with the sensual characteristics of the material
surroundings. She achieves this through deliberate meditative listening in which she
opens herself up to be sensorially immersed, and to be surprised and affected.
Sometimes her descriptions even leave behind the worldly associations of sounds,
dissolving their identities into a heaving sonic-scape; sounds combine and meld into a
single sound field that is at once near and far, soft and loud, low and high. Yet Oliveros is
only on the cusp of this earthy experience, since she is largely involved in naming
sounding objects (such as bulldozers and birds) rather than sonic properties (such as
densities, dynamics, timbres, textures). For an experience of the surroundings which
shifts from being orientated to its sensory materials, to being orientated to its earthy
qualities that drop below worldly identities, we now head to the desert.

A far out trip in the desert-scape (Smithson, c1969)

The next form of drifting comes from Land Art, a nomadic practice of sorts that emerged
in the late 1960s. The British strand of early Land Art was a humble pedestrian sort,
described as ‘rambling’ (Beardsley 1989:ch2). This strand was exemplified by Richard
Long and Hamish Fulton who walked around rural areas of Britain producing subtle
interventions and documentations of this. On the other hand, the American strand of
early Land Art was ‘monumental’ (Beardsley 1989:ch1), involving large-scale earthworks
 85

that used heavy machinery, exemplified by Michael Heizer, Walter de Maria and Robert
Smithson (1938–1973). Instead of rambles, there were ‘site explorations’ and ‘site visits’
that often occurred in cars, trucks or aeroplanes.

Here I consider a site exploration by Smithson and artist and wife Nancy Holt which took
place in 1969 or early 1970. They were searching for a site at the Great Salt Lake of
Utah, its waters at times blood red, to make what was to become Smithson’s most iconic
land art work, the Spiral Jetty. This massive spiralling jetty was made from rock and dirt
and constructed in 1970. Two years later, Smithson recounted the exploration of the site,
construction and documentary film of the work in an article of the same name (re-
published in Smithson 1996:143-153). He and Holt travelled by car, first visiting various
people living nearby the lake but they had no luck regarding the selection of a site. Then,
late one afternoon, they drove down a dirt road into a wide valley, and were mesmerised:

As we travelled [sic], the valley spread into an uncanny immensity unlike the other
landscapes we had seen… Hills took on the appearance of melting solids, and
glowed under amber light… Sandy slopes turned into viscous masses of
perception. Slowly, we drew near to the lake, which resembled an impassive faint
violet sheet held captive in a stoney [sic] matrix, upon which the sun poured down
its crushing light…
… As I looked at the site, it reverberated out to the horizons only to suggest
an immobile cyclone while flickering light made the entire landscape appear to
quake. A dormant earthquake spread into the fluttering stillness, into a spinning
sensation without movement. This site was a rotary that enclosed itself in an
immense roundness… No ideas, no concepts, no systems, no structure, no
abstractions could hold themselves together in the actuality of that evidence…
where solid and liquid lost themselves in each other… no sense wondering about
classifications and categories, there were none. (1996:145-146)

By searching in an unknown environment, through a deep quizzical immersion, and

probably through an altered state of consciousness (drugs or fatigue), Smithson gets ‘far
out’ in the desert and leaves the world for the earth.49 Whether his actual experience or
inflated reminiscing, here is an account of drifting on the surrounding-earth. Worldly
intelligibility drops to a hazy shadowy perception of the visual-scape, which all melt, get
viscous, flicker, spread out, flutter, spin, get lost together such that there is no more

49
For another reading of the earthiness of Smithson’s jetty, see Shapiro (1995:135-140).
 86

worldly objects no more (no ideas, concepts, systems, structure, abstractions). Instead,
there is the glow and flickering of light and the dissipation of individuated topographical
shapes and features into a fluid visual mass. This is the surroundings as enveloping,
swirling ambience.

Smithson’s account of searching for the site of Spiral Jetty also includes a variety of
worldly narratives, even in the midst of this hazy trip. Sections which I ellipsed in the
above quotation deal with ancient geological history and with cultural landmarks such as
sunken wrecks. Thus, Smithson’s drifting across the earthy terrain is hardly sustained or
in depth, although he does drift below normal worldly identities and objects in a greater
way than reported by Oliveros. To find an earthy drifting that is sustained, we need a
holding pattern – something to hold us to the surrounding-earth, beneath the observed
object and beyond the once-off trip.

3.4 The Approach of Serial Patterning

The holding patterns I am seeking would produce visual or sonic disturbances that hold
our attention to earthy materiality, rather than worldly regions, within the surroundings.
Furthermore, they would hold our attention in a way that counters the perceptual inertia
of habitually registering objects out of the surroundings. If we want to remain in an
engagement with surrounding-earth, we need to deal with the terrain as a continuous
undulating material field, and not as a bearer of objects here and there. So a third and
final shift is required, to arrive at perceiving the features of, and differences within, the
material fields of the surrounding-earth without parsing these fields into (worldly) objects.

This third shift is achieved through what I refer to as the approach of serialist patterning. I
begin this approach with the classic moment of Total Serialism, a movement in avant-
garde music from the early 1950s, before tracing various serialisms from the 1960s and
1970s which extend this approach. Of the three approaches, serialist patterning begins
furthest from ambient concerns, with the creation of discrete art objects (in the closed
format of the musical score). However, it ends up getting closest to the ambient earth by
making way for a particular type of serial, situated and minimal patterning.
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Total Serialism – de-synchonising the object into its material properties (1950s)

Total Serialism (also known as Integral Serialism and sometimes Multiple Serialism)
provides a model for creative practice that deals with fields of material properties rather
than objects, through the technique of de-synchronised parameterisation. This
movement in avant-garde music, which had is heyday in Europe between 1951 and
1953, expanded on the early musical serialism found in 1920s twelve-tone music
developed by Arnold Schoenberg and his pupils in Vienna. 50 This early form of serialism
used all twelve pitches of the semi-tone scale to produce a non-hierarchical, and
therefore non-tonal, relationship between the pitches. A random order of the twelve
pitches labelled by number – the primary series (such as 3,1,12,5,6, etc) – was arranged
into a matrix to generate different combinations or permutations of that series. However,
the series were usually unperceivable in the final work; this was a generative
compositional device that affected the overall sonic profile of the work, rather than
something one could hear and follow.

Total Serialism takes the idea of serialising the musical parameter of pitch, and applies
this to all the musical parameters notated in the score. Several composers applied serial
techniques to rhythm and durational values in the 1940s (see ‘Rythmic Serialism’ in
Griffiths 2006). However, the first application of serialism to multiple parameters was a
small piano piece composed in 1949 by Frenchman Olivier Messiaen (1908–1992).
Titled Mode de valeurs et d’intensités, it was to instigate Total Serialism. 51 As can be
seen from the notes that accompanied the score [Fig 3], the work is based on three
pitch-classes (modes) that are combined with twelve different articulations (attaques),
seven dynamics (intensités) and three divisions of twelve durations (durées). By applying
different series to difference musical parameters, Messiaen deconstructed the object of
composition to work directly with material properties prior to them been taken up as a
synchronised object. Instead of working with musical notes or gestures built up into
larger phrases, composing becomes a task of working with independent musical
parameters which only become synchronised in the final score, performance and
listening. This technique has since been described as parameterisation (Gibbs 1985 in
Koenigsberg 1991).

50
I follow the general trend in the literature to capitalise Total Serialism (because it refers to a discrete historical
movement) whilst all other terms referring to serialism are lower case.
51
For a history of early Total Serialism, and the influence of Mode de valeurs on a range of composers, see Toop (1974).
For an in-depth analysis of this work, see Richard Toop (1974:143-152).
 88

Bandur (2001) describes how Total Serialism actively undoes the synchronisation of
musical parameters most notably achieved in Western Romantic music. In the works of
Beethoven and other Romantic composers, pitch, dynamics, articulation, rhythm,
duration and timbre all work together synergistically to gush out in one expressive
phrase. That is, “a certain group of dimensions in a musical structure or fabric are
directed toward one central, sensually perceivable effect” (Bandur 2001:25). It is no
coincidence that the de-synchronisation achieved in Total Serialism occurs at the time of
early electronic music. In fact, some early electronic compositions are in the Total Serial
style (see Koegnigsberg 1991, regarding the Electronic Music Studio at Cologne). By
using machines with independently adjustable dials and sliders, each controlling different
sonic parameters, sound engineers and composers began to think and create in terms of
independent sonic parameters.

Just as in early Serialism, the series and patterns in Total Serialism are rarely, if ever,
perceivable to listeners. This is not surprising given that a key goal for composers
working with Total Serialism was maximum variation with no repetition (see
Stockhausen’s comments on “continuous renewal and variation” in Koenigsberg
1991:np; Bandur 2001:9). For serial patterning to be an approach to the ambient mode,
we need to locate a serialism that makes dealing with material properties without objects
a perceptual achievement, rather than simply a compositional technique. The next step,
then, is to locate a form of serialism that is perceivable.

Simple serialism – perceiving the series (1960s)

American serialism, in stark contrast to the European variety, tends towards maximum
repetition with little variation by using simple progressive series. Such series are easily
perceived in the end result, and are exemplified in work associated with Minimalism in
music and visual arts and some Conceptual Art. This type of serialism was given
prominence in several texts by Mel Bochner, especially The Serial Attitude (1967) and
Serial Art, Systems, Solipism (1968, first published 1967). Bochner emphasises that the
serial attitude is “a method, not a style” (1967:28), 52 which he finds in a range of artists
and periods, but most clearly in the Minimalist-related artists Donald Judd, Carl Andre,
Dan Flavin and Sol Lewitt. The serial method uses “prefabricated systems” (1967:31)

52
That serialism is method rather than style is reflected in the comments by surrounding the Total Seriliam of German
Karlheinz Stockhausen. Bandur states “the main idea is universal and meta-theoretical” (2001:6). Anything that can be
mapped onto a scale can be involved from any domain, such as “the size of objects, the color of eyes, whatever”
(Stockhausen in Cott 1973 quoted in Koenigsberg 1991).
 89

which are “carried out to [their] logical conclusion… without adjustments based on taste
or chance” (1968:100). A series is defined as a progression or “set of sequentially
ordered elements” (1967:31). The simplest is arithmetic progression (1,2,3,4 etc), but
progressions might also include permutation, rotation or reversal. When there is no
progression in a series, that is, when one standard unit is repeated unchanged
(1,1,1,1,etc), Bochner calls this modular rather than serial (1967:28). Bochner’s
examples of serial progression include Dan Flavin’s fluorescent light work Nominal Three
(to William of Ockham) (1963), which uses groups of one, two and three lights, and also
work from Sol Lewitt’s Serial Project #1, which involves permutations of a thrice-divided
cube (made in 1966 and exhibited and showcased in the journal Aspen in 1967). Simple
serial approaches can also be found in works by American minimalist composers who
made their mark in the few years after Bochner’s two essays first appeared. Steve
Reich’s early phase pieces (for tape, violin and piano, composed 1965-67) and
Pendulum Music (1968) and Philip Glass’ 1+1 (1968) all involve simple additive or
subtractive progressions. In terms of modular work, Bochner’s examples include Carl
Andre’s arrangements of commercial materials like bricks, Styrofoam planks and wooden
beams.

Bochner (1967:29-30) links his discussion of seriality in American artists to the European
movement of Total Serialism. However, he fails to observe the two main differences
between the European and American versions of serialism. Firstly, there is a difference
between the random and varying order within a series (European) and the simple
progressions of a series (American). These differences have a direct bearing on
perceiving the series in the presented work, which leads to a second difference in that
the random series is not perceived, whilst the simple series is perceived. Reich, in his
manifesto ‘Music as a Gradual Process’ (1968:423), makes mention of this: “In
[European] serial music, the series itself is seldom audible… This is a basic difference
between serial (basically European) music and serial (basically American) art, where the
perceived series is usually the focal point of the work.”

Whilst we perceive the simple series, our perception does not shift beneath the level of
objects. Since the ambient mode requires that we perceive material properties without
clumping them into objects, the way to achieve this is to combine the de-synchronisation
of the material properties of objects achieved by European composers in Total Serialism,
and the perception of the series by American artists in simple serialism.
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Reflective serialism – perceiving de-synchronised material properties

(Judd, from 1968)

The next step along the approach of serialist patterning towards the ambient mode is the
shift from perceiving objects to perceiving material properties. I refer to this as reflective
serialism, and I interpret certain works by Donald Judd (1928–1994), which serialise the
emptied format of Rauschenberg’s White Paintings, as exemplars of this type of
serialism.

The works I have in mind are the untitled stacks produced by Judd since 1965. However,
the earliest stacks that solicit this reading are those stacks with reflective or semi-
reflective surfaces, and these appear to have been produced since 1968 (see Serota
2004:109,191). The stacks are of flat-box-like objects which are attached to a wall and
stacked vertically one over the other, usually from floor to ceiling, with the distance
between each box the same as their height. Judd typically stacked ten boxes but other
numbers were also employed. Each series of boxes is regular and the same and, in
keeping with Boucher’s distinctions, we may think of this a modular rather than serial
work. That is, there is one similar unit that is repeated, rather than a series that varies
across its repetitions. Yet, this would be to deny that there is anything changing or
progressing across the repetition of these boxes, when in fact there is. What changes
across this series? The changes belong to our perception of the boxes ‘reacting’ with the
ambient lighting and spatial conditions of the exhibition space.

Consider, for instance, a copper stack from 1969 [Figure 4]. Notice the changes in the
colour of the boxes from top to bottom (from dark to light to dark on the front face of the
boxes), the changes and diversity in colour and shape of the reflections on the boxes,
and the angle and intensity of both the shadows and the throw of reflected light cast by
the boxes. These changes produce a spectrum of values within the parameters of colour,
angle and intensity – the material properties of the visual-scape – and these changing
values are de-synchronised from one another. Patterns are formed across the simple
series of boxes, however, the patterns are not imposed by the practitioner but are those
of the environment. These stacks function like Rauschenberg’s White Paintings in
allowing the environment to make its mark. But, because their form is porous and serial,
the stacks more fully open up to ambient materiality, which becomes salient as
differences mapped across the simple series.
 91

Judd’s reflective untitled stacks open up a perception of subtle changes in material

properties across a series. Just as emptying becomes full of ambient richness, as drifting
becomes anchored on the earthy terrain, so to, the regular patterning of such work
becomes full of material differences and irregularities. However, if serial patterning is to
be an approach to the ambient mode, it needs to approach the ambient surroundings
already always there (rather than be involved in discrete foregrounded creative works, as
is the case with all the serial examples discussed above). The serial approach needs to
become situated in the ambient surroundings.

Situated serialism – highlighting series in the built environment (1970s)

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, certain minimalist and installation practices shifted out
of the gallery into alternative industrial spaces, and outdoors into urban and rural sites
(Reiss 1999:110-123). As part of this shift ‘out-and-about’, some practices drifted out
onto the seriality of urban forms, producing what I refer to as situated serialism. Here, I
am not referring to those serial and modular works that were simply (re)located outside a
gallery context in urban locations, such as Carl Andre’s series of stones arranged in a
grassed lawn in Stone Field Sculpture (1977), or when some of Sol Lewitt’s Incomplete
Cubes (1974) are located outdoors. Rather, by situated serialism, I mean those creative
works that highlight the formal material qualities of the serial forms already present in the
built environment. Such highlighting can be achieved in three ways, which, in the context
of visual art, appears to have first occurred in the 1970s. One way involves creating a
modular work in which introduced units are spaced out according to pre-existing grids or
series in a place. Andre’s Lament for the Children (1976) is a good example of this
[Fig 5]. In this work, his signature item of building bricks are spaced out according to the
grid of concrete grooves on an urban block. Another way involves systematically altering
the pre-existing series found in the built environment. Several of Gordon Matta-Clark’s
architectural interventions are examples of this. His Doors, Floors, Doors work (1976)
highlights doors in a building by cutting away sections of flooring that match the shapes
of the doors. His Window Blow-Out (1976) highlights a series of windows in an industrial
building through the act of blowing out the windows with a gun [Fig 6]. Finally, a third
way of highlighting the seriality of the urban environment is achieved by simply
documenting it. Examples include the work of Bernd Becher and Hilla Becher whose
photo-grids of industrial structures have been published since the mid 1970. However,
Sol Lewitt’s little known book Photogrid (1977), which focuses on different magnifications
of architectural features such as windows, grills, lattice work, produces an even more
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formalised reading of urban series through the use of severe cropping and magnification
[Fig 7]. 53

Putting it all together – reflective serialism (perceivable and de-syncronised) with

situated serialism (1980s and beyond)

Situated serialism opens up to the formal material qualities of pre-existing series and
patterns in built environments, yet in and of itself, it is hardly shifts us into the ambient
mode of being. To do so, the achievement of situated serialism must combine with the
achievement of reflective serialism. That is, the de-syncronised material properties
perceivable in a work (reflective) are connected to the material series and patterns all-
around in our surroundings (situated). Differences in material properties all-around
become so engaging that object-ness falls away. And if this could be achieved, we would
be taken all the way into the ambient mode, observing material undulations across the
entire ambient scape of the pre-existing surroundings. Examples of such work do not
emerge until the 1980s and beyond, and I will now turn to these in the following
chapter. 54

53
Dan Graham’s Homes for America (1966) is a classic work from the 1960s that documents urban serial forms, in
particular ‘tract’ housing developments in America. However, his approach in this work is far more discursive (being
countered within histories of Conceptual Art, see for instance Godfrey 1998:312-314) and much less concerned with the
formal material qualities of this urban seriality.
54
It might at this point appear as if serialist patterning is the only approach that is required to get us into the ambient mode
of being. However, the pairing of reflective and situated serialism could only have been identified (by myself, since they do
not exist in the literature) through the two earlier approaches. Reflective serialism could not have been identified without
the paradigm of minimalist emptying – here, the emptied out format, which takes on ambient materiality, has been
serialised, in order to make differences in the ambient materiality more salient. Furthermore, situated serialism could not
have been identified without the paradigm of situationist drifting – here, drifting around the earthy terrain, rather then
worldly regions, is sustained through a holding pattern around formal serialisations of the surroundings.
 93

chapter four
verging on the ambient work
(mid 1980s – early 2000s)

In this chapter, I survey a range of contemporary works that do not just shift towards the
ambient mode of being-in-our-surroundings, but come closest to entering and realising
this mode. That is, they come closest to functioning as ambient works and are the works
I interpret as most relevant to the forms, experiences and spatiality of my own creative
works presented in this research. The works come from installation practices from the
mid 1980s to the early 2000s. I begin with considering ambient visual works, then I
address ambient sonic works, before ending the chapter by summarising the general
traits of ambient work gleaned from these examples.

As I will show, these contemporary works interweave all three approaches to the ambient
mode charted in the previous chapter; they are at once minimal, situational, and serial.
That is, they work to highlight the all-around material surroundings impartially (opened up
by minimalist emptying), in ways that drop beneath worldly meanings and norms to have
a sensitive all-over-the-place engagement with the sensuous earthy terrain (opened up
by situationist drifting), by highlighting the pre-existing fields of material qualities that
pervade the surroundings through reflective and situated serialism (opened up by serial
patterning).

4.1 Towards Ambient Visual Works

Boxes opening out to the horizon (Judd, from 1986)

In 1973, Donald Judd purchased land near the township of Mafta in Texas to build a
contemporary art centre that would permanently display large-scale installations. The
land was the site of a disused military base, which was renovated over the next decade
and opened to the public in 1986 as The Chinati Foundation (see Chinati Foundation
2006a). One of the works to be designed in the early 1980s and presented at the
opening was Judd’s largest, and possibly his best-known installation, 100 untitled works
in mill aluminium. This work is a grand statement of his notion of ‘specific objects’ (Judd
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1965) but also a statement of the ambient potential of the 1960s movement of
Minimalism in visual art [Fig 8]. The work is housed in two adjacent artillery sheds that
Judd renovated as part of the presentation of the work. The roofs were raised to form
semi-circular vaults, and the walls were replaced with an almost continuous series of
floor-to-ceiling windows, allowing the view and the light to stream in from the surrounding
desert landscape. The 100 works are each a different variation on the form of an open
rectangular prisms – reminiscent of large box kites – made from aluminium sheeting.
These prisms have the same outer dimensions (approximately 1m x 1.3m x 1.8m) but
have slightly different internal divisions. The prisms have been equally spaced in two
long rows in each shed, with 48 prisms in one shed and 52 in the other (see Chinati
Foundation 2006b).

Understood as one-hundred individual works, this does not get beyond the foreground
art object and is hardly an example of an ambient work. However, it is possible to
understand this as one work – as a field of one-hundred objects – that set up rhythms
between the objects and the materiality of the surrounding building and outdoors. It is
likely Judd designed the installation with something like this in mind (see Raskin
2001:685), but in any case, it can be, and often is, read in an ambient light. How are
these material relationships formed and highlighted? The serial arrangement of the
prisms echo and highlight the grids in the buildings that house them, the vertical and
horizontal beams that run through the window panels and support the roof, and the
distinct sets of shadows of the prisms and beams that even overlap in the early morning
and late afternoon light. The internal divisions of the prisms add to this rhythmic echoing.
Furthermore, the reflective surfaces of the prisms double-over the architectural features
and patterns, and also take on the hues and images of the surrounding landscape. In
photographs, the aluminium appears as different colours depending on the location and
angle of the camera and time of day – silver, copper, blue, green, even invisible. “The
effect of light reflecting off of these polished surfaces with the bleak horizon and broad
sky through the windows of the hangar seems a phenomenon unto itself. You have to be
there” (Kristin 2006:np). As Raskin has said, 100 works is “an all-inclusive arrangement
of reflective objects, the reflections themselves, people, windows, fields, buildings and
blue sky” (Raskin 2001:685). But there is more. Because of their shapes, hollowness and
reflectivity, the prisms are difficult to see and produce visual disorientations. They start to
blur and bleed with each other, the building and the landscape. Moving around them is
both the way to see what the works look like, and to have them continually shift and elide
any clear viewing of them. “With every step we take, the variables shifts; our active
engagement with the work offers a fresh, ever-new tableau” (Raskin 2001:685). In some
 95

photographs of this work on Flickr.com, elements of the aluminium or building or desert

even appear to float, hover and become dislocated from any normal way of interpreting
the spatial disposition of objects in the visual surroundings. “As you glide through the
ethereal rooms, reflections make the planes disappear and reappear in a surprisingly
fluid visual dance. Inside and outside become one…” (Tasset 2006:np).

Although 100 works creates relationships with and dissolves into the materiality of its
surroundings, the prisms are clearly imported into the place and through their size and
look, tend to hold onto a foreground importance. To fully realise the ambient mode, the
reflectivity, seriality and porousity of Judd’s work needs to be met with a more specifically
deduced rather than introduced form, derived from the material properties and patterns
already existing in a place. This is when things gets really interesting to me and for such
a work, I go to another large-scale minimalist installation made in a renovated building.

