Thinking about the perceived authenticity of lo-fi, the documentary-like-ness of field recording, the nostalgia and feelings attached to memory, and the intimacy of sharing them I began thinking about reality. Ideas of fake authenticity, of recreation. I wanted to grapple with