Reflecting and inflecting a maze of archways (Buren, 1991)

In 1991, Daniel Buren (born 1938) had the opportunity to use the entirety of the
capcMusée de Bordeaux in France, an old stone warehouse converted into a
contemporary art museum. As part of his exhibition Arguments topiques [Topical
Arguments], Buren presented Dominant-Dominé, coin pur un espace, 1465.5 m2 á
11°28’48” [Dominant-Dominated, Corner for a Space, 1465.5 m2 at 11°28’48”] in the
large lower level of the building [Fig 9]. This level possesses a nave two-storeys high,
braced by a series of large, medium and small archways. Dominant-Dominé, was made
of two elements that hold a chief place in Buren’s visual lexicon. Firstly, a huge sloping
mirrored plane was installed on the floor. It began at ground level on one side of the
nave, and rose to the other side to the height that the archways along that wall begin
their semi-circular curve. Thus, through the reflection, these archways appeared instead
as hovering circles. Secondly, all the archways in the room where lined with black-and-
white stripes, and these could be viewed throughout the room and doubled in the
mirrored plane. Because the mirror covered the entire floor-space, people experienced
the work from the second-floor mezzanine and terrace. 55

In this work, so much of the material place comes alive and starts to turn into hovering
undulations of light, shape and colour all-around. This is achieved in the dance between
mirrors, archways, stripes and ambient light. The reflective quality of the mirror makes

55
For more description and images of this work, see Guy Lelong (2002[2001]:129-133).
 96

the context salient, or as Buren said, through the use of mirrors, "the context becomes
very simply and very traditionally a spectacle in the form of an image" (in Lelong
2002:132). Importantly, the formal deductive placement of the mirror, deduced from and
set to highlight the circular geometry of the archways along one wall, becomes a key
interpret and see all the geometries created by the archways. This is enhanced by the
stripes, which, being the same set unit throughout the place, become a measure for the
relationship of small, medium and large archways that exist in a visual polyrhythm. I am
attracted to the fine detail all the differences of the archways and surrounding form rather
than assume they are all one-and-the-same – the material differences in the width and
curvature of the arches, and in the angle of reflected light hitting the archways, the
changes in lighting conditions and hues emanating from the stones. Furthermore, the
panels of the mirrors, each a slightly different angle, produce subtle shimmering counter-
rhythms to these geometries that disorientates my vision enough that I have to take a
second and third look. To this disorientation of the reflection is added the greater
perspectival disorientation of the slanting mirror, which helps to dislocate any habitual
way of looking at the place, since something is always not quite right (not right-angled)
about the place. One's bearings are being continually re-adjusted. The work’s title starts
to make sense – what is dominant and what is dominated? Or, what is foreground and
what is background? The work is becoming one with the place and the place is hovering
in its visual polyrhythms.

Despite its ambient activations, Dominant-Dominé is ultimately a framed work. People

could walk around the margins of the place/work and look in, but they could not enter
into it, unlike the walk-through afforded in Judd’s 100 works. Because of this, the
rhythms Judd’s work are more intimate, existing on a bodily scale. For an example that
combines intimate and intricate rhythms from Judd, and the deduced forms of Buren, we
can go to another of Buren’s large-scale installations.

Surfacing the windows of a corporate office (Buren, from 1999)

Transparences Colorées [Colour Transparencies] was created between 1999 and 2001
for the Allianz Hauptverwaltung building in Munich [Fig 10], and is one of a large number
of Buren’s permanent installations (for full list of permanent installations, see Buren
2006a). The building is a contemporary office space with a large open foyer with many of
its exterior and interior walls made from glass panelling. The work employs three visual
gestures. The first is a range of translucent coloured gels that fill rectangular areas of the
glass panelling. The second is white stripes adhered onto the glass panels that support
 97

the railings around the stairways and the third is the insertion of a mirror panel on the
wall next to the stairway. In terms of realising the ambient mode, I am most interested in
the implications of the gesture of the stripes in this particular context.56

The placement of stripes on pre-existing glass panelling means that Buren loses the
introduced ground that is typical of his work, whether the white backdrop for stripes, or
the mirrored panels and structures. 57 The stripes are introduced, yet they map directly
onto pre-existing structures and formats of the building, changing the state of the glass
panelling already there, in a contrast of opaque and transparent. The gaps between the
stripes are as much a part of the stripes as they are of the surrounds. There is no place
where the work is not. To see the work is to see the surroundings, and the work comes
to be everywhere all-around. The regularity and vertical orientation of the stripes creates
rhythms and intersections with the other stripes and other vertical and rectilinear forms
and shapes of the building. These rhythms are especially emphasised from the
viewpoints where multiple layers of stripes can be seen, each a different distance and
angle from the viewer. The reflectivity of the polished floors also comes into play as
shadows of the stripes are cast at a variety of intersecting angles which fan out and
reference the various sources of ambient light. The work encourages an all-around
viewing that takes in the entire surroundings as a visual feast that is all equally enjoyable
rather than as functional, hierarchical space.

The works so far discussed, by Buren and Judd, were made by practitioners associated
with minimalism in visual art in the 1960s. These works, scaled-up from the objects of
early minimalism, come to be on par with and highlight the entire already-existing
architecture where the work is located. 58 However, they only map and make the ambient
material salient in a general coarse-grained way. Both Buren’s works reference large
architectural shapes and certainly are not concern itself with any level of detail smaller
than the 8.7 cm width of his stripe. Likewise, the reflections and gridded relationships of
Judd’s work only reference the architectural and desert terrain in a general way. But if we
are going to fully enter the ambient mode, it would be at all scales or granularities of the

56
I am not aware of any available commentary by Buren or others relating to this work. For a suite of images, see Buren
(2006b). Note that Huaptverwaltung is misspelt as ‘Haupterverwaltung’ on Buren’s website.
57
I have not been able to determine the earliest example of this in Buren’s practice. Of the sources that were available to
me during this research project (Blistene et al 2005; Lelong 2002; Boisnard & Buren 2002, 2000a, 2000b ), it appears that
the use of stripes, placed on clear planes (Perspex or glass) or stripes with no backing planes (gaps between stripes),
turns up in the 1980s (see Boisnard & Buren 2002b:27,43,45,61,100-101).
58
This has been made possible through a spectacular increase in the resourcing and institutional support of minimalist
artists from the 1980s, which has increased into the 2000s (see, for instance, Meyer 2004 and Morris 2000 who bemoan
this, and Butler 2006 who celebrates it).
 98

ambient earth, that we can sensuously encounter without the aid of technologies of
magnification and amplification – as large as a building, a street and a horizon, but also
as small as the width of a hair, the size of a speck of dust, the quiet buzz of a far off
insect or faint echo of a reversing truck several streets away. To encounter the material
earth is not to smooth over or ignore minor details. In fact, there are no minor details in
the material earth, since there is nothing to determine one scale or undulation as any
more important or significant than another. The approach of the small-scale is to be
found in another type of minimalist installation, one that scales-down as much as it
scales-up, using a lighter touch with more refined and subtle means. As part of this, the
drifting about the place encouraged in the viewer is now also crucial in the making of
these works. Dealing with the minute means even more so dealing with the material
idiosyncrasies of a place, so that, although the idea of the works can be pre-planned,
their final form cannot be imagined until they are mapped onto these idiosyncrasies and
local contingencies. That is, making and not only viewing the work requires a regular
engagement with, and revision of, what we imagine to be the shape, colour and texture
of that place.

Spotting walls throughout an office building (Creed, 1993)

In the 1990s, Scottish visual artist and musician Martin Creed (born 1968) took mundane
materials, had them “fulfil their expected function” (blown up balloons in a room, a door
opens, a blu-tac blob on a wall), whilst subjecting them to a series of “nonchoices” in
terms of their arrangement (Buck 2000:110-111). Such nonchoices defer to default
settings or equal divisions of time or space. The combination of mundane materials and
nonchoices of arrangement opens up to the ambient mode in Work No. 81, a one-inch
cube of masking tape in the middle of every wall in a building [Fig 11]. It comes from a
period in Creed’s practice when he was attempting to deal with, quite plainly, all the stuff
in a particular place – for example, every ‘and’ on a page of type (1994), all the sounds in
a given space (1994), the light in a room (from 1995), half the air in a given space (from
1998), all the bells in a city (2000). 59 Work No. 81 was first made for the Starkman
building in London in 1993 and re-made in 2000 at the Southampton City Art Gallery.60
My discussion here refers to its original setting in the Starkman building, a corporate
building that housed office areas and had white walls and floorboards. In this building,

59
To identify these works, I consulted Creed’s online list of works (Creed 2007) and also Martin Creed Works
(Southampton City Art Gallery 2000). Creed’s more recent work has become far more theatrical (see, for instance, Vetrocq
2006).
60
I am unaware of any available commentary by Creed or others on this work. I have checked with Creed’s personal
assistants on this matter, done web searches and consulted his extensive bibliography (Creed 2007).
 99

Creed inserted an arrangement of neat little one-inch cubes made from layers of
masking tape, which were stuck at the exact horizontal midpoint of every wall or vertical
partition in the building, at a height of about 1.5m. This nonchoice of placement was
followed through in its entirety, to include “even strange little bits of wall” (email
correspondence, Guggenheim 2006). Whenever a wall was interrupted by a vertical
obstacle, such as conduit or an attached furnishing, this was taken to mark out a
partition. In all, some 273 cubes were used.

Work No. 81 employs a very formal and deductive placement strategy, involving the least
choice possible by being determined exactly by what already exists in a place – the
shape of its vertical planes. This regularity becomes a measure of material difference, to
see difference in size and shape. It creates a rhythm between all the planes in the
building, and exposes the forms and details and odd spots that might ordinarily go
unnoticed. The cuboid shape tends to highlight the planes and creates rhythms with the
geometries of the furnishings in the building. Furthermore, the shadows of these regular
cubes changes dramatically, even between cubes very near to each other, so that the
intensity, direction, hue and diffusion of the ambient light is mapped and noticeable. In
this work, the scale is as large as the walls and room, but unlike Judd and Buren’s work,
the scale shifts down to the detail of an inch, and even to the millimetres of texture on the
sides of the cube built up from layers of masking tape.

Work No. 81 opens up to the incredible variety of shape and scale of what these simple
architectural surrounds are actually comprised. It punctuates the space in a fine detail.
However, as shapes go, the cubes look introduced and, up close, they appear as
specially- and even virtuosically-made forms. For examples of work in which the
gestures are completely deduced, we can go to two further works from more recent
years.

Flipping out a gallery (Epars, 2001)

Swiss artist Ariane Epars (born 1959) creates works by spending time in a place until it
“offers an opportunity to rearrange its spatiality” (Horst 2001). 61 Her rearrangements
involve simple gestures and commonplace materials described as “mute and modest
intervention[s]” (Horst 2001), highlighting and playing with the intrinsic qualities of the
surrounding place (see Epars 2006). Piece of Land 240, created at the Contemporary Art

61
My thanks to Sandra Selig for bringing Epars to my attention.
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Centre of South Australia (CASCA) in 2001, is one such modest work [Fig 12]. The art
centre is a moderate sized space with several inter-connected rooms with high-ceilings,
white-washed walls and wide timbre floorboards. Epars intervened in the space by lifting
up several floorboards from each of the rooms and hallways in the space, and laying
them upside-down on adjacent boards. The dirt beneath the building, which may not
have been seen or touched for many years, could now be seen through the gaps. Epars
also removed bricks from the sections of the outer walls below floor level, which meant
the ground underneath was lit in various places.

By making pre-existing structures porous, Epars’ has increased the amount of

surroundings to take in, opening up everything to be taken into view. The work descends
to the ground below, and outside via the holes in the brickwork, and then it extend up to
take on all the walls, hallways and ceilings. By re-orientating the pre-existing series of
floorboards, the floor and other materials are defamiliarised. We have to look twice or
thrice to see the floor for what it has become. The same goes for the ground below,
which is at first very dark and strange, only coming into recognition slowly. The formal
patterns of the re-arranged floorboards emphasise and set up rhythmic relationships
amongst the various formal patterns in the opened up surroundings. The floor structures
bounce out, first creating a counter-rhythm to the directions and groupings of all the
floorboards, and then connecting to the shapes and surfaces of the walls and ceiling.
The shape of the boards then starts to connect with the rectilinear shapes of the walls,
doors and edging. Areas of shadow and light become salient in comparison. Smaller
rhythms also start dancing about the place. Details within the floorboards become
salient. Miniature rhythms turn up in the series of strut marks, nail holes and defects in
the timber. Then, in this architectural rhythm, everything starts to hover and tremble, as
the whole materiality, from earthen dust to floor to ceiling all-around, in every nook and
cranny, comes into view, becoming salient as a shifting, undulating visual-scape.

Epars’ gesture of removing floorboards was specifically deduced from the pre-existing
surroundings, although her choice of arrangement and placement had only a general
relationship to this surrounding. This contrasts with Creed and Buren’s works in which
the placement was specifically deduced from the forms of the surroundings, but the
gestures (tape cubes, stripes, mirrors, coloured gels) were not. In the final work which I
discuss in terms of ambient visual work, both placement and gesture are deduced from
the pre-existing surroundings, which means that although it is the largest work, it is also
the most delicate in terms of entering the ambient mode. Furthermore, this work takes us
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outdoors to the suburban scale, showing that the ambient visual work need not require
the interior of a room or building (as was the case with the previous works).

Re-surfacing an entire suburb (Rosado-Seijo, from 2001)

In 2001, the artist Chemi Rosado-Seijo (born 1973) began a project that came to involve
an entire hillside suburb of Naranjito, a township in his home country of Puerto Rico. The
project, El Cerro [The Hillside], took its title from the suburb in which it was created, one
of many lower-class housing areas in Puerto Rico that are squatted without permission
and known locally as barriadas. Rosado-Seijo often works with communities to change
their material circumstances, and El Cerro began with his desire to have people “re-look”
at the barriadas and create an “invitation to people to see how beautiful they are” (email
correspondence, Rosado-Seijo 2007). Rosado-Seijo is not a local of the area, but when
he came across El Cerro, he was struck by its relationship to the contours of the
landscape. “It looked so much like a mountain done with houses, and the sense of us
human beings and our relation with nature was there, [that] I thought it only needed a
simple gesture to show it” (Rosado-Siejo 2007). Rosado-Seijo’s simple gesture (in idea,
but not execution) was to paint all the houses in El Cerro green so that they would blend
into the hillside, making the relationship between built and wilderness environment even
more noticeable – “making El Cerro more cerro” (Rosado-Siejo 2007) [Fig 13]. After
some convincing, and the participation of social workers from University of Puerto Rico,
the people of El Cerro agreed to be part of the project. Houses are completely painted on
the outside, including balconies. Currently, about seventy percent of the houses have
been painted. Several different shades of green have been used (chosen by the
residents), producing a subtle motley effect from a distance that, according to the artist,
makes the location is “a lot more calmed the eye” than before. 62

There is much that could be said about the community development aspects of this
project, but I am only concerned here with its visual effects. Through re-painting houses
to produce a colour match with the surrounding hillside, the entire suburb is brought into
a large visual-spatial field that creates relationships between the homes, the
mountainside and the formal structures therein. There is a beautiful unassuming rhythm
to this work. There is a rhythm that echoes outwards, connecting the green houses with
the mountains, and connecting them with other houses of the suburb through their stark
contrast. There are also rhythms that echo within the green houses themselves, as their

62
For some further information on El Cerro, see Literature and Arts of the Americas (2004) and Gortzak (2006).
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windows and other architectural features start to appear in terms of colour-shape. Then
the cars and other parts of the city, like the trees, drop out of worldly identities and all
meld into one activated ambient visual-scape. The reduction in colour range means other
material differences (shape, placement, size) become prominent. But even in this narrow
range, we can compare the greens between the houses, and between them and greens
in the mountainside – a colour-rhythm that adds to the hovering visual holding pattern of
this work. The colour match also leads to a visual camouflage that means it takes time to
see the houses at all. But as they slowly come into view, the large ambient material
surrounding come into view as well. To see the houses is to see the hillside and the
entire materials surroundings in a renewed ambient way.

4.2 Towards Ambient Sonic Works

Having addressed ambient visual work, I now turn my attention to ambient sonic work.
However, throughout my research I have not come across any clear examples of such
works. So, in this section, I will suggest what would need to be addressed in ambient
sonic works and discuss several works that come closest to this. In fact, two different
issues need to be addressed. There is, of course, the relationship of the work to the
sonic surroundings, but before we even imagine what this work might sound like, we first
need to consider its relationship with the visual surroundings.

Any sound requires a visual manifestation; to make a sound is to make it with something
you can see (such as speakers and cables, performers and instruments). Sound-based
works that produce an introductive visual element end up establishing a foreground-
background relationship in the visual-scape; either what is visually introduced becomes a
foreground feature, or it becomes a to-be-ignored background feature. Because the
ambient mode does not have foreground and background, whatever the sensory realm,
any sound installation that contributes a visual excess, regardless of how subtle the
sounds are or how much they map the ambient sounds around, cannot operate in the
ambient mode. In other words, the visual excess of sound-based works needs to be
addressed if there is going to be any genuinely ambient sounds work. (Generally
speaking, visual works do not have the corresponding problem of sonic excess, since
they do not generally produce any sonic manifestations that have to be ignored or turn
up as foreground features.) In terms of approaching the ambient mode, the visual excess
of sound-production can be addressed by either hiding the sound sources or using pre-
existing sound sources that belong to the surroundings prior to any intervention of the
creative practitioner.
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The relationship to the visual surroundings aside, what of the sonic content of an
ambient sonic work? What would drop our listening out of world onto earthiness,
attending to the timbre-envelope all-around? To begin with, the sounds would need to
remove anything that makes the sounds a discrete figure or contain hierarchies of
foreground and backgrounds. This means no melody and accompaniment, no harmonic
direction, no musical gestures which are set apart from the surroundings. Instead, we
need sounds that are static, non-directional, able to be mapped with and blended into the
sonic surroundings. Such introduced sounds could exist either as non-descript drones or
non-descript repeated loops (the aural equivalent of Buren, Creed and Rosado-Seijo’s
work). Alternatively, the sounds works could directly alter the pre-existing sounds in the
surroundings in a way that made one notice those ambient sounds as an embracing
sonic-scape (the aural equivalent of Epars’ work).

I will now discuss several examples that begin to address the necessary relationships to
the visual and sonic surroundings just outlined, and in doing so, move towards the
possibility of an ambient sonic work.

A hidden drone, situated in the city (Neuhaus, 1977–1992, 2002– )

Max Neuhaus (born 1939), considered to be a founding figure of sound installation and
the one who coined the term, has produced many works which use hidden, situated
sound sources along with non-descript drones. The most pertinent in terms of
approaching ambient sounds works is his permanent work located in a small section of
New York’s Times Square. Simply referred to as Times Square, it was first installed
between 1977 and 1992, before being re-installed in May 2002 through the support of
Dia Art Foundation (2007). The work consists of a constant electronic drone that
emanates out of subway outlet vents on a median strip at one end of Times Square. The
sound can only be heard directly above the grill, and because it is not sign-posted, most
pedestrians who walk over the grill would not be aware of the sounds as a specific
creative work or artistic intervention [Fig 14]. A recent description of the experience of
this work points towards the ambient mode, and it is worth quoting this passage at
length:

[T]ogether with the sound [of Times Square], and distinct from it, the sum of all the
other noises of Times Square can be heard. The Sound Work [Times Square] and
its environment relate to one another as foreground and background, yet when
attention is focused on the work, the other noises of Times Square also move into
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the centre of perception along with it. A shift in attention, which may also depend
on the changing volume of traffic noise, can result in an exchange of background
and foreground: the ambient noises can emerge distinctly and can also fade further
into the background of the Sound Work. Ambient noises can be heard with the
sound of Max Neuhaus’s work in one’s ear – not blended with it (a sum of sounds
does not result), but coloured by the Sound Work…. Removed from their purely
worldly function. Coloured by the Sound Work, by a sound which is normally
perceived as pleasant, the sounds of the environment come the fore and no longer
just heard without being aware of them – if they are not perceived as an irritating
noise. Everyday noises are detached to a certain degree from the connotation
normally associated with them, especially connotations of ‘noise pollution’. The
colouring of the environmental noises by the sound of Neuhaus’s work has
something of a purifying effect… Neuhaus describes the sound of his work in terms
of ‘catalysts for shift in frame of mind’. (Loock 2005:91-92)

As described, “the sounds of the environment come to the fore”, “detached to a certain
degree from… connotation”, “[r]emoved from their purely worldly function”. Yet, as
Neuhaus has noted (1993:3), it is a common perceptual condition that drones tend to be
forgotten after awhile, receding into the background sounds of which we are not aware.
Times Squares appears to invite the ambient mode, but not sustain it; it does not hold us
in the ambient mode. To hold us, an ambient sonic work would have to be constantly de-
familiarised, rather than receding into the background. Walking back and forth over the
grill, in and out of the sound field of Times Square would be one way of achieving this,
but this spatial and temporal alternation is hardly suggested by the work itself. We need
to find a work that specifically alternates its sound field and non-descript drones within it.

Turning the sounds off in the surroundings (TRES, from 2000)

TRES (born 1956) is a Spanish sound artist whose practice is concerned with various
approaches to silence (TRES 2007a). His Blackout Concerts (see TRES 2007b), which
he has been performing since 2000, are examples of sound-based works that use pre-
existing sound sources along with alternating the sound field. The blackouts have been
performed in various locations, such as visual arts centre (No.4), café or lounge bar
(No.5), film and TV school (No.6), and bowling alley (No.16). The common trait of these
locations is that they have many pre-existing electronically produced ‘flat-line’ sounds
(such as lighting, air conditioning, computers, and the like which produce subtle hums)
and that any sounds from outdoors are not too loud. The black outs last between quarter
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and half an hour, in which time TRES turns off all the electronic fixtures and equipment in
a place. Not only does the place go dark, especially at night, but bit-by-bit, the noise floor
of the building is reduced. Softer and softer. And as each sound is turned off, the overall
timbre (sound quality) of the sonic-surroundings shifts. Audiences are led to listen
intensely to the whole surroundings which become strange, and since its timbre slowly
changes, listening never recedes into the background but is regularly refreshed.

In terms of an ambient sonic work, the limit of TRES’ Blackout Concerts is that it involves
a performance with some foregrounded visual elements (watching TRES as he walks
around turning off various machines, until it becomes too dark). What I am searching for,
then, is a sonic work that uses pre-existing or hidden sound sources, and regularly
alternates or subtly intervenes in the sound field, without any foregrounded elements
such as the performance ritual or visual excess. But I have not found any examples of
such work in the field of sound installation. The closest example comes from visual
installation – it produces the condition of regular alternation of material states of a
surrounding without foregrounded elements, but with a visual equivalent of the non-
descript situated drone, namely, the lighting states in a room.

Turning the lights on and off in a room (Creed, from 1995)

In 2001, Creed infamously won the high-profile Turner Prize for another work of his work
made in the 1990s that deals with the whole of a space. In this work, Creed punctuates
time rather than spatial volume. As its sub-title suggests, in Work No. 127, the lights
going on and off (1995, re-shown on multiple occasions) lights in a room go on and off, in
regular durations using an electrical timer. In this particular rendition of the work, 63 the
light in a room goes on and off every five seconds, and my comments here pertain to the
setting of the work in a room in the Tate Modern in London, as part of the Turner Prize
[Fig 15].

Creed’s work is often talked about in terms of a conceptualist wit (Honigman 2005;
Bishop 2000; Buck 2000), and rarely, if at all, is his work read in terms of its materiality.
For instance, I have only found one review which comments on the quality of the light in
the Tate rendition of Work No. 127 (Denny 2001). But the material presence this work is
palpable. It is startling how strange the place becomes in the contrast of lighting states,
between that of the electric light and that of the ambient light oozing through skylight and

63
Creed has produced versions of this work that use different durations (I am aware of works which use durations ranging
from one second to thirty seconds).
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doorway. Notice the change in volumes, angles, shading and hues (even if the
colouration in the photos is a little exaggerated due to colour balancing issues in either
film or digital cameras). There are so many nooks and cranny to notice, even in a
seemingly empty ‘white cube’ of gallery. Everything shifts between the two lighting
states. Nothing remains the same. And thus, there is everything to notice all-around in
terms of its material differences.

The timing of this rendition of Work No.127 is significant for this ambient reading of it.
The shortish interval of five-seconds is not too speedy to induce sensory shock, such as
strobe lighting, in which case the work would be more about sensory overload than
spatial appreciation. Nor is the interval too slow as to remove one’s memory of the
alternate states. Without the ability to make comparisons between one state and the
other, the ambient reading of the work and the surroundings would dissolve. The strict
regularity of the timing is also significant. This is a temporal example of Creed’s
nonchoices, the simple default choice of the same time on as off. Fluctuations in the
durations would produce syncopation or temporal urgency (mixing up the durations, or
getting faster or slower), which would then make the timing become content in itself (it
would have some special interest of its own). Rather, but being regular, the timing
functions a neutral trigger to induce a reoccurring defamiliarisation of the material states
of the place.

To summarise: an ambient sonic work would need to use pre-existing or hidden sound
sources, and regularly alternate or intervene in the sound field, without any foregrounded
elements such as the performance ritual or visual excess. We would be searching for a
sonic equivalent of Creed’s light work, something like subtle situated sounds going on
and off. This repeated sound would become a series which would establish a material
relationship and blend with sound all-around, in terms of its timbre, envelopes and cycles
of durations.

4.3 General Traits of the Ambient Work

At the end of Part One, I defined ambient work as that which invites and sustains the
ambient mode of being (see Ch 2.5). Having surveyed practical examples in Part Two, I
am now in a position to discuss the traits of ambient work. Even though only one or two
of the contemporary works surveyed in this chapter function most fully as ambient works
(Epars, Rosado-Seijo), I am able to make a range of generalisations that summarise how
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ambient works actually work. In effect, this sets out a syntax for describing the ambient
works that I made during this research project which are discussed in Part Three.

The setting of the work – the situated series in the built environment

At the end of Chapter Three, I ascertained that an ambient work requires a reflective and
situated series. The reflective series is a simple series of emptied out formats that turn
our attention to changes in the field of material properties across the regularity of this
series. Such a reflective series needs to map across a situated material series and
connect to patterns throughout the surroundings. An ambient work cannot exist in a
series segregated from the surroundings (in the framed-off art object, for instance), nor
can it exist in the surroundings without a series (in the wilderness, for instance). Rather,
the striations of the built environment provide the setting for the ambient work, from
details in a small room to structures across a suburb or city block. In this way, the
ambient work is an opportunistic work, taking an opportunity to inflect or reflect the
striations of the built environment in such as way as to drop us out of the world onto the
smooth space of the surrounding-earth.

The form of the work – a situated series that is rearranged or annotated, creating
reverberating material relationships throughout the place

To make an ambient work, the practitioner makes situated series reflective, by

rearranging them or by annotating them with introduced materials, which then highlights
the larger surroundings, without producing any material excess or privilege (any
background or foreground). Through its simple patterning, the ambient work set ups
particular relationships with the earthy material qualities of a place, expressed as
relationships of colour, light, shape and texture in the visual-scape, and expressed as
relationships of timbre, texture, duration and volume in the sonic-scape. These
relationships accumulate to form rhythmic reverberations that travel in two ‘directions’.
Firstly, the introduced or inflected series echoes outwards in relation to other material
patterns throughout the surroundings. Secondly, the series echoes inwards in relation to
the material patterns within it. The reverberation outwards is most important for the
ambient work, since it takes us into an enlarged engagement with the surroundings.
However, since nothing is to be ignored in the ambient work (every part of the material
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field to be noticed), the inner reverberations are just as much a part of the web of
material relationships that are established.64

Engaging with the work – a hovering state attending to ambient materiality

To engage with the ambient work is to engage with the pervasive material properties that
are there all along. As we attune to the ambient work, we enter a hovering state of
attending to ambient materiality which is all-around, all-the-time, prior to any foreground-
background. In shifting into the ambient mode, our mode of being shifts from the world
and its meanings, associations and nearness-and-farness, to the earth that is there-
anyway. It is not that worldliness goes away, but that what becomes salient, what we
attune to, is the earthiness of the surroundings.

Revealing the ambient world

Because the ambient work is located within the built (and especially urban) environment,
the ambient work also exists as an intervention in the worldly regions of those
environments, which then reveals something of the ambient world. Such worldly issues
have been largely ignored in my analysis of works in this chapter, because they are
residual, rather than central, to the achievement of the ambient work. I have, for
instance, passed over the community negotiations and development enacted through
Rosado-Seijo’s El Cerro project, the metaphorical readings of ‘below’ in Walker’s (2001)
interpretation of Epars’ Piece of Land 240, and how these works may renegotiate notions
of public and contemporary art. These issues relate to the ambient worlds with which the
work intersects, but for the ambient work, its ties to these ambient worlds are not
primary; it attempts to transcend, or rather descend beneath, these worlds.

= = =

Where have we arrived, after going by way of example in this part of the essay? To put it
simply, we have shifted from including or excepting ambient, material spatiality in the
core of the creative work, as discussed by Greenberg and Cage in the mid twentieth

64
Note that the form of ambient work includes the material contribution of the practitioner (that which has materially
changed in a place due to the intervention of the practitioner) and the relationships this forms with, and between, other
material properties in the surroundings. In fact, this more or less amounts to the same thing, since the material contribution
only comes into existence in terms of the relationships it forms with the surroundings. Take away the surroundings and
there is no material form, but just materials lying about, if any, waiting to come into relation.
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century, to highlighting and making salient the entirety of the ambient, material spatiality
(surrounding-earth) via the ambient work.

The approaches towards the ambient mode surveyed in this part of the essay are,
however, all together too neat, in terms of how the ambient mode was developed
through this research project. Prior practice has made way for the ambient mode and the
ambient work, but I did not come upon this by starting with the 1950s and working
forwards. The ambient mode needed to be realised in the first instance through practical
experimentation, through which I developed and presented creative works that activated
the ambient mode. Only then could this come to be understood as a weaving together of
approaches and strategies of past practice in terms of particular concepts. My realisation
of the ambient mode, and presentation of ambient work, is the focus of the next part of
this essay.
 110

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III
part three
by way of making

In this part of the essay, I show how I arrived at the ambient mode through practice-led
research. First, in Chapter Five, I tell the story of the development of my creative work
and understandings surrounding it that emerged over the life of this research project.
Then, in Chapter Six, I take us on a journey to experience and reflect upon the final
creative outputs of this research.

Ch 5 Realising the Ambient Mode (mid 2003 – early 2007)

5.1 Beginnings (mid 2003)

5.2 Developing a Creative Process and Context (mid 2003 – late 2004)
5.3 Developing a Conceptual and Practical Framework (mid 2005 – late 2006)
5.4 Current Understandings of My Ambient Practice (late 2006 – early 2007)
5.5 Endings (early 2007)

Ch 6 Presenting the Ambient Work (late 2006 – early 2007)

6.1 Final Exhibition (Oct 2006) – An Encounter

6.2 Final Exhibition (Oct 2006) – Discussion and Reflection
6.3 Final Documents (early 2007) – Picture Book and Audio Discs
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chapter five
realising the ambient mode
(mid 2003 – early 2007)

In this chapter I tell the story of how I realised the ambient mode through a practice-led
approach. It is a personal account that describes those things that shaped the research –
how my making developed and how my conceptual, analytical and historical interests
developed and folded into my making. This leads to mapping out understandings of my
ambient practice and the tactics I employ to produce ambient works, as it stands at the
end of this research. These understandings harness the conceptual and practical
frameworks and vocabulary of the previous parts of the essay, and set the scene for the
final creative outputs of my research which I examine in the following chapter.

The story here is highly abridged and far more streamlined than the erratic flux of intense
activity, quiet times, dead ends and moments of insight that are all part of an unfolding
creative practice. For a full list and timeline of all the formal activities I undertook as part
of this research, see Appendix A and B.

5.1 Beginnings (mid 2003)

I began this research project with a practice that had developed out of several main
strands: music composition, performance art and visual-based installation. These
developed during my undergraduate studies in music composition at the Qld
Conservatorium of Music (1995-1998), through two collaborations formed during this
time – the performance and sound art duo juannellii (1997-2001) and composers group
COMPOST (1997-2004) – and through living alone in a house where I began
experimenting with room-based installation set ups (1997). Several concerns common to
all these areas developed during the late 1990s, which I continued to pursue as a
freelance practitioner (2000-2002). These included: a concern for minimal structures
based on simple formal patterns, use of found objects and site-specific procedures, and
a reduction in ‘content’ and ‘embellishment’ in favour of creating relationships to
surrounding architectural contexts. These concerns related to my interests in various
traditions of creative practice, including the thinking of John Cage, neo-dada movements
 113

of fluxus and conceptual art, minimalism in music and visual art, and creative strategies
from improvised theatre. I also studied musicology at the Queensland Conservatorium
and completed honours research in this area (1999). This involved training in various
models of musical analysis, music theory and historical research.

At the time I commenced this research, I sensed there was a significant continuity across
the range of interests in my practice that required deeper investigation – perhaps
something beneath it all – although I was unsure what that might be. At the same time I
also felt that, overall, my practice was quite scattered and distracted. A practice-led
methodology was thus an ideal way to reflect upon and challenge my practice, and also
to investigate the deeper aesthetic and philosophical issues at stake in my practice and
related traditions of practice.

Early on in my research project (Sept 2003), I summarised my initial intuitions and

queries relating to my practice in two questions:

What is the thing I am trying to get at, that urges an expression in a variety of
mediums, artforms and contexts?
What is it about minimalism, conceptualism and composition that I am drawn to?

I only recently re-discovered these questions when looking back through my journaling,
but in hindsight, I can see that they have been underwriting the life of this research.

5.2 Developing a Creative Process and Context (mid 2003 – late 2004)

Early pivotal experiments

Around the time of commencing my research, my long-term collaborations with juannellii

and COMPOST began to peter out. A few new collaborations pursued early on did not
open up any long-term directions. Instead, the most fruitful experiences came from
working by myself, tinkering about. I made a lot of small works – trials and experiments
that enabled me to practically realise and purge a personal catalogue of ideas that had
accumulated over time. I was then able to act upon new ideas that emerged from this
period. From these experiments, there were two that directed me towards the issues and
ideas I now identify as belonging to the ambient mode of being. One focused on my
visual work and the other on my sonic work, and both were created in a studio context
and were received by a small and select group of peers.
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Visual experiments: In August 2003 I secured a two-week residency at Artworkers 60

Merivale St Gallery in South Brisbane, which culminated in a low-key exhibition lasting a
few days, titled Flat Out. The gallery was a (somewhat) tidied up industrial building with
four rooms. During the fortnight, I treated this space as a large studio, creating a range of
installed and mainly flat floor-based and wall-based works. I realised several old ideas
but my favourite work was a new one, installed in various corners of one room. The
installation involved parallel strands of delicate, narrow white tape stuck in a way that
articulated architectural features of the room – its planes, and the struts and skirting
boards that articulated their boundaries [Fig 16]. This installation was ephemeral, site-
specific and subtle, blending into the architecture to the degree that some viewers
mistook it for permanent components of the building, or even more paradoxically, as
supports that were helping to hold up the walls. Upon reflection in the following months,
the other works in the show were less interesting to me because they had too much
internal compositional structure [Fig 17] or they exerted too much physical presence
over the pre-existing architecture [Fig 18].

Sound experiments: In February 2004, I participated in a reflective exercise with

COMPOST, held at the home of one of the composers. Each composer presented a new
piece of music for feedback. After many years developing a process of turning loops on
and off to build large-scale digital audio works, I had an intuition to make a piece with just
one loop, all by itself, which would repeat for a while. The first loop I tried – the one
presented to COMPOST – was a digital loop lasting about ten seconds made up of an
electronic drone lasting several seconds, followed by a silence lasting a little longer
[Box 2: Disc A]. I called this my on/off music. The juxtaposition of sound and silence
also had connections to my previous acoustic compositions, in which long silences were
often used to punctuate large-scale structures. Upon hearing this on/off experiment for
the first time through the stereo speakers in my home studio, I encountered my sonic
surroundings in a fresh way. In the absence of more complex musical layers and with the
speakers set at a low-volume, I was able to compare the sampled drone with the other
incidental hums and sounds in the office and in the house and street beyond. The way
the loop came in and out of silence continually arrested my ear, since it could not settle
into one state or another. This work seemed more ephemeral than other music I was
making, in that it highlighted the changing sounds in the environment, over and above
the constant sound of the piece. However, at the time of sharing my on/off piece to the
other composers in workshop, the piece seemed limp. The direct formal attention given
to the work by the composers, as if it was a concert piece, seemed to deprive it of its
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impact. This raised the issue of how I might bring people into the particular attention of
the sonic work without imposing a format that defeated its subtle workings.

First significant public presentations

My experiments continued, and in the second year of my research project I consolidated

my in situ working practices through two opportunities to present my work in public
forums.

Consolidating my visual practice: I was awarded an eight-month studio residency at

Metro Arts, a contemporary arts facility supporting independent and emerging practice in
inner-city Brisbane. The residency began in March 2004 and ended with a solo exhibition
in November and December 2004. In the first few months, I worked within the confines of
my third-floor studio [Fig 19] hardly making anything at all. Instead, I was mainly staring
out the window at the city streets below, quieting my mind whether I liked it or not. Then,
one day, a friend visited out-of-the-blue. He had brought with him a digital camera, so we
decided to walk around the CBD and go exploring. Coming across a pile of red milk
crates on the corner of a street, I decided to make a work then and there, without really
thinking about it, whilst my friend took photographs. I moved the crates about, testing
various angles and placements, until I worked out one that seemed to click [Fig 20]. It
felt a little risqué handling items that were clearly not mine in public view. More
importantly, it felt strangely right to use a series of found objects in the very place I had
encountered them.

After this experience with the crates, I re-defined the function of my Metro Arts studio – it
was to be a site-office from which to travel out into the city and make work with the things
and patterns I found there. This got me going. During the remainder of the residency, I
worked both inside and out the Metro Arts building, and in the city streets and parkland. I
worked by either introducing simple materials to map architectural features (mainly Lego
and sticky tape) [Fig 21], or by re-arranging and re-orientating the materials and patterns
pre-existing in the architecture (mainly windows and doors, and also surfaces with dust,
leaves and petals).

The work produced during the residency was nearly all unannounced, without securing
prior permission from the owners or stakeholders in those places. Sometimes, however,
it was necessary to gain permission. In the project Shopping on Edward St, conducted
towards the end of the residency and presented in the ensuing exhibition, I approached a
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dozen retailers in the street where Metro Arts was located. Six of them took up my
request to re-arrange their shopping products, from clothes to shoes to books to eyewear
[Fig 22]. Besides the fun of making connections with a variety of people, the exciting
challenge in this project was to work with patterns and arrangements that were already
very stylised and ordered in the form of the rows of products on display. How to out-order
the orders already in place?

In the exhibition, which I called City Living to reflect my consolidated in situ and out-and-
about approach, several issues and questions turned up that I was to experiment with for
the remainder of the research:

How could I bring my subtle ephemeral work to audiences?

Could I mix documentation with in situ work in an exhibition space?
What was enough work to show? What was too much?
What signage, maps and exhibition formats were needed?
What if people miss the subtle work, in situ or even in the documentation?

For this exhibition I decided to present both in situ work (created in the gallery and other
spaces of the Metro Arts building) and a wall of photographs that documented in situ
work I had made throughout the residency (within Metro Arts and in the greater CBD). I
was starting to identify a number of working tactics in my practice, and under the heading
of ‘positioning’, I clustered the photo-documentation into the following sub-headings:
‘building’ (working with Lego blocks), ‘connecting’ (working with sticky tape), ‘cleaning’
(streaking dust and sweeping away fallen leaves), ‘shopping’ (the Shopping on Edward
Street project) and ‘opening and closing’ (arranging windows, blinds, doors and drawers)
[Fig 23].

Consolidating my sound practice: In September 2004, towards the end of my Metro Arts
residency, I was involved in a one-night student-curated sound and video event, titled
SCOPIC, held in various locations in the QUT Creative Industries Precinct at Kelvin
Grove Urban Village. For the event, I presented my on/off sounds to the public for the
first time. The location for my work was the university’s basement car park, to which I
had negotiated access through a range of organisations including the campus security,
faculty administrators and third party tenants. The work was titled Car Stereo-ing and ran
over several hours in the evening. In the near-deserted car park sat a single car with its
windows wound down, whilst an on/off loop emanated from the CD player inside
[Fig 24]. The sound was a five-second sample of a delicate acoustic guitar chord that
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resonated throughout the concrete chamber, followed by about twenty seconds of

silence [Box 2: Disc B]. People were directed to the work with a few signs near and at
the entrance of the car park, and its was also mentioned in the event catalogue.

Stationed in the car park all night – to make sure nobody drove off with the car since the
keys were in the ignition so the CD player would work – I was able to observe certain
interactions between the audience and the work, and also between the sounds of the
work and the surroundings. People wandered into the car park in dribs and drabs. Some
left immediately having neither seen nor heard anything to indicate a sound event, some
became more curious and approached the car to hear the sound looping a few times,
while others remained for half-an-hour or more. As a long-term audience member
myself, I found that over time the work began to work wonders. The longer we stayed
and listened, the more we heard the sound loop, and the more we heard the sounds of
the surrounding urban village map back into the sounds of the loop – gentle far-off
drones of cars, the breeze, people walking on the nearby footpath. Midway into the night,
a high pitched hum started to come in with the loop, almost in time with the repeats. It
was so in synch that I thought it may have been an error on the CD. Eventually we
discovered that a thermal control unit was causing the hum. My simple audio loop
functioned at the threshold of being apart from the environment and yet intimately a part
of it. This sonic work encouraged an attunement to the immersive environmental sounds
that are often masked and ignored, to a degree far richer than is possible without such a
sonic trigger.

In the weeks following this event, I realised how important it was to use a ‘found’
playback device, one belonging to the pre-existing environment. Although I had parked
the car, it looked like one of the regular cars that parked there everyday (in this case, a
white sedan like those of faculty services). It looked like it belonged. Introduced playback
devices, like PA systems set up in sound installations, are a visual incursion that rely on
us to ‘ignore’ them. Using found playback devices removed this distraction. This was part
of a general shift in my practice to reduce all things that might be read as a creative
intervention in a place, in order to focus on the subtle stylisation of the patterns of the
readymade units that, whether found or introduced, belonged with that place.

Relationship to broader fields of practice

During the period of my research described above, from mid 2003 to late 2004, I was
also expanding my readings on other creative practitioners and broader fields of practice.
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In particular, I was reflecting on the three strands of practice that I had identified in my
early journaling: minimalism, conceptualism and composition (see Ch 5.1). In October
2004, I gave a presentation at a postgraduate research forum hosted by the school of
visual arts at QUT Creative Industries, in which I outlined models of practice most
relevant to me at the time. In this presentation, I discussed minimalism in terms of
minimalist reduction (linked to Cage and Rauschenberg); the type of music composition I
referred to was serialist parameterisation (linked to Total Serialism); and my reflections
on conceptualism led me to recast this in terms of how an object might have different
concepts applied to it in different contexts, such as a readymade, which I described as
conceptualist multi-discursivity. I also summarised a list of ‘usual suspects’ that related to
these issues, namely: reduction, readymade, re-arrangement and repetition, as well as
site, performativity and non-representational presentation. My question at the time was:
how did these all fit together for me? I also identified three major difficulties I was
experiencing: contextualisation (what disciplines and context to ground these issues,
especially since I worked in a range of disciplines and did not feel loyal to any particular
one), terminology (what terms and discourse to use), and documentation.

By this time, I had also started a digital archive of images and other documentation of
works by other practitioners. My method of selection was intuitive; I had no conscious
selection criteria except to archive anything I was attracted to. This archive was stored
on my laptop and I consulted it often – a few times each week for many months to come
– either to add to it, or to reflect upon the emerging shape and patterns of this collection.
As part of preparing my postgraduate presentation, I noticed that the works I was
especially drawn to could be clustered into those from the 1950s to 1970s and those
from the 1990s and early 2000s. At the time, I was not sure what to make of these
clusters.

Then a calm before the storm (late 2004 - early 2005)

In the next half a year or so after the Metro Arts residency and SCOPIC, the pace of my
output slowed down. I needed time to reflect upon the major portions of practice that had
developed during 2004. I also had my first child in February 2005, which coincided with
and contributed to the slower pace. At this stage of the project I was wondering:

What will happen next?

What do I really value in the experiments and readings I have conducted so far?
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During this period, I read much of the literature on site-specificity (summarised by Kwon
2002), but found that the types of sites that this literature explored did not seem to
account for the way I thought my work engaged with sites and places. My overview of
the discourse of site-specificity was presented in the Sensorium conference, University
of Melbourne (June 2005), but I left my own position in regard to this discourse hanging.
At this stage I was wondering:

Which writers could I turn to, who speak about creative engagements with place in
ways that are more relevant to me?

These questions, voiced in the calm, were to be answered in a storm of activity and
insights to come in the second half of my research project.

5.3 Developing a Conceptual and Practical Framework (mid 2005 – late 2006)

A surprise at a high school workshop

In August 2005, I participated in a two-week residency with the visual art department of
Kelvin Grove State College, a secondary school in Brisbane with a strong emphasis on
excellence and innovation in the creative arts. During this time, I made in situ work
around the school, indoors and outdoors, and I enjoyed seeing first-hand how the
students reacted, or did not react, to the work. I also presented documentation of these
works and my larger practice on an exhibition wall in the visual arts building. No real
surprises here. But I was surprised by a one all-day workshop I conducted as part of the
residency. About a dozen students were involved in the workshop, mainly from years
eight and ten (13-16 years old). The day was a lot of fun and we produced interventions
styled around my creative processes, in the visual art building, the manual art
workshops, around the outside of buildings and in a courtyard [Fig 25].

How quickly the students picked up my modus operandi! The students had little if any
background in contemporary art practices, and their only acquaintance with my practice
had been a short slideshow presentation the previous day. Yet, within about a quarter of
an hour, students starting producing their own interventions, rearrangements and formal
patterning in their school environment. Students were making work that almost seemed
like my own work. It was as if my practice had spontaneously cloned or franchised itself.
This was both a delightful and an unnerving surprise; there was something significant
about this experience that I needed to digest.
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Over the next month or so, this workshop experience provoked the following questions:

What was being transacted via the workshop that the students could pick up on the
logic of my practice so quickly?
And more importantly, what is transacted in my practice?

The answer to these questions slowly crystallised. In the workshop, what was being
transacted was not a set of aesthetic objects or work. I was not giving the students a
work for them to perceive. Rather, I was being a conduit for a set of strategies and ways
of operating in the world, in terms of both perceiving it (the viewer/audience mode) and in
terms of handling and re-shaping it (the maker mode). In short, this experience got me to
thinking about creative practice as ways of being in the world.

Achieving ambient attention in a research lounge

In September 2005, a month after the workshop experience, I held my next exhibition,
Going Slow. The title referred to the slowing down that needed to occur to experience my
works, and also to how the progress of my research felt at the time. Slow going. This
was not a public show, but a week-long event at the exhibition space in the visual arts
building at QUT (H Block, Kelvin Grove). I designed the event to be a forum for gaining
relaxed, in-depth feedback from my peers and staff members, which coincided with a
period when my supervisors were on extended leave. I needed to let my ideas float
about in a forum for discussion and debate, to see what ideas were most useful to
pursue, and which to leave aside. In the main exhibition room, I set up a range of works
[Fig 26]. These were made during the week of the exhibition, as was now my typical live-
in or in situ approach. In the smaller adjacent exhibition room, I set up a discussion
lounge [Fig 27]. There were lounge chairs, coffee and refreshments, and on the walls, I
stuck up bullet points of my ideas and photo-documentation of past works for people to
read and view at their leisure. I was based in this space for the duration of the week, and
met a dozen people (staff and peers from different arts backgrounds). Discussions were
usually one-on-one, with key points documented on my laptop, and I clocked up over
twenty hours of discussion devoted entirely to my practice. Because of the proximity of
the lounge to the in situ works, the discussions addressed both my ideas and a direct
encounter with the work. I was also able to observe how people interacted with my work.
This was an incredibly rewarding experience, which set up the direction of the remainder
of my research.
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The main idea that surfaced through the research lounge was that of ambient attention.
This came about as a melding of two streams of thought. The first stream involved a shift
from being concerned with the what of my practice (time-space forms) to how one
engages with it and the sort of attentiveness being activated (ways of being in the world).
In addition to the revelation of the high school workshop, the way people interacted with
my in situ work in Going Slow was very telling. They searched here and there, either
enjoying the search or feeling self-conscious about how others would look at them
because, without there being anything obviously there, they might appear to be
wandering around aimlessly. Some people even asked me if I had made certain
incidental marks or gestures in the gallery which I had not noticed myself, let alone
tampered with. Observing people in this discovery mode made me reflect upon and re-
understand observations and feedback from previous exhibitions. For instance,
regarding the signage and maps supplied in the City Living exhibition at Metro Arts, the
consistent response was that these navigating devices were over-kill, destroying the
subtle poetry of the work and its discovery. Furthermore, around this time, several peers
told me about things they noticed around the university campus and inner-city, and they
had asked me if I had made these. I nearly always had not made such things, but what
was clear was that the sort of attentiveness coaxed by my work was then being taken up
by people in their day-to-day lives. All-in-all, I was reflecting on the attentiveness opened
up by my practices. But how to describe and contextualise this particular sort of
attentiveness?

The second stream of thought that led to the notion of ambient attention came from my
readings in ambient practices, which was one of the topics presented on the wall of the
research lounge. A few months before, in May 2005, I began reading about ambient
music and ambience more generally. I had thought for some time that my on/off sound-
based work functioned like background music, and it occurred to me that I should read
up about background music rather than just mention it off-hand. I discovered that
background music has a very particular history, including Brian Eno coining of the term
Ambient Music in the 1970s. My readings then broadened out to consider how ambience
had been taken up in various domains, from music to visual arts to built environment to
computing and literary studies.

Thus, combined with my shift in focus from what to how, my research into ambience
enabled me to provisionally name the sort of attentiveness that I was noticing in my
practice – ambient attention. By this I meant attending to the ambient details in a place,
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triggered through subtle interventions that did not break this ambience by being too
central or ‘in your face’.

The notion of ambient attention led to two queries that I was to explore in the remainder
of the research project. To begin with, what sort of ambience was I dealing with in my
practice? The literature tended to describe ambience in terms of those things in the
peripheral or background of our attention and the surroundings. However, I sensed that
while my in situ work may have began in the background or periphery, it was really
dealing with space in a way that got out of centres and peripheries, or foreground and
background, all together. Rather, I was dealing with the surroundings as an enveloping
whole. Since I was proposing an alternative notion of ambience to the mainstream of the
literature, I needed a framework of ambience from which to pivot. Somewhat surprisingly,
within the literature on ambience there was no articulate framework of ambience. My
query to arise out of a notion of ambient attention was thus:

Where could I go to find a framework of ambience, which would deal adequately

with my emerging interest in the sense of all-around non-peripheral ambience?

I also had an lingering sense that focusing on the how of my practice alone would not
suffice; how people interacted with their surroundings through my practice (myself
included) was clearly important, but what of particular time-space forms and their very
precise arrangement? I could not just ignore the forms of my in situ work, because I gave
so much consideration to their precise placement and materials, and it was this that
opened up the sort of attentiveness I was calling ambient attention. My second query
was thus:

What framework could be used to acknowledge and integrate both the

engagements (how) and time-space forms (what) of my practice, which were both
interacting with the surroundings (where)?

Discovering Heidegger

A few weeks after the Going Slow exhibition, I came across writings on the philosophy of
Martin Heidegger. Through the various interpretations of Hubert L. Dreyfus, and Julian
Young’s Heidegger’s Philosophy of Art (2001), I was led to Heidegger’s concepts of
world and earth introduced in his essay ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’. Firstly, world and
earth helped me to understand the different dynamics of a discursive-social reading and
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an aesthetic-sensorial-material reading of my work. Both readings were contextual – a

social context and a material context – and were both triggered by defamiliarisation. I
then realised that world and earth were different types of ambience, which helped
explain the different sorts of ambience that my own practice was engaging with – a social
ambience with priorities and hierarchies (the ambient of world), and a sensorial
ambience that could exist all-around without priority and hierarchy (the ambience of
earth), The notion of ‘ambient attention’ I had proposed earlier was now re-conceived as
an experience of the ambience of the surrounding-earth.

But there was more to get from Heidegger. Related to world and earth were modes of
being and their tripartite structure of what–how–where. When I realised that Heidegger’s
existential phenomenology always linked things (what) with ways of engaging (how) and,
furthermore, they were always linked to types of places (where), I realised that modes of
being could be used to discuss the range of issues that my ambient practice was
grappling with. This was quite exciting. Up until then, I had been searching for a suitable
analytical framework to help unpack my interests but was dissatisfied with the
frameworks and vocabularies available to me in contemporary arts discourse. While
formal readings may deal most with what, experiential readings with how and contextual
readings with where, the analytical focus of modes of being dealt with all three terms,
and all three terms seemed crucial in a discussion of my practice. The use of
Heidegger’s modes of being as an analytical focus became a fertile answer to the
question of contextualisation and terminology that I had identified in October 2004 at the
postgraduate presentation.

Visiting a philosopher of place

Because Heidegger’s philosophy was outside the gamut of expertise at my university

and Brisbane more generally, I needed to look elsewhere to get a critical review of the
framework of ambience that I was developing using Heidegger’s world, earth and modes
of being. Through the recommendation of several creative practitioners and theorists, I
was led to Professor Jeff Malpas, Head of Philosophy at University of Tasmania (UTAS).
Along with Edward Casey, he is one of the international experts on philosophy of place
and his work draws heavily on Heidegger. He was completing a book on Heidegger’s
sense of place, which has been recently published (Malpas 2007). Malpas was thus the
most appropriate source of feedback in Australia, if not the world, on using Heidegger in
terms of ambience. Also useful to me, although I did not discover this until I met him, was
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Malpas’ interest in creative practice and his experience in practice-led research (through
the School of Arts at UTAS).

Malpas generously made himself available for a two-day visit in July 2006. This was a
remarkably fertile excursion for me. The first day centred on philosophical concepts and
ambience as an abstract concept. Malpas suggested subtle yet significant corrections to
some of my key definitions and spatial understandings regarding ambience, and
suggested the term salience as a complimentary contrast to ambience (see Ch 1.2). On
the second day, we stopped speaking in the abstract, and instead looked through photo-
documentation of my works and considered how the concepts and philosophy we had
discussed related to the practice. The questions that arose included:

What is made salient through the in situ works? What sort of ambience?
What should and should not be made salient in the way I document my work?

It became clear in the weeks to follow which terms and ideas were useful and which
could be left to one side. I was able to produce a typology of four modes of being-in-our-
surroundings, one of which is the ambient mode of being (see Ch 1.3). I was also able to
determine the place of Heidegger in my research, which was to discuss the ambient
mode in terms of an experience of the ambient earth, which helped developed the
vocabulary to discuss creative practice (see Ch 2). I thus was able to answer the
question posed early on in my research regarding “the thing I am trying to get at” that
urges an expression across a range of forms and arenas. This thing is the ambient mode
of being.

I ended the visited by making a work in his office [Fig 28] and in a nearby courtyard
[Fig 29].

Refining and intertwining my relationship to broader fields of practice

As my conceptual framework around ambience and the ambient mode was being
refined, so too was my relationship to broader fields of practice. In fact, as certain
synchronicities emerged, the various strands and areas of readings that I had intuitively
pursued came together in ways I had not anticipated.

Firstly, in early 2006, the three strands of practice achieved their final description as I
came to understand the issues and reasons why I was attracted to them. For two
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strands, this was only a slight adjustment to the understandings I presented in the
postgraduate seminar in October 2004: minimalist reduction became minimalist emptying
(still based around Cage and Rauschenberg’s 1950s ‘empty’ works) and serialist
parameterisation became serialist patterning (still based on 1950s European Total
Serialism, but adding other forms of 1960s and 1970s American Serialism as well).
However, there was a larger shift involved in the other strand that I had previously
described as conceptual multi-discursivity. Through readings on graffiti, gifting, urban
adventuring and skateboarding, and also a paper on ‘multi-discursive things’ (Jaaniste
2006) presented at the Rhizomes conference at University of Queensland in January
2006, I realised that I was much less interested in conceptualism than I was in re-
conceptualising and de-conceptualising our surroundings through alternative
performances. These readings and thoughts led me back to earlier readings of the
French Situationist practices of actively altering the places, pathways and discourses of
the urban environment. This strand of practice came to be expressed most succinctly in
the dérive, and what I had first called conceptualism and later conceptual multi-
discursivity was now called situationist drifiting.

Further, I realised that these three strands represented the three approaches or
operating principles that were practically necessary to enter into the ambient mode. This
tied in with my thinking around broader fields of practice and with my conceptual
framework of ambience based around Heidegger. I had thus answered one of my two
initial questions journalled almost three years ago in September 2003. The question of
the relationship between minimalism, conceptualism and composition had become the
question of the import of minimalist emptying, situationist drifting and serialist patterning.
The answer was that they were the approaches to the ambient mode of being-in-our-
surroundings (see Ch 3).

By late 2006, I have digitally archived over six hundred images, diagrams or musical
scores which represented about 300 works by other practitioners. From this collection, I
realised that a small selection of the more contemporary works were examples that did
not just approach the ambient mode, but entered into it (see Ch 4).

Finally, also in late 2006, I discovered that the history of ambient practices in the
twentieth-century can be back-tracked to Cage in the 1950s, rather than Eno in the
1970s as is commonly thought. This discovery, achieved by following up a passage in
Tamm (1995), connected the three approaches to the ambient mode (see Ch 3) to my
survey of the history of ambient practices (see Ch 1.1); the first and major approach to
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the ambient mode (minimalist emptying, represented most strikingly by Cage’s 4’33”)
was also the source of ambience as a key term in creative practice. Previously, these
histories of practices had been separate clumps in my research that did not seem
directly related.

The discovery of ambient references in Cage’s writings whet my appetite for performing
key term searches on the use of ambience in discourses of creative practice prior to the
1970s. In doing so, I discovered ambient ideas similar to Cage’s espoused by another
major figure of the mid-twentieth-century, Clement Greenberg (see Ch 1.1 ‘Before Eno’s
Ambience’). This strengthened the links to my interest in visual arts and urban
architecture (and set up a range of future research directions into back-tracking the
more-distant history of ambience). It had previously seemed strange that much of my
discussion of contemporary work and my own practice was in terms of visual works,
rather than sonic works, but now this does not seem askew.

During the time of developing my conceptual and practical frameworks, I continued to

make in situ visual and sonic work, document it, and present it in talks, exhibitions and
other events. As these frameworks developed, so did my understandings of my ambient
practice and the way that my work functions. In the next section of this chapter, I give an
overview of these understandings. This harnesses the framework and vocabulary
established in the previous parts of the essay, and sets the scene for discussing the final
creative outputs of the research in the following chapter.

5.4 Current Understandings of My Ambient Practice (late 2006 – early 2007)

The practice developed in this research project involves making ambient works. Through
such works we attune to the entire pervasive material ambience of a place, revealing the
ambience of the surrounding-earth afresh. These works are subtle material fields that
highlight, annotate, are deduced from, and create reverberations throughout pre-existing
material series, patterns and properties of a place. This activates a nomadic sensorial
curiosity that hovers across the material properties in the visual- and sonic-scape of the
surrounding-earth.

To produce these ambient works, I follow an in situ installation methodology, in which I

create works in direct response to and from an improvisation with the particular ambient
materiality of a place. During the research period, I have worked in a range of locations
in the built environment, including homes, office spaces, shops, galleries and other arts
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spaces, streets, outdoor paved areas and parklands. Overall, I either re-arrange found
materials to highlight material patterns in a place, or introduce readymade units that
annotate the pre-existing material patterns in a place. In making ambient works, I have
developed and categorised my practice in terms of a range of tactics – spotting,
surfacing, orientating and tolling – each of which has a set of related sub-tactics.

I have also developed a range of secondary supporting practices – activities I undertake

as a practitioner to present, preserve and promote my work. Some of these activities
occur in conjunction with the in situ making and focus on the exhibition of in situ work
(preparations of space, signage and exhibition documents). Others occur once the in situ
work has been made (observing, discussing and reflecting, and documenting and
presenting documentation).

In all this, creative tensions relating to public presentation are at play in my practice.
Within my in situ making, tensions arise when the work is made for an exhibition as
expectations, deadlines and the need for particular permission and access become
paramount. Within secondary supporting practices, there is a fundamental tension that
exists between the subtle ambient quality of the in situ work and the various means of
making it salient to other people.

I will now provide general descriptions of my tactics and process of in situ making, before
outlining my secondary supporting practices. Specific examples that embody these
issues will be addressed through a discussion of my final creative outputs in Chapter Six.

Four tactics

My in situ works are currently grouped into four main tactics of making. I first
experimented with grouping works by tactic when I presented photo documentation at
the City Living exhibition at Metro Arts in November 2004 (see Ch 5.2). There were over
forty documented works, which I wanted to present in some sort of meaningful clusters.
Rather than by the materials used, date or location, I grouped the works based upon the
generative tactic at play – blocking, connecting, cleaning, shopping, opening and closing.
The usefulness of identifying works by their generative tactic was clarified during my visit
to Jeff Malpas in July 2006. As Malpas noted, tactics are not substantives (not fixed
objects or tangible things like materials, places and dates), so categorising by tactics
prevents the substantives from being made salient; only the ambient materiality and the
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rhythms formed between them should be salient and clustering by tactic helps achieve
this.

After City Living, the number of tactics I used to categorise my work grew to over a
dozen. Then, in early 2006, I started to notice underlying similarities that led me to
identify four main tactics, each with several sub-tactics. I list these main tactics below,
along with the sub-tactics represented in the final creative outputs of this research:

Ambient visual works

highlighting the visual-scape of urban surroundings

Spotting placing simple objects to annotate fixtures, fittings and furnishings

~ basic Lego blocks on, beside or under features

Surfacing creating contrasting stripes or planes on and between divisions in

fixtures
~ sticky taping, either between structures or on flat surfaces
~ streaking dust or mist with fingers
~ sweeping patterns in petals, leaves and other debris

Orientating opening and pivoting fittings in formal patterns in urban surroundings

~ pulling out doors
~ sliding open drawers
~ adjusting heights of blinds/windows

Ambient sonic works

highlighting the sonic-scape of urban surroundings

Tolling placing a drone-like sound in the surroundings that regularly

fades in and out
~ digital loops, played on found sound systems

New tactics usually emerge by accident, as part of day-to-day activities and interactions
with my surroundings when I am not consciously thinking about making. Something
catches my eye, or I notice myself or others fiddling about with particular materials or
arrangements in the surroundings. The new tactic is then trailed, repeated, named,
presented and consolidated into a formula. My repertoire of tactics is thus evolving, with
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some no longer in use, others existing as a formula to draw on, and others still quite
formative.

There are a number of sub-tactics explored in this research which I have omitted from
the final creative outputs. Whilst crucial to the evolution of the ambient work submitted,
these works did not achieve an expanding ambient resonance. Like the ambient works,
they involve subtle, formal and material re-arrangements in a place, yet they do not set
up larger connections and rhythms throughout that place; they are gestures within an
urban ambience, but not a resonant field – too much like discrete drawings, or
sculptures, or music. Note that the sub-tactics of using blank stickers (in the tactic of
spotting) and texta markings (in the tactic of surfacing) made a minor appearance in the
final exhibition, but as I will discuss, these also did not produce successful ambient
works (see Ch 6.1).

The work of earthing – my in situ making processes

The visual and sonic works require slightly different processes, but they follow a common
work-flow outlined below. Within it, the opening that occurs at the point that the work
comes into being is most crucial, since here is the moment that the ambient mode of
being is opened up in and through the work.

(1) Selection of a place

Often, the place of making – some form of built environment – is given through
planned events, such as an exhibition or residency. Just as often, however, I make
works unannounced and outside of any external opportunity, in the places I
encounter day-to-day and those I visit when travelling on field trips or family
holidays.

(2) Scanning for opportunities

Once in situ, I scan for opportunities to make new work. This involves attending to
the material patterns and idiosyncrasies of a place – its fittings and fixtures,
lighting, shadows, hues, textures, sounds and available perspectives – in tandem
with considering what tactics and sub-tactics I could employ from my current
repertoire.
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(3) Experimenting with forms

Through hands-on experimentation, I fiddle about with the materials and features in
a place. Sometimes this occurs in conjunction with materials I have previously
collected and then introduce – such as Lego blocks, sticky tape and digital sound
loops. Usually, lots of different ideas and configurations are trialed. Often, I discuss
merits of the various trials with other people – my creative assistant, supervisors or
peers who pop in during making, and technicians and facilities staff.

There are three types of questions that I am considering during the stages of
scanning and experimenting. Most central are compositional questions about two
related issues – the choice of materials and placement and what to highlight in the
surroundings. But these cannot be answered without also considering pragmatic
questions regarding costs and time, and, when necessary, questions of permission
regarding what I am and am not allowed to do in particular places.

(4) An opening to the ambient mode

Then a resolved idea for an ambient work emerges, the formation of which opens
up a particular hovering state that resonates with material patterns all-around. This
formation emerges as a synchronous answer to the range of issues and questions
surrounding composition, pragmatics and permission. It ‘just fits’ like ‘it was meant
to be’, afforded by a situated series in the urban surrounding that I am working
within. The resolved idea for this work sometimes occurs all-of-sudden and other
times more slowly. Either way, I come to sense a loss of identity with the materials
and surroundings I am working with, as they lose their worldly meaning and
become present in their strange, expansive materiality.

In any place, there are usually only a few opportunities to make ambient work;
while I can no doubt inflect and annotate the many series in the built environment,
only occasionally does this lead to an expansive ambient resonance. These
opportunities tend to arise in relation to situated series that are not only porous and
regular but are also a little erratic. The erratic disruptions in the series counteract
the complacency that comes from assuming that the series is the same throughout.

(5) Executing the final form

Turning the resolved idea into the completed work often requires tedious or
meticulous attention and effort that belies the simple and straight-forward
appearance of the forms. This is often a question of millimetres or fractions of
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seconds; placement must be precise if the ambient fields and rhythms are to really
resonate.

(6) Experiencing for the first time

With the work made, I then experience it as a whole for the first time, which, if it is
working as an ambient work, brings me to experience the surroundings afresh.
Often I begin to notice other synchronicities and perspectives in the ambient work
and surroundings, which I was not aware of during the making process. We should
expect this of truly ambient work, and these synchronicities do not reduce the work
but add to and expand the sense of ambient connections.

I will now expand upon this general work-flow with regard to the particularities of my
visual and sonic works, from scanning through to executing, but I begin with the collation
of materials which happens prior to working in situ.

Making the visual work

The materials I collate for my visual ambient works include different types of Lego blocks
and sticky tape. The Lego blocks are of the most basic, brick-like variety, in a multitude
of shapes and over a dozen colours. I source these new and second hand, and collate
them by colour and shape. The sticky tape I collect spans a wide variety of widths,
colours, substance, texture and translucency, including clear tape, magic tape, masking
tape, electrical tape, duct tape, gaff and paper-based. These collections of materials are
put into portable storage boxes so they may be easily brought to the places I work.

There are a number of procedures I employ whilst scanning for opportunities and
experimenting with forms. I often give myself simple instructions in order to disrupt my
familiar modes of perceiving to notice material patterns (such as look down, look up,
notice all the red things, list all materials available). I consider which of my tactics and
sub-tactics I could employ. When I bring in my collections of Lego and tape, I search for
matches in colour and shape and, in the case of tape, translucency and texture between
the introduced materials and the surroundings. Sometimes, ideas are generated by the
observations of others. In any case, I am searching for what fits best with and highlights
the local materiality of the place.

During this process, the compositional questions I ask myself are: what materials to use?
what patterns and series to highlight? and what final arrangements and placements to
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employ? Once an opening to the ambient mode emerges in relation to the visual-scape,
executing the work requires simple yet fiddly and exacting hands-on placement and re-
arrangement of materials.

Making the sonic work

The current tactic of my ambient sonic work involves embedding digital audio loops into
the surroundings. Thus, my making begins off site, creating and collating the sound
loops. It involves a much more in-depth process than simply collecting materials for the
visual work. My music composition practice is employed, albeit with very small drone-like
units. I start with a sound sample (generated by myself electronically, or sampled from
my past work or other sources) such as trills, hums, swells, low rumbles and white noise.
Then I generate variations based on differences in duration, envelope and timbre. A
stock-pile of similar sounds is produced for later use, or, occasionally, I specifically make
a sound for a particular place.

Scanning for opportunities to make an in situ sonic work involves looking for found
playback systems to use. I attempt to find out all the audio playback devices that exist in
a place (such as a PA, computer, television, portable stereo etc), which I can access,
and which would be most appropriate.

Experimenting with forms involves dealing with the compositional questions of (sonic)
material and (temporal) placement, namely: what timbre to use? what envelope? what
duration and ratio of sound and silence in the loop? and finally, what volume which
blends in rather than being too loud (foreground) or too quiet (background)? This
involves bringing sounds into a place that I have prepared earlier. Sometimes I modify
the loop (in real-time if I have my laptop, or off site). As I test and adjust sounds, a
solution to these questions emerges that provides an opening to the ambient mode in
relation to the sonic-scape.

Executing the final form of the sonic work involves fiddling with the chosen playback
device to make sure it can perform continuous looping. This is often a far more difficult
issue to solve than one may imagine; from CD players to cars to PA systems, there is
usually some form of technical issue I need to overcome.
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The moods of making

Throughout this process of in situ making, I experience a general ebb-and-flow of

moods: intrigue associated with scanning opportunities of a new place; boredom as
intrigue wears off and initial perspectives become stale; and anxiety as I wonder if any
good ideas are going to turn up – especially when I am working to deadlines and
expectations associated with some form of public presentation. Then, suddenly, a flow
state occurs when a resolved idea turns up through an opening to the ambient mode;
followed by tedium in executing the final work which sometimes shifts into a meditative
state; and, usually a little later, excitement as I come to experience the surroundings
anew through the work.

If the place is one of those that I experience day-to-day – my house, the footpaths and
parkland I walk along, my shared office and the wider university campus – then the
intrigue of place is replaced by a continual nagging question about what I could make. If I
have made something in those places, then the question is about what I could make
next.

On the few occasions when an idea for a work jumps spontaneously out of my
immediate surroundings, I do not experience the arc of intrigue, boredom and anxiety
associated with planned works. I am simply caught up in an unexpected flow-state
wherever I happen to be, which then moves on to tedium and excitement as I then make
and experience the work.

Further stages
There are several further stages in my creative process. These are critical to my
ambient practice as I dedicate as much time and care to them as making in situ
work. Operating in tandem with my in situ making, when applicable, are supporting
exhibition practices including preparations of exhibition spaces, signage and
accompanying documents. And after the work is made, there are several further
stages: documenting and presenting the documentation and observing, discussing
and reflecting. I will address these in some detail below.

The work of worlding – presenting and preserving the in situ work

In addition to in situ making, there are secondary practices I undertake to bring this work
to other people. Some of these are associated with presenting my in situ work in
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exhibitions, while others are undertaken in order to preserve our encounter with the work
beyond its in situ existence.

The fundamental tension at play in my creative practice, felt throughout all these
supporting activities, turns up when considering how I might bring people in contact with
my subtle, ambient works. Specifically:

How can I point towards and make salient (foreground) my ambient works, without
defeating the essential ambient quality (neither-foreground-nor-background) of
these works?

Throughout my research project I have experimented with various approaches, shifting

towards much more subtle solutions. But even the most subtle solutions will never
resolve this tension, since it is the fundamental tension between earth and world –
between the ambient work (which drops us down onto earth) and the means to make the
work salient to others (which brings the work into contact with the sub-worlds of my
community of practice and various audiences). My aim, then, is not to remove the
tension but to be as sensitive to it as possible.

Exhibiting is the main way I provide the opportunity for people to experience my work in
situ. Whilst making work for each exhibition, I consider the following questions:

How much work do I exhibit?

Should I exhibit documented works in addition to in situ works?
What exhibition documents (such as catalogues or statements) do I present?
What signage can I use to help with navigating the exhibition and individual works?

Whilst considering these questions, I am also wondering:

What is not enough or too much?

And how do I present them so that they do not invoke contradictory conventions of
foreground and background?

Dedicated exhibition spaces often have a range of pre-existing artifice that set up
conventions of foreground and background attention, which work against the ambient
mode. Thus, even though my modus operandi is to work with the pre-existing place just
as it is, within an exhibition space I also ask myself:
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Is there any need to remove exhibition artifice or prepare the space in some way to
avoid, as much as possible, conventions of foreground and background?

In my research I experimented with various approaches, which I drew upon for the final
exhibition (see Ch 6.2).

Documenting the in situ work and presenting it is the main way I preserve my work, for
myself and for others to encounter beyond the life of the work. It is also the main way I
present it to larger audiences who were never there for the in situ experience. Whatever
format used, I attempt to capture something of the ambient qualities of my work in a
durable record. But there is a tension at play between the exhibition and documentation
of in situ work, which is an issue that is part of any creative practice orientated towards
live or installation formats. The ephemeral, unframed, dispersed and situated qualities of
the in situ work sits in stark contrast to the permanent, framed, discrete and
transportable qualities of audio and visual documentation. So I ask:

How can I present documentation that suggests the in situ qualities of the work?
How do I suggest the disperse ambient field within a framed document?
What overall format of documentation suits best?
What textual and other information do I include to orientate people?

In my research, I experimented with various approaches, settling on a particular ‘house

style’ of photographing visual in situ work presented in a picture book, and a way of
presenting audio loops on discs.

For visual works: My house style involves multiple images in landscape format to capture
the distributed quality of the work. Generally speaking, each viewpoint of my work
requires a close-up, depicting the intimate details of the inflected or annotated series,
and a wide-angle, depicting the relationships and reverberations of the series within the
wider surroundings. Once documented, I use subtle digital editing to address barrelling,
skewed horizon lines, colouration inconsistencies, and image cropping.

For the final outputs of this research, I decided to use a landscape postcard-size picture
book, which put the wide-angle on the left-hand-side and the close up on the right. This
left/right format allows readers the space and time to be immersed in each pair of
images. Book layout requires two levels of selection and story-boarding – ordering the
selected images of a single work to achieve a sense of ‘walk thru’ continuity, and
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ordering the selected works across the entire book to achieve a sense of continuity
between my sub-tactics.

For sonic works: Early on, I would present a single iteration of an on/off loop on a
compact disc, which needed to be looped by the playback device. However, I now
present the on/off loops as long tracks, to prevent people listening to the short single
loops as if they are the work, and to cater for equipment that cannot perform continuous
looping of individual tracks (like some older CD players). The audio signals are set at a
soft volume, compared to standard commercially-release discs, to suggest the soft
volume required for the tracks to work in an ambient way.

Note that, whilst the photographs are 'post-situ', since they come after the fact as a
documentation of what happened, my on/off loops are 'pre-situ'. These loops are not
documentation of a previous sonic work, but the materials for a new sonic work, to be
activated in situated playback.

Whenever my work has a public outcome – via exhibition or documentation – I must deal
with issues of signage and textual information, which I refer to as sign-posting. The
general arc of my research project has been to provide less and less specific
information, thus giving audiences more opportunity and responsibility for discovering the
work and connections to the surroundings. It is important to note that I no longer title my
individual in situ works, neither do they bear the title of ‘untitled’. Since the Going Slow
exhibition in September 2005, there have not been any naming tags attached to them.
Previously, my titles named the materials and tactics involved (such as “Sticky taping on
flooring”) but this defeated the ambient quality of the work, by suggesting that the form of
the work was just the materials I had added or altered in one particular area, rather than
the complete material ambience that it activated.

Observing, Discussing, Reflecting

I reflect on my work and practice through observations of how people interact with my in
situ work, and discussions with them about their experience of and insights about it.
During this research project, I have had many, many hours of discussions and email
exchanges with a range of people (creative assistant, curators, fellow practitioners,
reviewers and writers, administrators, technicians and facilities staff, friends, family and
strangers) about both the in situ works and documentation. I did not keep an hourly log
of these dialogues, but I calculate it would be into many hundreds of hours.
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Discussions can occur in situ, whilst experimenting and making the work and then whilst
experiencing the final work. Sometimes formal frameworks, such as exhibition floor talks,
compliment the more common informal discussions. Whist in situ, I am able to observe,
and sometimes document, the way people move about and interact with the place when
discovering my work. The fundamental tension between the ambient quality of the work
and making it salient to others can arise on these occasions. Often I am asked to point
out the work or describe certain aspects of it whilst in situ, and I wonder how much to
say. It feels like I am straddling a thin line between being too cryptic and too direct. I also
have many discussions and opportunities for reflection with people post-situ (beyond the
in situ experience), through informal exchanges in person and via email, and through
formal frameworks such as artist talks and research seminars. (See Appendix A for a list
of the formal talks and seminars conducted during my research project.)

Having a long-term creative assistant (theatre director Nerida Jaaniste) has been an
immensely valuable source of reflection and insight throughout my research project. For
at least a few days a week over the last three years, we have reflected upon the nitty-
gritty of individual in situ works, exhibitions and documentation, from planning stages
through to the execution and experience of these outputs. We have also discussed my
readings and conceptual frameworks. Through this long-term professional dialogue, we
have also been able to reflect upon the overall characteristics and evolution of my
practice. Although less frequent, the long-term dialogue with my principal research
supervisor (painter and visual arts lecturer Dan Mafé) has also been a valuable source of
reflections and insights.

The digital archive of my photo documentation and audio tracks that I have built up
during this research – over 10,000 images and 300 tracks sorted and stored on 10
gigabytes of hard-drive space – has been a valuable source of reflection in my practice.
Regularly looking and listening back through the archive is a simple way of seeing
various patterns of practice emerging and shifting.

Experiencing the work and the ambience of place

Typically, an encounter of the ambient work follows the order of the four modes of being-
in-our-surroundings as I introduced them in Part One (Ch 1.3).
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The work begins in the background (un-noticed, below salience) before we come to
notice the re-arrangements and annotations in the foreground (noticed and salient). Les
Hooper (2005:np) has written about this shift from background to foreground in terms of
a “catalogue of looking” relating to my visual works, “ranging from unconscious gaze,
single take, double take, to prolonged scrutiny”. The same could be applied to hearing
my sonic works.

These re-arrangements or annotations do not stay in the foreground, but rather ‘tune in’
our attention to relationships within the surroundings. The ambivalent mode is entered,
as our attention shifts between this and that all about the place. Sometimes I have
observed a very child-like ‘treasure hunt’ enthusiasm, when people start to lose their
inhibitions and scurry about and crouch down and move all around to experience the
place. Sometimes people even start to ask me whether this or that is also my inflection
or annotation, though often it is not.

In the ambivalent mode, there is often a heightened dichotomy of worldly associations,

between the playful, ephemeral, fragile in situ work, and the sombre, fixed and robust
build environment. This is dramatised most in my Lego works, which pits cheap, childish,
temporary, small Lego blocks against expensive, adult, permanent, large built
environment. Such polarities show up the artifice of the worldly regions within which the
in situ work is placed, which sets up a tension that waits to be released...

… Then all this can dissolve into some form of hovering state, in the ambient mode.
Once we realise built environment and ambient gestures are part of the one pattern, their
worldly differences collapse and their similarity, being all part of the one earthy terrain,
comes to the fore. For instance, there is no longer building and Lego but just stuff
dispersed about that all contributes to undulations in earthy material properties.

The entire pervasive materiality comes into attention, even if in a fleeting or partial
sense. The surroundings hover in an ambient dissolution of figure-ground hierarchies, as
a material-earth all-around comes into salience.

Finally, some have described to me how they have taken the type of attentiveness
encouraged by my work into the surroundings of their day-to-day life. These stories are
usually told to me in terms that reflect the ambivalent, rather than, ambient mode:
someone listening to ambient sounds for a whole fortnight whilst walking to and from
work; various people telling me they think they have found my work in other places
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around Brisbane, although it is usually not something I have done; and an artist who,
deciding to look for ambient details as she was walking outdoors, immediately turned
upon a lost book in a street, which she gave to me as a gift.

Earthy and worldly readings

After experiencing the ambient materiality of the place there are range of responses and
readings that are shared. Some focus on the earthy aspects of the ambient work, whilst
others on the worldly.

Some people speak of a peaceful, meditative experience that I attribute to the earthiness
of the ambient mode-of-being. To experience the work is to become calm and sensorially
connected. This is a response that I am aware of and hoping to achieve at the time of
making. Others speak of an expansive opening up of awareness or even transcendence
from the ordinary.

In contrast, others have commented upon a witty or subversive quality within my ambient
work. Although these worldly readings are generally not in my mind at the time of
making, they are a necessary residual of the work (as discussed in Ch 2.5 and Ch 4.3)
and it is not surprising that they are commented upon frequently. Such readings include
commentary on: do-it-yourself and the politics of urban place (who does what where?
and revealing under-used or dysfunctional spaces); the function of expectations and
norms of exhibitions (a mild form of institutional critique); and slowing down (a critique on
the busi-ness of urban life and exhibition manners). Generally, it is those with a stake in
the particular sub-worlds where my work is placed (such as those associated with
exhibition practices or management of urban facilities) who share these responses.

5.5 Endings (early 2007)

After presenting my final exhibition, and whilst producing my final creative documents, I
happened to watch a documentary (Supin 2002) on one of my favourite composers, the
Estonian Arvo Pärt. I remember watching this late one night, and he said something that
made such deep sense to me.

At the end of the 1960s Pärt rejected the atonal serialism that was the trend for modern
European composers and his own early training. For the next seven years he did not
compose anything, but started to research early church music and chants. Then in 1976,
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he wrote a simple two-minute piano piece, Fur Alina. This was the break-through that led
to the rest of his minimal, spiritual and often beautiful oeuvre. In a short scene mid-way
through the documentary (DVD Scene 7 ‘Auftakt’), Pärt is shown tinkering on a keyboard
and explaining the importance of this work in a masterclass with university music
students in 1999. In discussing his creative ambitions, Pärt muttered something that
suddenly felt like the end of my research journey, if applied to the materiality around us
rather than to discretely-presented music. And by ‘end’ I mean both the last stage and
the central point of the research:

I’d say I had a need to…

I wouldn’t call it neutrality…
A need to concentrate on each sound
so that every blade of grass would be as important as a flower.
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chapter six
presenting the ambient work
(late 2006 – early 2007)

This chapter is a journey taken together, through which we encounter the final creative
outputs presented in this research project – my ambient works and documents of them. I
present these works and the issues surrounding them as concrete examples of the terms
mapped out in this essay, namely, the understandings of my ambient practice
summarised in the previous chapter (Ch 5.4), which exist within the larger conceptual
and practical frameworks set up in Parts One and Two.

There are two types of outputs, which are encountered differently. Firstly, there is a final
exhibition, showcasing around a dozen in situ works, that we encounter together through
a guided tour and reflective discussion. Most attention is given to this exhibition in the
prose of this chapter, since it highlights an ambient encounter with in situ work that is no
longer available in its embodied form. Secondly, there are the final documents in the
form of a picture book and set of audio discs, presenting selected in situ works made
throughout this research project. These can be experienced first-hand, since they
accompany this essay (see Box 1 and 2).

6.1 Final Exhibition (Oct 2006) – An Encounter

Some of us, including myself, have already been on parts of the journey we are about to
take. And we had stories to share – of our experiences, feelings, insights and questions
– at the exhibition, at the hour-long exhibition floor-talk, in café meetings afterwards, in
debates at the research office I share, on the phone late at night because one of you did
not want to forget your ideas, and via email. This journey is an amalgamation of these
stories, heavily abridged, and the questions put to me are an amalgamation of those
previously asked as part of sharing our stories. If this is your first encounter, I hope you
get a sense of what it was like to be there, presented with and present in the ambient
mode of being.
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Approaching the Ambient

3 – 6 October 2006, The Block + surrounds
incorporating Ambient Café
11 September – 20 October 2006, crEATe café

QUT Creative Industries Precinct

…before entering The Block…

We meet under the large awning outside The Block [Fig 30], a large block-like building
that is the main exhibition space at QUT Creative Industries Precinct. Before you arrived,
some of you may have been sitting at the café or outside on one of the seats outdoors in
what is called the Parade Ground, or you may have just come down from an office space
in one of the buildings that adjoin the Parade Ground, or from a lecture hall, and others
of you may have walked up from the Kelvin Grove Urban Village next to the campus.

The Block’s entrance is fully open. It is a large squared entrance over one-and-a-half
times the height of an standard-sized doorway. We can see well inside. We walk in.

…upon entering The Block…

The place appears empty. We are inside a large room, about the floor size of an indoor
soccer court and three-storeys high. The floor is a well-worn matt black. The walls matt
white, made up of a grid of rectangular and square panels, broken here and there by a
service doorway. The ceiling is black as well. There are no internal lights on, but we do
not really need to adjust our eyes, since there is plenty of light coming through the one
large window at the end of The Block near the entrance. At the rear of this main room,
opposite to the window, are two smaller rooms, side-by-side, separated by a small
hallway. Their doors are completely open and the rooms appear to be cube-like spaces
about five metres wide and deep.

So where is the work? Can you show me?

Do you have names for the works?

I could tell you where the works are, but that would be to defeat them. Directly pointing to
the work is problematic because it makes something-in-particular salient (foregrounds),
but these in situ works have been designed to make the whole ambient materiality of the
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place salient (dissolving foreground and background). So if I pointed out the material
contribution that I have made, whether through introduced materials or the pre-existing
materials that I have altered, this would hardly be the complete picture. The form of the
work is not just the configurations I made but the relations and connections with the
material all-around. Giving names to the works produces the same problem of singling
out particular parts of the ambience (such as certain materials, locations, times), and so I
no longer title my works.

Instead of pointing out or attempting to name the in situ works, let’s just take our time
and just see what we shall see, and hear what we shall hear.

…surfacing…

We walk a little more into the main room [Fig 31]. Perhaps something catches your eye,
marks of some kind on the floor. Here and there, arranged in parallel stripes is what
looks like black plastic sticky tape, or strips of semi-gloss paint. We walk around and
start to see more and more of these stripes. By this stage you have probably noticed that
the floor is a criss-cross of various-sized panels arranged to match the grid of the walls.
The stripes map out some of the panels; not the larger rectangles, but the smaller
squares which are about two feet wide. The stripes alternate with gaps the same width
as the stripes, and this snugly divides each square into six stripes and six gaps. As we
walk around, it now seems that all square areas, about two dozen, have been covered.
These squares appear to be spread out across the room in a regular grid, making three
rows along the length of the room. But not quite – have you noticed that some squares in
the middle are ‘missing’? And you probably notice that the stripes are parallel to the
length of the room. But not always – have you noticed that in a few squares, the stripes
travel perpendicular to the majority? Perhaps you work out that these few squares are
those that disrupt the regular grid.

The entire pattern of shapes throughout the flooring becomes salient, as does how and
where its regularity is disrupted. Rhythms echo within, between and without the squares.
The regular spacing of the stripes resonates with the grooves that exist between the
many panels of the floor. This resonance continues outwards, connecting to the patterns
on the walls, and all the patterns and structure of The Block. Differences between the
squares also hold us to this ambient visuality. The squares are now not always complete
squares, if you have come to notice the small triangular shapes sawn off various corners.
The form of each triangle is a different size, angle and orientation and this creates
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fluctuations in the larger orthogonal rhythms. Furthermore, the surface of the floor
becomes incredibly textured. Dust, scruff marks from feet and wheels, old and odd bits of
tape, changes in density and gloss of the floor paint [Fig 32]. Although they have always
there, by gazing through the stripes these material details seem fresher, easier to see,
more inviting and captivating.

As we have been moving about, immersing ourselves, the stripes have been
disappearing and re-appearing. Viewed directly from above, when we stand over them,
they can become almost invisible. Only at a distance, from certain obtuse angles, do the
stripes stand out as they reflect the whitish hue of the walls and doors. Shimmering
even. The reflections on the edges of doors, on the walls, and the more diffuse
reflections on the flooring, all shimmer as well. From other angles they seem to possess
the blackest black and become deep cuts in the flooring. By now, we are nearing the
back of the main room. As we turn around, we see the stripes line up in parallel rows and
by extension we can trace the lines all the way along the floor [Fig 33]. And the stripes
have changed colour. Grey, blue, aqua, peach, orange. Strange. We move a bit to get a
different view and suddenly colour shifts across the stripes. Colours stream in from
outside, from the buildings and trees and distance city-scape and sky and clouds,
through the large window at what is now the far end of the space.

Maybe, for some of you, this is enough wondering and wandering about the stripes. But
have I told you before that immersed in these in situ works, I like to playfully glide about?
Especially when no one is watching me. I walk, slink, crouch and even run around the
space trying to move the colours and light about the place. This kind of drifting about in
sensory curiosity is fun and exhilarating. Just try it. At other times I just like to stare. I can
stare at the one spot for ages and still not have seen all there is to see there.

…spotting…

Now that we are near the back of the main room, we move on over into the two smaller
rooms. Both have their extra-high doorways completely open. We decide to go into the
left-hand side room first. As we enter, we notice that its surfaces are completely black.
Floor, walls and ceiling. It is somewhat dark, as the only light source is the window at the
other end of the main room. And it, like the main room, initially appears empty. So we
walk through a small door at the back right-hand side, across a short hallway, to the
other small room. This room is the opposite; its floor, walls and ceiling are white, except
the skirting board which is light grey. Another empty room it would appear.
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Let’s go back to the black room [Fig 34]. Perhaps you notice that its surfaces are not
completely black? Some specks catch your eye? You need to look down to the skirting
boards. So many light switches and data plugs! Their casings are black, but the little
switches and plugs are white. They are everywhere, about a dozen on each wall, evenly
spaced, a few centimetres above the floor. And they are being doubled, by little blocks of
some sort placed directly underneath these switches and plugs, matching almost exactly
their width and colour [Fig 35]. It looks like Lego. Perhaps you also see green blocks
matching green switches, and a yellow block where a switch is covered with yellow
electrical tape. Any there any other shapes or colours? Some blocks don’t seem to relate
to any power points or light switches. Looking up, perhaps you realise there are other
shapes and protrusions from the wall, such as encased safety gadgets.

We retrace our steps to the white room, to have another look [Fig 36]. Again, so many
light switches and data plugs, located in the same areas as the black room. Blocks,
doubling those and other protrusions, are everywhere as well. In this room the green bits
really stand out. To see that the blocks are in fact Lego, you have to get up close. At this
proximity the stains, marks and other minutia on the flooring comes into view. The white
now becomes full of subtle colour variations, a translucent sfumato of purple, brown and
yellow stains and mottled sunlight.

A few more steps, and we return to the main room. Something else, besides the tape on
the floor, catches our eyes [Figs 37-38]. More Lego? The blocks are now all around the
walls – not only black and white but also grey, blue, orange, yellow, green and even
translucent red. There are now protrusions from the walls everywhere, many high off the
floor – brackets, door stops, safety lights, more light switches and data plugs, a pulley
system. Our eyes are drawn every-which-way, to the floor, corners and small details of
The Block. There is a rhythm between the colour-shape of the Lego bricks and the forms
they couple, which also makes the fine print and textures around the room come into
view. Larger rhythms start to form between all these smaller couplets, and become as
large as the building itself. The colour-shape all around hovers in a delicate salience.

So much material detail in The Block has been uncovered, much more than when we
first entered. But perhaps you are one of the people that missed the Lego in the main
room entirely, or missed all the Lego, even in the black room with the white bits shining
out.
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…orientating…

Here we are then, standing near the back two rooms, looking across the main room and
towards the large window near the entrance. This window takes up the entire end wall,
from floor to ceiling, some three-storeys high. The window is approximately square,
divided vertically into five equal columns about two metres wide, and horizontally into
three equal panels about three metres high. Perhaps you notice, like most others, that its
blinds, one per column, have been brought about half-way down into a stylised
arrangement [Fig 39]. The blinds are pulled down at different heights to produce equi-
distance steps, each about half a metre, within the middle horizontal panel.

We can see under and through the blinds to the grided patterns and rectangular forms of
the medium-density urban village outside, to nearby parklands, and to the distant
cityscape of Brisbane. As blinds and urban forms echo one another, the angles and
shapes of the urban-scape came into sharp relief. Suddenly, all the visual-scape to the
horizon is very close and all of it beautiful. This experience is later echoed in a review of
the exhibition:

[I]n The Block exhibition space, whilst examining the outside view that has been
framed by Jaaniste’s staggered placement of blinds, the adjacent apartment
building becomes as much part of our focus as the blinds, or the ‘work’,
themselves. At that moment, an overarching awareness of both the gallery space
and the urban environment exists. Foreground and background, inside and
outside, physical and spiritual, conflate into a unified whole or some kind of
existential totality or experiential momentariness. This is Jaaniste’s ambient – a
perpetual plane of existence in which everything becomes accessible. (Bennie
2006:np)

Do you recall the view of these blinds from outside, before you entered The Block? If you
were walking up from the Urban Village, or driving through the streets, you may have
seen them. Or perhaps you travelled past by bus and even thought, like one colleague,
that the technician must have been bored and was fooling around with the blinds. From
various vantage points of streets, parkland and buildings, the blinds can be seen up to
two hundred metres away [Fig 40]. Outside, the blinds do not look translucent but
appear as stark white forms, like Lego stacks or cardboard cut-outs. The stagger of the
blinds, the steps leading up to The Block, and diagonals in the architecture echo one
another, dissolving the built environmnt into a single field of oscillating visual pattern.
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…tolling…

We are now standing close to the window, staring outside. We turn to the nearby
entrance, and allow our eyes to drift around. Inside and out. Up and down. All-around.
Taking it in. After these visual discoveries, perhaps you start to dwell on the sonic
surroundings. There is somewhat noisy and intermittent construction work occurring less
than a block away, as part of development of the Urban Village. There are also muffled
undulating drones of traffic wafting up from the village centre and also from the busier
main road behind The Block.

Slowly, you may also start to notice another sound, like a soft, sustained musical chord
or electronic drone, fading in and out. Each cycle or loop returns about every half a
minute or so. Then we walk outside, to get a sense of where the sound is coming from,
and to get a different perspective on hearing it within the surroundings [Fig 41].

Outside, the loop has more presence, but so too do the sounds of the environment.
Perhaps you notice some of the half-a-dozen speakers that are part of the PA system
attached to buildings around the Parade Ground. The loop appears to be sounding
through these speakers, but this is only evident when we stand close by one of them. In
the surroundings more generally, the loop seems to be coming from all directions. The
volume has been set so that the sounds blend in, neither fully foreground nor
background. And the steady returning drone functions as a tonic through which all the
others sounds come to be compared and connected in terms of their timbre and
duration. Nearby cars, distant traffic, voices and sliding doors opening and shutting all
dissolve into the one undulating sonic-scape. We hear this scape afresh. An incredible
moment of sonic expansion.

Now and then, the timing and timbres of the loop seems to shift subtly. Is this a change
in the loop itself, or the subtle fluctuations of our perception? Perhaps, whilst we are
standing here over the next fifteen minutes, every time we pay direct attention to the
loop, we also become aware of an aeroplane flying overhead – as was my experience
early on in the exhibition. The drone of each aeroplane, sweeping across the sky and in
synch with the loop, extends our ambient hearing to the heavens. The regular on-and-off,
or in-and-out of the loop starts to map against other events as well. One colleague even
thought that the sounds were triggered by entering and exiting automatic doorways in
one of the buildings that surround the Parade Ground.
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6.2 Final Exhibition (Oct 2006) – Discussion and Reflection

…sitting down outside, near The Block…

We walk to a table nearby The Block, on the edge of the Parade Ground, near one of the
speakers emitting the sonic work. Time to sit down, rest our legs, and reflect a little.

But there are other works to discover in this exhibition, around the Parade Ground
and in crEATe café. Can you lead us around these other works?

I am not sure I want to bother. You see, I have come to think of these as less successful
in terms of inviting and sustaining the ambient mode of being. By being either too
dispersed or too cluttered, these half-a-dozen or so works have not produced the
ambient resonance that the more successful works do. For the most part, they belong to
the sorts of works I made during my research project, which are like my ambient works
except that they lack an ambient resonance (see Ch 5.4 regarding sub-tactics that do not
produce ambient works). Of course, in other contexts these works might really work, but I
think they have come to be a detraction to this particular exhibition. So instead of walking
around, I will just provide a quick description, starting with the visual work in the café.

The café is not an especially segregated area; it bleeds into the bottom floor of one of
the buildings that adjoins the Parage Ground, which also functions as the foyer for a
nearby theatre space. One wall of the café is covered by a wooden patchwork of
overlapping square and rectangular panels. This produces a mottled effect, with gaps
here and there behind the overlaps of the panelling. I spotted white Lego blocks in a
particular pattern of panel corners and, overall, I felt this work was successful. However,
I also placed black blocks and grey block in other areas of the café to articulare cornices
and skirting boards. These placements created discrete moments that do not connect up
together in a larger field of rhythms. The work with Lego was the first I made in the café.
Unfortunately, I kept adding more works, which cluttered the space. I marked up the
three different glass doorways entering the café area, using a special type of children’s
texta, matching the surrounding colours (blue, green, yellow, purple) and the shapes of
the safety stripes that exist on the glass panels. The use of texta markings is a new sub-
tactic I am experimenting with, and I did not realise that sunlight would make the
markings fade, which diluted the vibrance of the colour and its connections with the
surroundings. Another work, also a new sub-tactic, involved using white rectangular
stationery stickers to highlight the formal elements of the lettering on all the aluminium
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signs around the building. This work also spreads out to all similar signage around the
Parade Ground. Whilst geometric visual rhythms were created within the signs,
highlighting their brute materiality over their functionality, there is no connection between
these internal forms and forms in the greater surroundings. I have also placed white
sticker dots on various architectural spots around the Parade Ground and surrounding
areas, including the tubular door handles and the elegant curves of drainage grills.
These works have the same limitation as the stickers on the signs. The dust markings I
created, next to all the windowsills of each weatherboard building surrounding the
Parade Ground, also fail set up any large-scale rhythms and material connections in the
surroundings. The work is quite delicate and formal, but too dispersed and tiny in the
context of the surroundings.

There were two works based outdoors that extend works from inside The Block. I took
the idea of sticky taping squares on the flooring, and placed parallel, evenly-spaced
strands of clear packing tape on the concrete cube bollards (about 50 cms cubed) that
spread out in a low row from The Block to near the café. You may have noticed this work
when we first walked outside The Block. In this case, there happens to be less large-
scale echoing of shapes outdoors, but, I think, the activations of ambient light and forms
has been a useful compliment to the indoor work. I also arranged blinds in various
buildings that could be viewed from the Parade Ground, to extend the blind work in The
Block. However, the amount of reflection on the windows has meant that the blinds are
difficult to see and the patterning tends to disappear, withdrawing completely into
background.

Finally, I should mention that, as we speak, there is another sonic work going on in the
foyer area connected to several small lecture rooms in a building near The Block (Z3
Level 3). I now think my choice of sound does not quite suit the pre-existing sonic
ambience of this place. However, after being in the foyer area for a while, it does start to
work, especially when the automatic sliding doors to the level keep opening and shutting
as people walk in and out, letting sounds from outdoor merge with the work indoors.
Unfortunately, on the first day of the exhibition, the complicated automated playback
system, which normally handles multiple DVDs and digital media files, failed to keep my
single CD track looping, but this was fixed for the second day onwards.
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Why use so many areas for the exhibition, rather than just The Block?

Since the early planning stages a year or more before the exhibition, I knew I wanted to
use a range of locations at the Creative Industries Precinct, to reflect the range of places
in which I made work throughout the research project. I also wanted to counter any
reading that my ambient work is solely, or even primarily, an engagement with the logics
and discourse of galleries. In hindsight, it would have been better to not have made so
many visual works – I mean the ones which cluttered the café and worked less
successfully around the Parade Ground – but in the thick of in situ making, it is hard to
get a thorough perspective on which works are working, which should not be executed,
and which, once made, should be removed. Making work in situ as I do is always a trial,
an experiment, a risk of sorts, especially when it is to be publicly presented – will it work,
or will it not?

Can you describe your processes of in situ making in relation to this exhibition?

When making the works, I once again followed my process of in situ making, which I
have previously discussed (see Ch 5.4). This process begins with (1) selecting a place to
work. Then, through (2) scanning for opportunities and (3) experimenting with forms, I
consider compositional questions of materials and placement, along with questions of
pragmatics and permission. At some point, (4) an opening to the ambient mode occurs
as an idea for an ambient work emerges, which is afforded by a situated series and
which resolves all of the making questions. Then the process shifts to (5) executing the
final form and (6) experiencing the work and surroundings for the first time.

The place of the exhibition had been selected over a year before the exhibition date (I
was offered The Block as are other practice-led doctoral students at QUT Creative
Industries Faculty). Then, a few months before the exhibition, the opportunity to work in
the café turned up. Through a visual arts staff member, I discovered that the manager of
crEATe café was seeking to have creative works displayed there, and a block of six
weeks was available which overlapped with the time of my final exhibition.

For at least the year prior to the exhibition I wondered what I would make, as I
experienced these places at least a few times a week as part of my activities on campus.
About six weeks before, I began my active scanning, experimenting and executing,
beginning with the café, and then visual works outdoors. I then had one week of set-up in
The Block, followed by four days of the exhibition, and a day to de-install.
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The emotional ebb-and-flow of making discussed previously (see Ch 5.4) was again part
of this process, especially so, given the expectations of a final public and examined
presentation of the creative outputs of my doctoral research.

I will describe specific examples of the stages of scanning, experimenting, the opening
and executing in relation to making the four successful works we experienced in our
walk-through of The Block. I never planned to have these works represent all four tactics,
however, the characteristics of the place afforded it. I have now realised how useful this
is in explaining the range of tactics and approaches I have developed during my
research.

So how did you come to make the work that uses tape on the floor panels?

I had thought for a while that I wanted to highlight the grided floor panels in The Block –
the patterning was prominent yet easy to ignore. This seemed like a good opportunity to
use the sub-tactic of sticky taping as part of the tactic of surfacing. In some past works, I
stuck tape in parallel strands on floors, creating even divisions between and even
connecting various visual patterns and structures in the built environment, highlighting
light, reflection, shape and texture. After several weeks of discussion with the technicians
and coordinator, I was able to test out how tape would react to the flooring. I tested small
areas with several types of tape, and in every case, removing the tape removed a layer
of the black paint on the flooring. I was then given permission to use tape, as long as I
repainted the flooring afterwards.

As with other taping works, the compositional questions of materials and placement
related to the type of colour, width and texture of the sticky tape, the area where it would
be placed, and the direction of the strands. In my tests, I had used a range of tapes from
my collection, including clear packing tape, magic tape, black gaff tape, black electrical
tape and black two-inch duct tape. The final form of the work – the use of the squares
and duct tape – arrived as a moment of synchronicity involving the following conditions:
the black duct, like the black gaff and electrical tape, were at home in the exhibition
space (these are standard materials for technicians for taping out areas and taping over
leads); this tape was the most ‘invisible’ of all the tapes tested – it seemed to sit within
the flooring instead of on top of it, disappearing from certain viewing angles and coming
alive from others; the strands of two-inch wide duct tape, spaced apart by the same
width of the tape, fit snugly into the width of the squares; the squares were dispersed
across the floor, in a regular, yet also erratic, grid, highlighting the entire flooring with the
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small-sized floor panels; and the total number of squares was an area that could be
taped within the short set up time, and repainted afterwards within the even shorter de-
installation time – any larger segments would not have been feasible.

Executing the work took six hours one evening, and it involved immense concentration to
get all the tape down without wrinkles, stretches or distortions, in parallel and evenly
spaced rows [Fig 42].

How did you come to make the work that uses Lego blocks around the base of the
walls?

In some of my previous works using Lego, my main sub-tactic of spotting, I had

discovered that the basic Lego brick (of 2 x 2 ‘dots’) was the same width and
approximated the overall size of standard light and electrical switches used in Australia.
Knowing this, I had wondered long before the exhibition if I would spot the unusually
large number of white power points in the two small rooms in The Block. After I worked
out that the other colours of the protrusions in the rooms (such as green and yellow)
were a very close match to Lego colours, I decided to proceed. The compositional
questions of the types of blocks (colour and size) and their placement had been
answered. I did not need to do any trials or experiments with this work; I brought in my
boxes of Lego bricks, and began placing the blocks directly underneath each power point
and data plug in the rooms. I would then step back to see if the alignment was correct,
and couch down to amend and place more [Fig 43]. After spotting these small rooms, I
began to notice all the other switches and protrusions in the main room of The Block.
This led to the work being taken out into this room as well. The more I laid out the Lego,
the more I saw things protruding from the walls, and several other sizes and colours of
Lego bricks joined the mix. Since the Lego was not fixed in any way to the base on the
walls, I arranged for no cleaning to occur in The Block during the fortnight of the set-up
and showing of the exhibition (this also assisted the upkeep of the duct tape on the floor
panels).

How did you come to make the work that uses the blinds on the large window?

When planning for this exhibition, I had wondered whether the blinds in The Block could
be re-arranged as part of my sub-tactic of setting the heights of blinds and windows,
which is part of the tactic of orientating. I was especially interested in these blinds
because of their blank and geometric look, and their clear view to the urban surroundings
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outside. Prior to my exhibition, the blinds were always operated all together – set
completely up or down or a little open to let some sunlight in for various events. So,
could I operate the blinds individually, to set them in a stagger? In discussions with a
technician, we were able to devise a solution for setting the heights individually. Since
the blinds were all connected to the one controller, the winches of each blind except one
were turned off. This blind was set with the controller, and then the winch of the next
blind was turned on and the first winch turned off, and so on. The switches for the
winches exist at the top of the blinds, which means the technician needed a crane to do
the job. Because the crane had to be reset each time a new blind was set, the blinds
took about one hour to complete. To check the height of each blind, I would run to the
back of the main room and then outside to get a better view.

The compositional questions for this work related to which blinds to use (since there are
actually two sorts, one behind the other) and what arrangement to make. The choice of
blind was both pragmatic and aesthetic. Because the full block-out blinds buckle in the
heat, they are only ever drawn down in the afternoon or evening.65 Since my show was
to be open all day, the use of the block-out blinds was not feasible and I thus needed to
use the translucent blinds, which had certain advantages. As the translucent blinds
would allow more light into the building I did not need to use internal lighting (an
important consideration that I will discuss below). Also, it was possible see through the
‘haze’ of the translucent blinds to the outside, which meant that when viewing the blinds,
one viewed much more of the outside ambience.

Regarding the arrangement of the blinds, there were two questions: what size ‘step’
should there be between each blind? and which way should these steps lead up, to the
left or to the right? I first decided to set the blinds to lead up to the left, when looking from
within The Block, because of the contrary-motion that this formed with the step
formations outside the building, and how it would look when entering the building.
Regarding the ‘step height’, I first decided on an equal division of the whole wall. The
technician and I executed this, however it was not as successful an arrangement as I
had imagined it would be. There was something too clunky about this pattern, and it
seemed so much a part of the surrounding architecture that it disappeared too far into
the background [Fig 44]. I needed to rethink the pattern of the blinds, and came up with
the solution of setting equal steps within the middle horizontal row, which the technician
was gracious enough to change within the short timeframe. In this new arrangement, the

65
The block-out blinds are no longer restricted from being drawn during the day. As a result of working with the blinds for
my exhibition, the technician happened upon the cure for the heat stress.
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visual rhythms became more delicate and more closely reflected and highlighted the
stagger and visuality of the urban village and other structures outside.

Finally, how did you come to make the work that uses sound from the Parade
Ground?

I was aware for sometime prior to the exhibition that there is a system of audio speakers
attached to buildings around the Parade Ground, which hardly ever gets used. So, using
this pre-existing playback system, I hoped to make a sonic work from my tactic of tolling.
I needed to ask permission to use the speakers, for continuous twenty-four hour
playback throughout the exhibition period. The subtlety of my sounds assisted in
permission being granted.

The control unit for the speaker system is located in The Block. Over several days
leading up to the exhibition, I plugged my laptop into the system and played loops from
my audio library, which I could tweak on the spot. Once a loop was playing, I would walk
outside and all around the Parade Ground, listening to the loop and its relation to the
surroundings for at least a few minutes, before coming back into The Block to tweak the
loop or try another one. I slowly arrived at the final choice of loop. On the morning of the
first day of the exhibition, when I fine-tuned the volume, the construction work nearby
was especially loud. When construction noise returned to its normal level the next day,
the volume of the loop became too loud in relation to the surroundings, dominating and
disturbing rather than blending with it. So I needed to adjust the volume one final time,
which greatly improved the work. On reflection, I think the sound loop used was not
wholly successful on a timbral level, in terms of how the other sounds of the environment
blended in with the loop against this sound. I have come to think the sound sample was
just a little too rich and interesting, within the particular context of the Parade Ground –
too many harmonic layers (a chord) rather than a simpler (thinner) tone as I have used in
other sound installations. However, I thought the duration of the loop worked very well.

Interestingly, there were two sorts of audiences for this sonic work – pedestrian and
desk-bound, but I had only anticipated the first. There was the audience outdoors and in
The Block, who were usually walking through the area, or sitting for short periods. But
there was a second, indoor audience of those working in the office areas adjacent to the
parade ground, especially those located close to one of the speakers. I became
concerned that this constant loop might get annoying for this long-term audience,
however, once the volume was adjusted on the second day (based on the change in
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construction sounds), people in these areas commented that it was not annoying at all,
despite being constant.

Where there any overall challenges to your normal in situ processes?

There were several differences in making this exhibition compared to how I have
previously worked in situ. The window of opportunity to work hands-on to devise and
make the work in The Block was small. I had been inside The Block many times in the
previous two years, but it was always cluttered with exhibitions or exhibition set-up and
bump out. So I had never experienced it as emptied out until the week of my set-up –
and it wasn’t until three days into this time that the rooms were completely cleared.

The scale of the opportunity was a new and interesting challenge – in terms of the size
and expanse of the buildings (both the size of the main room in The Block and the size of
the Parade Ground) and also in terms of the length of time for the sonic work (one week,
as opposed to one day or night).

My normal direct hands-on improvisation was hindered when making three of the four
works. When making the blinds I needed to use digital images to trial various
arrangements, since the requirement of a crane to move the individual blinds meant I
could not do trials in situ. The arrangement of sticky tape on the floor was something I
needed to imagine beforehand; I could not conduct a large-scale trial-and-error process
as I have done in previous tape works, putting tape down and pulling it off again.
Removing tape would have ripped off the paint beneath, which would have been another
material contribution altogether and a distraction to viewing the work. The sonic work in
the Parade Ground took considerable time to set volumes, change the sounds, listen to
them and adjust them further; I needed to walk about sixty metres between the audio
controls in The Block and the central area of the Parade Ground. Normally I am in a
situation where listening and adjusting can occur simultaneously.

Besides making in situ works, there are other secondary practices that I employ in
exhibition contexts, to support the fragile and subtle nature of my ambient works –
preparations of a place, signage and exhibition catalogues and companions. While they
are not usually that visible to those visiting the exhibition, these secondary practices take
just as much of my concern and energy.
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What preparations did you make in the various areas of this exhibition?

My preparations relate to The Block. Although I work with a pre-existing place as it

already is, I have learnt that there are some preparations that I need to make whenever I
am using a dedicated exhibition space. I need to remove any exhibition artifice that
produces conventions of attention that set up foreground and background condition.
Sometimes, preparations are also geared to increasing the rhythmic relationships and
resonances within the pre-existing forms and patterns of the place.

My efforts were firstly directed towards the two very large projection screens
(approximate 3.5m x 5.0m) that normally hang on the walls of the main room in The
Block. The screens are white, like the walls, but they have a thick black border that
makes them clearly stand out, especially when the room is otherwise empty. In the
context of the gallery, even when not used, the screens take on the appearance of
having been deliberately added to and placed in the room by the exhibited
practitioner(s). Given this, I wanted to remove the screens but they could not be taken
outside of the main room because they are larger than any of the doorways (the screens
were built inside The Block). If you look up to the ceiling towards the back of the main
room, you will be able to see my solution. I have raised the screens using the lighting rig
to lie horizontal just beneath the black ceiling, and I employed a technician to design and
make large fitted covers out of black fabric [Fig 45]. Removing the screens not only
removed any chance they would have been interpreted as part of my material
contribution to the place, it also gave the grids and expanse of the walls more presence,
adding to the resonance of the tape and Lego works in the main room.

I also needed to consider the lighting in The Block. In past exhibitions, I realised that
artificial lighting in a gallery, especially when it focuses on particular parts of the walls or
floors, implied conventions of foreground attention – giving focus to certain places over
others. Since my exhibition was only open during the daytime, there was always going to
be plenty of light coming through the large window to flood all of space, including the
back two rooms, and so I decided to not use interior lighting. Using only the ambient
sunlight meant there were a lot more subtly undulating shadows and hues that changed
states throughout the day. A feeling of continuity between outside and inside was also
created, since all shadows throughout the building came from the one outside source.

My preparations also extended to the look of the window from outside. Pre-existing
wooden boards at the base of the window created a highly visible white band about two
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feet high. This band had the effect of reducing the size of the window, which upset the
geometries forms by the staggered blinds. It also cut the window arrangement off from
the surrounding architectural forms. To remedy this, I covered the boarding with black
cloth making this disruptive band all but disappear (if allowed to remove the boarding, I
would have).

I also decided on opening the very large door to The Block, rather than rely on the
standard-sized doorway. The entrance became more inviting, and inside was opened up
to outside, suggesting a continuity with the surrounding place rather than a separation
from it. With the larger doorway completely open, the sonic work in Parade Ground was
more audible inside The Block.

And there are no exhibition attendants – why is that?

If I was going to use exhibition attendants then I needed to determine where they would
be located. But there was not adequate solution to their placement. Without a foyer in
The Block, attendants would have to be placed either inside or outside. As I had noted in
previous exhibitions in The Block, when attendants were placed inside with a chair and
table, they functioned as a material excess, as something to-be-ignored, and installations
in The Block appeared to occupy less than all-around the place. In my case, to place
attendants outside would have the same effect, functioning as a material excess to the
work in these outdoor surroundings. Furthermore, based on discussions with precinct
management, I could not guarantee what attendants would and would not say to those
encountering the work, even with instructions. There was a risk that any specific
directions given by enthusiastic attendants could compromise the subtly of the work and
overall signage. For these reasons, I decided not to use attendants.

How did you decide what signage to use? Were these the only clues to
discovering your works?

My approach to signage for this exhibition has been a new development in my practice. I
deliberately embedded signage into the already-existing architecture and furnishings of
surroundings. In this way, it does not overpower the work but operates on a similarly
subtle level.

Where was I to put a sign for the exhibition title? A title inside the space would suggest
the exhibition is restricted to that space, or that the work is somehow ‘inside’ the space,
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rather than the space being activated by it. As such, people would need to ignore the
foreground detail of the title as not-the-work, which is a contradiction of the ambient
mode. Therefore, I choose to put the title outside The Block and to make the sign blend
in with the surroundings, I decided to place it on the building itself, on the awning that
comes out from The Block in one of the corners of the Parade Ground. To make the sign
blend in even more, I matched its the colour, font, weight and lower-case styling to the
names of the buildings dotted around the precinct [Fig 46]. Did you notice it when you
arrived at The Block?

I also prepared several signs that presented information on the exhibition. You may have
noticed that outside the entrance to The Block there is an A-frame with basic exhibition
information, inviting people to walk into The Block and begin exploring the ambient
surroundings, and suggesting there is an exhibition companion inside [Fig 47]. The
wording was deliberately crafted in negotiation with precinct management to function in
lieu of exhibition attendants. When we walk over to the café later, you will probably
notice small A5-sized signs on the tables which look like those commonly used for
menus and advertising. These signs give basic information on the title and dates of both
exhibitions (Ambient Café and Approaching The Ambient). To compliment these table
signs, there is an A4 sign on the serving counter. This sign provides an exhibition
statement for Ambient Café and can be read when people pick up food and beverages
and use the EFTPOS machine [Fig 48].

This subtle signage alerts people to the exhibition in terms of its title, dates and
locations, but it does not give any clues as to where to find the work. For such clues,
follow me.

…back inside The Block…

We walk back into The Block. Half-way along the wall of The Block where the entrance
is, there are two doors that open onto a small kitchenette. The doors open out in the
same way as the back rooms, suggesting that this is also a place to explore. Did you
notice this area before? The kitchenette is only two-feet deep, with cupboards above, a
drinks fridge to the right, and a sink to the left. It appears empty, except for four booklets
lying neatly in a row on the bench in front of us [Fig 49]. I pick one up and hand it to you
(see Box 3: Exhibition Documents). It is about the size of a postcard, spiral bound to
open up as a landscape spread, with about 20 pages. The cover is white and in small
print you can read that it is an exhibition companion. If you flick inside, you will find on
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each double-spread a pair of colour photographs that together depict one work from the
exhibition. The works include the four main ones explored through this guided tour, as
well as the other less-successful ones. Each pair of photographs does not, and cannot,
show all of the elements of a work, but give enough to suggest where to start looking and
listening. And there is little text. Besides the cover, there are two quotes at the front and
back of the booklet relating to our experience of ambient materiality. A basic map on the
back inside cover reveals the general areas in which the works can be found.

What gave you the idea to make the exhibition companion? And why did you put
this in the kitchenette?

In previous exhibitions, I experimented with maps and explicit labels as a way of leading
people to the in situ works. However, these approaches tended to short-circuit the
process of discovering the works and introduced a level of discourse that counters the
process of dropping out of worldly meaning into the ambient mode. So, for this exhibition,
I was seeking a different approach.

I came up with the idea of the exhibition companion after deciding to submit
documentation of previous visual works in the format of a picture book, which I had been
working on since mid 2006. The exhibition companion and picture book have the same
format, except for one difference. For each in situ work, the picture book usually has
multiple spreads of images that attempt to provide an overall impression of the work,
whereas the companion just gives a glimpse of each work in one spread. This is
because I want to encourage people to discover the dispersed works in situ and not
substitute the booklet for this experience.

Depicting the sonic work in this booklet format was a challenge. I experimented with
ways to do so without words, by using symbols or sound waves mapped onto the
speakers in images of the surroundings. But by focusing on the speakers, these symbols
foregrounded one area of the surroundings at the expense of others. I also wanted to
use more than one image to represent the location of the sonic works, since they
encompass the entire surroundings. Given these issues, my solution was to use the
words ‘sound’ and ‘work’ overlayed at the bottom of a pair of images depicting two views
of the area of each sonic work. Interestingly, some peers acquainted with visual arts
seem to have been confused by this – they heard the ‘sound’, but said they could not
find the ‘work’ which they had assumed was visual. Others, including those acquainted
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with contemporary sound practices, were not confused by the term ‘sound work’ in this
context. 66

The exhibition companion needed to be produced in just a few days – from taking
photographs through to layout and receiving copies from the printers – to cater for the
fact that the works in The Block could only be made just prior to the exhibition opening. I
could not have achieved this turn-around without the efficiencies that comes with the
house style of my photo-documentation, and assistance from a research peer who has
training as a professional graphic designer (Meredith Randell).

Once I had decided on the format of the exhibition companion, I needed to work out
where copies would be placed, and whether they would be specifically sign-posted.
Instead of a plinth or table or obvious point of display, I chose to put the exhibition
companions in the kitchenette of The Block, a location not visible from the entrance to
The Block. This meant I did not need to introduce a framing device that would set up a
material excess, and by simply finding the companion, people would be already
participating in a mode of discovery in the surroundings.

The choice of where I placed the exhibition companion meant that one last preparation of
The Block was required: cleaning out the kitchenette. This area, normally closed off from
public view, was quite messy, and I though this might make it appear as something to-
be-ignored, as if the open doors were a mistake. However, I wanted the kitchenette, its
forms and materiality, to be as included and involved in the visual surroundings as much
as all the other rooms and nooks and crannies in the building. So with the help of the
technician and my creative assistant, we cleaned it out.

...back outside, and to the cafe…

There is a label on the kitchen bench underneath the exhibition companions, which
explains that we can collect a copy of the exhibition companion to take with us from the
office next-door. So together we walk outside The Block, enter the office and you receive
a companion from the administrative staff. We then head across the Parade Ground to
the café for some refreshments [Fig 50], where we will end our exhibition experience,

66
For the purposes of the final submission of this research project, I have decided to use the term ‘sonic work’ instead of
sound work since this directly correlates to my use of the term sonic-scape (as ‘visual work’ correlates to the visual-
scape). This decision was made after the exhibition.
 161

sitting within the field of Lego spotting. Questions turn to the experience and responses
of others.

With such subtle work, signage and companion, was there a risk people would
miss some of the work, or even the entire exhibition?

Since the consistent feedback about my previous exhibition was that I should continue to
reduce the signage and text I provide to help navigate my in situ work, I decided that if I
was going to err, it should be of the side of too-little help with navigation. My peers have
not commented that there is too much supplied in this exhibition, and most have said that
it was neither too little. This gives me a sense of achievement as I seem to have
overcome my tendency for an over-kill of signage.

For those not acquainted with contemporary exhibition and installation practices, stories
of interactions with the exhibition have ranged from missing it entirely to becoming
absorbed in it. This polarity of interactions was recently dramatised in a conversation
with two faculty staff members. Both are highly interested in creative practice, although
neither is acquainted with contemporary installation and exhibition practices. One of
these staff members remarked that it was the easiest exhibition she has encountered at
The Block, because “it came to me, I didn’t have to come to it”. However, the other
replied that she felt completely at a distance – she could not find many of the works, and
even when pointed out to her, she could not see all the elements of each work.

Or, consider the differences in the experiences of two fellow students, whom also were
not especially acquainted with contemporary installation practices. Both students were
aware that the exhibition was on, knew that my work was subtle and often hard to find,
and had seen some documentation of my previous work. One walked into The Block
during the exhibition, but thought it was still in the process of being set up. So he left,
bemused. The other said that, after exploring the works through the exhibition
companion, when she came to the quote on the back of the companion, the whole
experience made sense:

Wherever we are, there is so much to see and hear…

Instead of wanting to add to it, as if it were empty or inadequate, I want to tweak
the ambience of a place in such a way that we are drawn to a closer relationship
with what has been there all along, regardless of our to-ing and fro-ing, our busi-
ness and our particular tastes.
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You have spoken about the difference between earthy and worldly readings of
your work. How did this play out in this exhibition?

Two research peers, whose desks neighbour one another in the shared campus office
where I also have a desk, highlight the dichotomy between earthy and worldly readings.
Their reflections on this exhibition re-iterate their contrasting comments to me over the
last two years about my practice. One peer, a visual artist and curator, has spoken often
about a playful or even humorous quality she enjoys in my exhibitions, as norms of
exhibition practice are subverted. She also comments on the connotations and possible
narratives surrounding the use of Lego. The other, a creative writer and theorist of
gendered urban space, has spoken often about a remarkable calm she experiences in
my work that transports her away from daily concerns.

Earthy and worldly readings can also be found juxtaposed in the review of the final
exhibition (Bennie 2006:np). Early in the review, Bennie reflects on the interaction of my
ambient work with the sub-worlds, or worldly ambience, of contemporary exhibition, the
art world, and social spaces:

Jaaniste’s continuing project, it seems, is to afford exhibition goers (himself

included) an opportunity to suspend, momentarily, or for prolonged duration,
contrivances associated with both historical and contemporary interpretations of
Art. To do that Jaaniste forces us to consider space, in particular socially
constructed spaces peculiar to institutions.

But to conclude the review, Bennie has dropped out of consideration of these worldly
issues, into a much more earthy account:

Foreground and background, inside and outside, physical and spiritual, conflate
into a unified whole or some kind of existential totality or experiential
momentariness. This is Jaaniste’s ambient – a perpetual plane of existence in
which everything becomes accessible. When we enter Jaaniste’s space we are no
longer approaching the ambient, we, like the space we inhabit, the air we breathe
and the architectural forms surrounding us become the ambient.

Finally, the sonic work invoked a response that perhaps sits somewhere between earth
and world, or perhaps elsewhere towards the heavens. One of the academic staff,
herself a fashion designer who would walk through the Parade Ground many times a day
 163

between her office and teaching and studio spaces, said the sonic work was angelic. It
transformed the precinct into place of social and meditative connection, a special place
in the midst of our day-to-day lives.

6.3 Final Documents (early 2007) – Picture Book and Audio Discs

…sometime later…

With the final exhibition over and the in situ works no longer in existence, my
documenting and presenting practices have come into play. I have presented a range of
in situ works made throughout the research period, which I could not have shown in the
final exhibition since they were created at other times and in other places between 2004
and 2006. Of all these works, only those most clearly approaching the ambient mode
were selected.

Spotting, Surfacing, Orientating

selected visual works, 2004-2006
106-page picture book

The depicted works are grouped into my three tactics for making ambient visual works –
spotting, surfacing, orientating. They have been made across Australia in a range of
locations such as homes, office spaces, arts spaces, a shop and a side-walk. Some
works occupy a two-page spread and others occupy multiple spreads.

Tolling
selected sonic works, 2004-2006
four audio discs, three tracks each

The four hour-long audio discs contain tracks from my tactic for making ambient sonic
works – tolling. Each disc represents a different library of on/off loops. Each track is one
on/off loop which is repeated for about twenty minutes, and the three tracks on a disc all
have the same duration and envelope, but slightly different sound qualities. The tracks
have been designed for individual continuous looped playback at a soft volume, although
the whole CD can be played as one work that subtly shifts with each new track.

To encounter these works, I invite you to put on a CD and look through the picture book.
 164

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 165

<
conclusion
new mode, new possibilities

7.1 Finding – A New Mode of Being

7.2 Opening Up – New Possibilities
 166

7.1 Finding – A New Mode of Being

What happened in this research? Overall, a mode of being was developed, a new way of
being in the world and on earth, a new possibility of human existence.

It began with the nagging of ambient materiality, usually counted as material excess, and
my question as to whether it was possible to make things which opened up to the
ambient all-around without itself producing material excess (Ch 0.1). Then practical
experimentation began. Through small beginnings, which were consolidated and
presented in public forums, a new sense of practice slowly emerged (Ch 5.3). Various
interventions in the latter half of the research project coaxed the ambient mode of being
into light: a high school workshop, the term ‘ambience’, a research lounge, some
philosophers, and modes of being (Ch 5.4). Intermingled with this were questions and
tensions surrounding the making, exhibition and documentation of creative work, as well
as conversations, feedback and reflections, and re-interpreting models of practice from
broader fields.

Out of this practice-led journey, a new sense emerged, a way of being-in-our-

surroundings that I came to describe as the ambient mode of being. Invited and
sustained by ambient works, this new sense reconfigures both how we engage with our
surroundings in general and the possibilities of installation practices in particular. The
ambient mode of being was preserved and presented through the final creative outputs
(Ch 6) and this written essay, which have approached the ambient mode in four
complementary ways – by way of concepts, examples, and making (charted in the three
parts of this essay) and experience of ambient works themselves (via the final exhibition
and documents).

Throughout, my practice-led approach has involved a creative dialogue between different

voices and research strategies. At times I have been almost entirely theoretical,
exploring concepts about ambience in their own propositional logic. At other times I have
been almost entirely hands-on and intuitive, exploring material configurations and their
own spatio-temporal logic within the ambience of particular places. The joy of completing
this doctoral research project has been to immerse myself in these different aspects and
see how they connect with and extend each other. In fact, one could not have been
achieved without the other. Ideas about ambience came after hands-on experimentation;
ideas about making ambient works were honed by thinking through ideas about
ambience.
 167

Thus, the primary original contribution of this research project has been proposing,
expanding upon and presenting the ambient mode of being in concept and practice.
Because the ambient mode is an a-typical mode, this project has contributed to the
transformation of our being, transforming our familiar modes of being to develop a new
mode. In doing so, it is a transformation of the what–how–where of our existence that is
at once ontological, phenomenological and topological. A range of secondary original
contributions have been made in support of this thesis. To be clear, by original I mean
that these matters have not existed in any distilled and articulate state prior to this
research; they form significant new knowledge and new ways of knowing and being.

By way of concepts (Part One)

As part of developing the concept of the ambient mode of being, I have clarified the
notion of ambience, in order to distinguish the ambience of the ambient mode from other
conceptions of ambience. Original contributions in this regard include: a comprehensive
survey of the recent history of ambient practices and discourses (Ch1.1); a nuanced
definition of ambience, in consort with salience, which carefully states its relationship to
notions of background and foreground (Ch1.2); a taxonomy of four modes-of-being-in-
our-surroundings which clarified that there are three different conceptions of ambience in
the literature – as background, as back-and-forth, and as all-pervasive – and placed the
ambient mode within this taxonomy (Ch1.3); and a significant theoretical account of
ambience, applying the spatiality of world and earth from Heidegger’s existential
phenomenology (Ch 2). Furthermore, I have developed the use of modes of being as an
analytical framework to discuss creative practice, with particular reference to my practice
and the ambient mode. Original contributions in this regard include: presenting a distilled
tripartite structure of modes of being (Ch 0.4); analysing the what–how–where of the four
modes of being-in-our-surroundings, the first three briefly (Ch1.3) and the last of these,
the ambient mode, in detail (Ch 2).

By way of example (Part Two)

As part of providing practical examples that shift towards and enter into the ambient
mode and verge on the ambient work, I have produced a phenomenological analysis of
prior creative practice from the mid twentieth century through to contemporary work (Part
Two). Original contributions in this regard include: producing detailed ambient readings
of Cage, Rauschenberg and what I called the approach of minimalist emptying, which
brought together a range of practices in terms of shifting to the ambient mode (Ch 3.1).
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The same can be said for the other two approaches, situationist drifting (Ch 3.2) and
serialist patterning (Ch 3.3). In all cases, I have linked together otherwise disparate
practices, revealed similarities in terms of their operation, and shown their ambient
potential. I have then collated a suite of contemporary works that synthesised these
three approaches, and interpreted them in terms of ambient work, for both visual
installation (Ch 4.1) and sound installation (Ch4.2). General traits of the ambient work
were then proposed (Ch 4.3).

By way of making (Part Three)

I have also approached the ambient mode of being through making and presenting
creative works. Original contributions in this regard include: developing and articulating
an in situ installation methodology through which I produce ambient works (summarised
in Ch 5.4); developing and articulating a range of secondary practices that support the
delicate ‘work-being’ of the ambient work – the work of inviting and sustaining the
ambient mode – rather than simply documenting its ‘object-being’ – its material
configuration (summarised in Ch 5.4); and producing a set of creative works that function
as ambient works (explored in Ch 6) which consolidate and extend the ambient potential
of prior practice.

Over the course of this research journey, my creative practice has undergone two large-
scale transformations. What felt like a scattered practice at the beginning of this research
(see Ch 5.1) has now become focused and integrated. Although the breadth of the
activities and discourses I engage with has not reduced, the orientation and sense of
purpose with which I pursue my practice is far more concentrated. Part of this process
has been a remembering and re-understanding of my early interests and background.
Furthermore, what was instinctive has now become articulate. My intuitive interests in
minimalist emptying, situational drifting, serial patterns and urban settings are now
understood as a co-ordinated and necessary set of conditions to open up a particular
sort of being-in-the-surroundings, namely, the ambient mode.

And finally, by way of experience (through final exhibition and documents)

Looking back, there are so many words and concepts that buttress what, at another
level, seems to be a simple thing. When the in situ works really work, as ambient works,
then the experience of the all-around ambience of the surrounding-earth is just there,
salient, happening in an immediate, expansive and gentle way. Beyond and beneath
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words. Simple although phenomenally strange. While all these words and my creative
works can invite us into this mode of being, into a new way of existing, they cannot
represent nor replace an actual experience of it. As Guy Debord (1958) has said,
“[w]ritten descriptions can be no more than passwords to this great game.” It is up to you
– in reading this essay, looking at the picture book, listening to the CDs, and, for some,
recalling the exhibition – to determine whether these words and works resonate with your
own experience and sense of your surroundings, and how this practice-led research
makes an original contribution to the possibilities of being.

7.2 Opening Up – New Possibilities

Besides opening up and contributing the possibility of the ambient mode, this research
sets up other new possibilities to be explored in further research and creative practice.
As this research project has been drawing to a close, these possibilities have come to
intrigue and excite me as a thinker and maker. I look forward to what comes next.

In terms of my making – further refinement and new developments

Three openings for further making have emerged in this research. Firstly, I sense there is
still more to refine and hone regarding the ambient mode and presenting ambient work.
Things can still get more crystalline. As part of this, I am particularly interested in working
within the challenge of large-scale built environment, in both visual and sonic work, as
was the case in my final exhibition. Secondly, I am interested in presenting, and making
more of, the range of works that used similar in situ tactics to my ambient works, but
were not included in the outputs of this research project; the ambient gestures (little
drawings, sculptures and music) could come to compliment the ambient fields of this
research in a second picture book and audio box set. Examples of such ambient
gestures include hole-punching leaves, chalk and Texta markings, spotting with things
other than Lego blocks, and much more melodic on/off loops. Thirdly, new pathways of
creative practice have emerged in the latter half of this research. The supporting
practices in my current ambient practice – photography and other documentation,
discussion, signage and the foreground creative work – are, in various ways, emerging
as central in future work. For instance, I have begun several series of landscape-based
photography and video works. I have also begun drawing again, intervening in
documents such as magazines and newspapers. And I have vague queries about types
of music I want to make in the future. Whether refining or following new pathways in the
future, it is all an ongoing, evolving process of creative practice.
 170

In terms of ambient discourses – history, theory and cross-overs

The historical survey, definition and theoretical framework of ambience that I developed
in this research presents a significant platform for further investigation. A deeper history
of ambience beckons, one that examines larger cultural influences and impacts as well
as the long-term history of ambience in practices and discourses, going back to early
uses of the term prior to the 1950s. Such a history would cover a range of disciplines,
such as visual arts, architecture and the disciplines of built environment, romantic
literature, and music among others. More work could also be done on expanding the
theoretical framework of ambience I developed using Heidegger’s existential
phenomenology. Connections to related philosophical and theoretical perspectives await
to be explored (such as the recent preliminary work by Thibaud 2002, Malpas’ new book
on Heidegger’s topology published recently in early 2007, and the work by Rickert 2004
and forth-coming). The relevance and applicability of this framework to various
contemporary domains of ambience, such as Ambient Intelligence and ambient displays,
is also a rich area to explore. Through such investigations, there is a potential for inter-
disciplinary cross-over between various contemporary fields dealing with ambience, such
as architecture, computing and environmental philosophy. This is even more significant
in light of the lack of dialogue between these various domains regarding the key term of
ambience.

In terms of modes of being – broader applications and notions of transformation

Finally, opportunities exist for further research in applying the analytical orientation of
modes of being to wider fields of creative practice, practice-led research methodologies
and other domains of cultural creativity. In particular, if this research has transformed our
modes of being such that a new mode has been developed – the ambient mode – then
what are the larger models of the transformation of modes of being that can be gleaned
from existential phenomenology and other domains? Furthermore, how can this be
applied to understanding cultural innovation and change? Such questions invoke large
stakes, implicit in this research, which must wait for further research. What if the
transformation of our modes of being is the central contribution of creative practice to our
world, whether enacted through a practice-led approach within formal research
frameworks, or within culture more generally? It is with these larger questions in mind
that I end this essay. Afterall, to develop new mode of beings is no light claim, since this
is to open up new possibilities of being human, new futures, and new relations to the
world and earth of our existence.
 171

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references

abbreviations

BT Heidegger (1996[1927]), Being and Time.

DNW Spinosa et al (1997), Disclosing New Worlds.
OED Oxford English Dictionary.
OWA Heidegger (2002b[1935-36]), ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’.

np no page numbers

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 183

creative works by other practitioners – in order of appearance

* = accompanying image

chapter three

John Cage, 4’33” (1952)

Robert Rauschenberg, White Paintings (1951) *
Kasimir Malevich, White on White (1918)
Marcel Duchamp, Large Glass (1915-23)
Robert Rauschenberg, Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953)
Max Neuhaus, LISTEN (1966-1976)
Robert Morris, untitled (four mirrored cubes) (1965) *
Max Neuhaus, Times Square (1977–92, 2002– )
Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty (1970– )
Olivier Messiaen, Mode de valeurs et d’intensités (1949) *
Dan Flavin, Nominal Three (to William of Ockham) (1963)
Sol Lewitt, Serial Project #1 (1966)
Steve Reich, early phase pieces (for tape, violin and piano, composed 1965-67)
Steve Reich, Pendulum Music (1968)
Philip Glass, 1+1 (1968)
Donald Judd, untitled stack (1969) *
Carl Andre, Stone Field Sculpture (1977)
Sol Lewitt, Incomplete Cubes (1974)
Carl Andre, Lament for the Children (1976) *
Gordon Matta-Clark, Doors, Floors, Doors work (1976)
Gordon Matta-Clark, Window Blow-Out (1976) *
Sol Lewitt, Photogrid (1977) *
Dan Graham, Homes for America (1966)

chapter four

Donald Judd, 100 untitled works in mill aluminum (1986– ) *

Daniel Buren, Dominant-Dominé, coin pur un espace, 1465.5 m2 á 11°28’48” [Dominant-
Dominated, Corner for a Space, 1465.5 m2 at 11°28’48”] (1991) *
Daniel Buren, Transparences Colorées [Colour Transparencies] (1999– ) *
Martin Creed, Work No. 81, a one-inch cube of masking tape in the middle of every wall
in a building (1993) *
Ariane Epars, Piece of Land 240 (2001) *
Chemi Rosado-Seijo, El Cerro [The Hillside], (2001, ongoing) *
Max Neuhaus, Times Square (1997-1992, 2002– ) *
TRES, Black Out Concerts (since 2000)
Martin Creed, Work No. 127, the lights going on and off (1995, re-shown 2001) *
 184

+
appendices
to the essay

Appendix A List of Formal Research Activities

Appendix B Timeline of Formal Research Activities
Appendix C Writings on My Practice During the Research
Appendix D Full Contents of Research Outputs
Appendix E Project Credits
 185

appendix a
list of formal research activities
^ = group show or event
* = public event

exhibitions

Flat Out 13 – 17 Aug 2003

Artworkers 60 Merivale St, South Brisbane

Random Acts of Horti-Culture * 3 – 7 Dec 2003

Visual Arts Program, Straight Out of Brisbane Festival, Fortitude Valley

POSTSCRIPT for Melbourne (with Nerida Jaaniste) ^ * 18 – 30 May 2004

Alexandra Gardens, Next Wave Festival and City of Melbourne

Mini Micro Works ^ * 8 Sept – 24 Oct 2004

The Cupboard Space, Metro Arts

City Living (including Shopping on Edward Street) * 17 Nov – 3 Dec 2004

Main Gallery, Metro Arts

Transformers: More Than Meets The Eye ^ * 22 Oct 2004 – 30 Jan 2005
QUT Art Museum (curated by Simone Jones)

Art Scene Investigation: QUT Art Museum (ASI:QAM) * 16 Aug – 11 Sept 2005
Tom Heath Gallery, QUT Art Museum

Going Slow 26 – 30 Sept 2005

H Block Gallery, QUT Kelvin Grove

The Holes in My Practice 2 – 10 Feb 2006

H Block Gallery, QUT Kelvin Grove

The Ephemeral City ^ * 24 Jul – 1 Oct 2006

InfoZone, State Library of Queensland (curated by Kris Carlon)

Ambient Café * 11 Sept – 20 Oct 2006

crEATe café, QUT Creative Industries Precinct

Approaching The Ambient * 3 – 6 Oct 2006

The Block + surrounds, QUT Creative Industries Precinct

public art projects

Public art commission (concept development phase) Oct – Nov 2004

City Botanic Gardens, Museum of Brisbane, Brisbane City Council
 186

sound events

BRAINgame (with COMPOST) ^ * 21 Aug 2003

MLC School, ABC Science Week, Ultimo Centre, Sydney

Test Patterns No.2, Small Black Box #29 * 26 Oct 2003

Institute of Modern Art

Orchestral Workshop, The Queensland Orchestra (TQO) ^ 28 January 2004

Ferry Rd Studios

Trigger Mortis with COMPOST * 17, 22 July 2004

Liquid Architecture 5 Festival of Sound Arts, Melbourne and Brisbane

Singing Bridges Remix Project (devised by Jodi Rose) Aug – Sept 2004

SCOPIC ^ * 21 Sept 2004

Creative Industries Precinct QUT
(curated by Simone Jones & Lubi Thomas)

Electric Guitar-ing, The Sacred Sound, WhereMusicMeets ^ * 10 Oct 2004

QUT Creative Industries Precinct (curated by Jody Kingston)

Sounds of Brisbane, In Studio concert series ^ * 27 July 2005

The Qld Orchestra (TQO), Ferry Rd Studios

in.audible fields 6 – 12 Feb 2006

Z2 Level 3, QUT Creative Industries Precinct

Approaching The Ambient * 3 – 6 Oct 2006

Parade Ground + Z2 Level 3, QUT Creative Industries Precinct

artist talks

Exhibition talk, Transformers: More Than Meets The Eye ^ * 11 Nov 2004
QUT Art Museum

Exhibition talk and walk-thru, City Living * 24 Nov 2004

Main Gallery and Biz Art Makers Space, Metro Arts

Artist talk, Qld Art Teachers Association (QATA) 16 Mar 2005

Kelvin Grove State College

Artist talk, eXchange program ^ 30 Apr 2005

Dell Gallery, Qld College of Art

Exhibition talk, Art Scene Investigation (ASI:QAM) * 30 Aug 2005

QUT Art Museum

Exhibition forum (invited guest), ReActive ^ * 9 Mar 2006

The Block, QUT Creative Industries Precinct

Exhibition talk, The Ephemeral City ^ * 25 Aug 2006

InfoZone, State Library of Qld
 187

Exhibition talk and walk-thru, Approaching the Ambient * 4 Oct 2006

The Block, QUT Creative Industries Precinct

conferences

‘It’s All Research: a vectorial approach to research in practice’ ^ 1 Apr 2005

Conference Presentation with Toby Wren (for COMPOST)
Speculation+Innovation: Practice-Led Research (SPIN)
Creative Industries Faculty, QUT

‘Disappearing Grounds: the dissolution of “site-specificity”’ 22 Jun 2005

Conference Presentation, Sensorium: Philosophy and Aesthetics
University of Melbourne

‘Multi-discursive Things: A Monolithic Tale of Sorts’ 25 Feb 2006

Published Conference Paper, Rhizomes: Re-visioning Boundaries
School of Languages and Comparative Cultural Studies, University of Qld

‘A Relational Model of the Major Research Paradigms’ 25 Oct 2006

Discussion Paper and roundtable, Innovation, Quality + Impact (IQI)
Creative Industries Faculty Postgraduate Conference, QUT

postgraduate research seminars

‘Notional Themes in my Practice’ 3 Jun 2003

Mirrorings, Research Seminar Series
QUT Music & Sound, M Block, QUT Kelvin Grove

PhD Confirmation 11 May 2004

Z2-226, QUT Creative Industries Precinct

‘Pathways into an expanded post-disciplinary space’ 10 Oct 2004

Visual Arts Postgraduate Research Seminar
H Block, QUT Kelvin Grove

PhD Final Seminar 13 Dec 2006

Z3-305, QUT Creative Industries Precinct

residencies

Composer Affiliate, The Qld Orchestra 2003 – 2005

Composer-in-Residence, Border Music Camp, Albury-Wodonga 6 – 12 July 2003

Artists-in-Residence with COMPOST ^ 2004

Old Government House (OGH), QUT Cultural Precincts

Artist-in-Residence, Metro Arts Mar – Nov 2004

Victory Hotel Award

Artist-in-Residence, Kelvin Grove State College (KGSC) 22 – 31 Aug 2005

 188

Artist-in-Residence, Living City 6 7 – 9 Sept 2005

Brisbane City Council

field trips

Participating in Sensorium conference and visiting visual arts centres Jun 2005
Melbourne

Visiting Professor Jeff Malpas, Head of Philosophy 12 – 15 July 2006

University of Tasmania, Hobart
 189

appendix b
timeline of formal research activities
talks, seminars residencies exhibitions sound events
conferences field trips

May
Mirrorings Jun Ch 5.1
Border Music Camp Jul
Aug Flat Out BRAINgame
Sep
Oct Test Patterns No.2
Nov
Dec Random Acts
2004 TQO workshop
COMPOST workshop Feb
Metro Arts Mar
Apr
PhD Confirmation May POSTSCRIPT Ch 5.2
Jun
Jul Trigger Mortis
Aug Singing Bridges
Sep Mini Micro Works SCOPIC
Vis Arts Postgrad Talk Oct Transformers Electric Guitar-ing
Transformers; City Living Nov City Living
Dec
2005
Feb
QATA Mar
exchange ; SPIN Apr
May
Sensorium Melbourne field trip Jun
Jul Sounds of Brisbane
ASI:QAM KGSC Aug ASI:QAM
Living City 6 Sep Going Slow
Oct
Nov
Dec Ch 5.3
2006
Rhizomes Feb Holes in My Practice in.audible fields
ReActive Mar
Apr
May
Jeff Malpas field trip Jun
Jul The Ephemeral City
The Ephemeral City Aug
Sep Ambient Café
Approaching the Ambient ; IQI Oct Approaching the Ambient Ch 6.1-2
Nov
PhD Final Seminar Dec
2007
Feb Ch 6.3
Mar

= Significant stepping-stones, specifically addressed in Ch 5-6.

For details of these events, refer to Appendix A. Exhibitions listed in beginning month only.
 190

appendix c
writings on my practice during the research
interview

With Nerida Jaaniste

exhibition catalogue, City Living, Metro Arts (18 Nov – 3 Dec 2004)

general overviews

‘Scan 2003: Luke Jaaniste’ by Mary Ann Hunter

RealTime 57, Oct-Nov 2003, p44

‘Luke Jaaniste’s Peripheral Vision’ by Les Hooper

QATA Bulletin, May 2005

sound reviews

Test Patterns No.2, Small Black Box #29, 26 Oct 2003

‘Variety being the spice of life…’ by Christine McCombe

www.smallblackbox.com.au/reviews.php?review_id=23

‘Television is the retina of the mind’s eye...’ by Jamie Hume

www.smallblackbox.com.au/reviews.php?review_id=22

exhibition reviews

Random Acts of Horti-Culture, 3 – 7 Dec 2003

"Terrain and Transfiguration: The Subtle Art of Luke Jaaniste" by Victoria Bladen
Local Art, Issue 9 Dec 2003, p4

‘Garden Art’ by Fenella Kernebone

Limelight Magazine, February 2004, p104

City Living, Metro Arts, 17 Nov – 3 Dec 2004

‘City Living’ by Kay Drew

Rave Magazine #667, 23-29 Nov 2004, p24

‘Watch Your Step Around City Art’ by Patrick Watson

Courier Mail, 24 Nov, p7

‘City Living: Luke Jaaniste’ by Simone Jones

Eyeline, Issue 56, Summer 2004/2005, p56

‘City Living: Luke Jaaniste’ by Kris Carlon

un magazine, Issue 3, Autumn 2005, pp 52-53
 191

Transformers, QUT Art Museum, 22 Oct 2004 – 30 Jan 2005 (group show)

‘Out of the Ordinary’ by Phil Brown

Brisbane News, 8 Dec 2004, p35

‘Transformers, More Than Meets The Eye’ by Emma Muhlberger

Eyeline, Issue 56, Summer 2004/2005, p57

Unpublished review (1600 words), focusing on my work in the Transformers

exhibition, by Sven Knudsen

Art Scene Investigation (ASI:QAM), QUT Art Museum, 16 Aug – 11 Sept 2005

‘An Artwork is a Dot on a Line: two contemporary ephemeral artists’ by Emma

Muhlberger
Machine Vol 1 No.4, February 2006, p8-9

Approaching the Ambient, QUT Creative Industries Precinct, 3 – 6 Oct 2005

Unpublished review (900 words), by Chris Bennie

 192

appendix d
full contents of research outputs
Essay with Appendices

Approaching the Ambient:

Creative Practice and the Ambient Mode of Being

keywords 2
abstract 3
contents 5
statement of authorship 6
acknowledgements 7

> introduction: getting in the mode 13

0.1 Background
0.2 Project Overview
0.3 Essay Synopsis
0.4 Analytical Orientation – Modes of Being

I part one: by way of concepts 27

Ch 1 Proposing the Ambient Mode 28

1.1 Brief History of Ambient Practices (1970s – 2000s, and back to 1950s)
1.2 Back to Basics – Key Definitions
1.3 Four Modes of Being-In-Our-Surroundings

Ch 2 Fleshing Out the Ambient Mode 45

2.1 The What of the Ambient Mode

2.2 The How of the Ambient Mode
2.3 The Where of the Ambient Mode
2.4 Entering the Ambient Mode
2.5 Practising the Ambient Mode – Through the Ambient Work

II part two: by way of example 69

Ch 3 Pre-figuring the Ambient Work (early 1950s – 1970s) 70

3.1 Three Necessary Shifts Towards the Ambient Mode

3.2 The Approach of Minimalist Emptying
3.3 The Approach of Situationist Drifting
3.4 The Approach of Serialist Patterning

Ch 4 Verging On the Ambient Work (mid 1980s – early 2000s) 93

4.1 Towards Ambient Visual Works

4.2 Towards Ambient Sonic Works
4.3 General Traits of the Ambient Work
 193

III part three: by way of making 111

Ch 5 Realising the Ambient Mode (mid 2003 – early 2007) 112

5.1 Beginnings (mid 2003)

5.2 Developing a Creative Process and Context (mid 2003 – late 2004)
5.3 Developing a Conceptual and Practical Framework (mid 2005 – late 2006)
5.4 Current Understandings of My Ambient Practice (late 2006 – early 2007)
5.5 Endings (early 2007)

Ch 6 Presenting the Ambient Work (late 2006 – early 2007) 141

6.1 Final Exhibition (Oct 2006) – An Encounter

6.2 Final Exhibition (Oct 2006) – Discussion and Reflection
6.2 Final Documents (early 2007) – Picture Book and Audio Discs

< conclusion: new mode, new possibilities 165

7.1 Finding – A New Mode of Being

7.2 Opening Up – New Possibilities

references 171

+ appendices to the essay 183

A List of Formal Research Activities

B Timeline of Formal Research Activities
C Writings on My Practice During the Research
D Full Contents of Research Outputs
E Proposed Archival Box Set of Outputs
F Project Credits

* figures in the essay refer to the separately-bound document (essay images)

 194

Essay Images

in a separately-bound document

for chapter three: pre-figuring the ambient work

Fig 1 Robert Rauschenberg, White Paintings (1951) 5

Fig 2 Robert Morris, untitled (four mirrored cubes) (1965) 6
Fig 3 Olivier Messiaen, Mode de valeurs et d’intensités for piano (1949) 7
Fig 4 Donald Judd, untitled stacks (1969) 8
Fig 5 Carl Andre, Lament for the Children (1976) 9
Fig 6 Gordon Matta-Clark, Window Blow-Out (1976) 9
Fig 7 Sol Lewitt, Photogrid (1977), one page from the book 9

for chapter four: verging on the ambient work

Fig 8 Donald Judd, 100 untitled works in mill aluminum (1986–) 11

Fig 9 Daniel Buren, Dominant-Dominé, coin pur un espace, 12
1465.5 m2 á 11°28’48” (1991)
Fig 10 Daniel Buren, Transparences Colorées (1999–) 13
Fig 11 Martin Creed, Work No. 81, a one-inch cube of masking tape in the 14
middle of every wall in a building (1993)
Fig 12 Ariane Epars, Piece of Land 240 (2001) 15
Fig 13 Chemi Rosado-Seijo, El Cerro [The Hillside] (2001–) 16
Fig 14 Max Neuhaus, Times Square (1977-1992, 2002–) 17
Fig 15 Martin Creed, Work No. 127, the lights going on and off (1995) 18

for chapter five: realising the ambient mode

Flat Out, 60 Merivale St, South Brisbane (13–17 Aug 2003) 20

Fig 16 Tape Piece
Fig 17 100 Percent Colour
Fig 18 Paper Piece

Metro Arts residency, Mar – Nov 2004 21

Fig 19 Level 3 studio, Metro Arts, Brisbane (2004)
Fig 20 Charlotte St, Brisbane (23 June 2004)
Fig 21 Level 3, Metro Arts, Brisbane (Nov 2004)
Fig 22 Elio Moda for Men, Edward St, Brisbane (11 Nov 2004)

Fig 23 City Living exhibition (17 Nov – 3 Dec 2004) 22

Fig 24 Car Stereo-ing (21 Sept 2004), part of the SCOPIC event 23

Fig 25 day-long workshop with secondary students (29 August 2005) 24

Going Slow (26–30 Sept 2005), H Block, QUT Kelvin Grove 25

Fig 26 exhibition area
Fig 27 research lounge

visit to Professor Jeff Malpas, University of Tasmania, Hobart 26

Fig 28 Humanities building
Fig 29 courtyard outside Humanities building
 195

for chapter six: presenting the ambient work

Approaching the Ambient exhibition (3–6 Oct 2006)
The Block + surrounds
Creative Industries Precinct, QUT

Fig 30 … before entering The Block … 28

Figs 31-33 … surfacing … 29 – 31
Figs 34-38 … spotting … 32 – 34
Figs 39-40 … orientating … 35 – 38
Fig 41 … tolling … 39
Fig 42 making the work that used black duct tape 40
Fig 43 making the work that used Lego blocks
Fig 44 the first, rejected, version of the work that used the blinds 41
Fig 45 preparing The Block, by removing the screens from the walls 42
and raising them to the ceiling
Fig 46 installation of vinyl lettering signage, at entrance of The Block 43
Fig 47 A-frame signage, at entrance of The Block
Fig 48 counter and table signage, crEATe café 44
Fig 49 Exhibition companion, located in the kitchenette of The Block 45
Fig 50 crEATe café 46
 196

Box 1: Picture Book

Spotting, Surfacing, Orientating

selected visual works, 2004-2006

104 pages
98 images / 21 works

spotting

004-011 2005.09 H Block Gallery, QUT Kelvin Grove QLD [c]

012-017 2006.07.14 Humanities building, UTAS Hobart TAS
018-021 2006.09 Create Café, QUT CIP, Kelvin Grove QLD [e]
022-033 2006.10 The Block, QUT CIP, Kelvin Grove QLD [e]

surfacing

036-039 2004.11 Main Gallery, Metro Arts, Brisbane QLD [b]

040-043 2006.02 H Block Gallery, QUT Kelvin Grove QLD [d]
044-051 2006.10 The Block, QUT CIP, Kelvin Grove QLD [e]
052-055 2006.07.18 Victoria St, Windsor QLD
056-059 2005.06.30 Gertrude Street Studios, Fitzroy VIC
060-061 2006.06.24 Victoria St, Windsor QLD
062-067 2006.11.01 Buttlefield St, Herston QLD
068-069 2006.07.14 courtyard, UTAS Hobart TAS

orientating

072-077 2004.11.09 The Book Nook, Brisbane QLD [b]

078-081 2004.10.01 Level 2, H Block, QUT Kelvin Grove QLD
082-083 2005.12.21 Percival St, Lilyfield NSW
084-089 2006.09.27 The Block, QUT CIP, Kelvin Grove QLD [e]
090-091 2004.11.16 Level 5, Z1 QUT CIP, Kelvin Grove QLD [b]
092-093 2005.12.26 Cunningham St, Kingston ACT
094-095 2004.10 QUT Art Museum, Gardens Point QLD [a]
096-097 2004.11.16 Level 4, Metro Arts, Brisbane QLD [b]
098-101 2006.10 The Block, QUT CIP, Kelvin Grove QLD [e]

works presented in the following events:

[a] Transformers, QUT Art Museum, Oct 2004 - Jan 2005

[b] City Living, Metro Arts, Nov-Dec 2004
[c] Going Slow, H Block Gallery QUT, Sept 2005
[d] The Holes in My Practice, H Block Gallery QUT, Feb 2006
[e] Approaching the Ambient, QUT CIP, Oct 2006

abbreviations:

CIP Creative Industries Precinct

QAM QUT Art Museum
QUT Queensland University of Technology
UTAS University of Tasmania
 197

Box 2: Audio Discs

Tolling
selected sonic works, 2004-2006

4 audio discs
3 tracks per disc

disc a

01 using MIDI electric piano, Feb 2004

02
03

disc b

01 using remix of my Champagne Guitar Quartet (2000), Sept 2004 [a]

02
03

disc c

01 using fLOW software v3.4, July 2006

02
03

disc d

01 using patches from freesounds.iua.upf.edu, Oct 2006 [b]

02
03

each track is design for continuous looped playback, at a soft volume

works presented in the following events:

[a] SCOPIC, QUT CIP, Sept 2004

[b] Approaching the Ambient, QUT CIP, Oct 2006
 198

Box 3: Exhibition Documents

exhibition companion (booklet)

32 pages / 26 images / 13 works

2 quotes (inside front and back cover)
1 map (inside back cover)

exhibition audio (discs)

1 disc / 2 tracks

Final Exhibition

Approaching the Ambient

in situ visual and sonic work
3 – 6 October 2006, The Block + surrounds

incorporating Ambient Café

11 September – 20 October 2006, crEATe café

QUT Creative Industries Precinct

visual in situ works

The Block
The Parade Ground
crEATe café

sonic in situ works

The Parade Ground

Z2, Level 3 Foyer

exhibition talk + opening

4 October, 1.30 PM
 199

appendix e
project credits
NB: positions listed were current at the time I worked with that particular organization

ongoing support

Creative Assistant

Nerida Jaaniste

Supervisors

Dan Mafé (principal)

Professor Brad Haseman (associate)
Associate Professor Zane Trow (associate)

Other Academic Staff

Adjunct Professor Richard Vella (QUT Music & Sound – initial principal supervisor)
Dr Jillian Hamilton (QUT Communication Design)
Dr Barbara Adkins (QUT Humanities & Human Services)
Professor Jeff Malpas (Head of Philosophy, University of Tasmania)

Postgraduate research peers at QUT Creative Industries Faculty, especially…

Rachel Cobcroft, Penny Holliday, Jody Kingston, Natascha Matthes, Jonathan

Nalder, Ashley Paine, Rachael Parsons, Meredith Randell, Ali Verban, Mariana
Verdaasdonk, Oksana Zelenko

Postgraduate research peers at other universities

Chris Bennie (Griffith University College of Art), Kris Carlon (University of

Queensland), Philip Clark (University of Queensland), Aaryn Snowball (Griffith
University College of Art)

university support

QUT Creative Industries Faculty (CIF), including…

CIF Equipment Loans Centre + Chris Fardon, Brian Mann

CIF Research Office (previously CIRAC)
QUT Music & Sound
QUT Visual Arts

QUT Precincts, including…

QUT Art Musuem + Allison Kubler (curator), Gordon Craig (curator), Simone Jones
(assistant curator)
QUT Creative Industries Precinct + Peter Lavery (director)
 200

final outputs

QUT Precincts

Jill Standfield (operations manager)

Lubi Thomas (creative projects coordinator)
Liz Thomas (events officer)
Leon van de Graaff (main technician)
Helen Green (technician – screen covers)

Additional Venue support

crEATe café and Duane (café manager) and La Boite Theatre

Graphic Design Consultation

Meredith Randell

Editing

Angie Smith (WordSmith)

Kate Indigo (Cambridge University Press, Australia)

Thanks also to Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia for supplying images of
Ariane Epar’s Piece of Land 240, and Chemi Rosado-Seijo for images of his El Cerro

specific creative projects conducted during the research project

Visual-based projects

Artworkers Alliance
Brisbane City Council, Museum of Brisbane
City of Melbourne + Ariel Valent
Dell Gallery Qld College of Art
InfoZone State Library of Queensland
Kevin Grove College + Les Hooper (head of visual arts)
Metro Arts + Sue Benner (CEO), Liz Burcham (Biz Arts), Robert Kronk (facilities),
Chris Sharp (publicity & design), Annabelle Cozens (communications), along
with The Victory Hotel, and The Cupboard Space + Bev Jensen
Next Wave Festival
Straight Out of Brisbane Festival

Sonic-based projects

Border Music Camp

COMPOST (Damian Barbeler, Julian Day, Freeman McGrath, Toby Wren)
Liquid Architecture Festival of Sound Arts + Nat Bates (director), Sue Jones
(producer)
room40 + Lawrence English (director)
The Queensland Orchestra + Jean Louis Forestier (conductor)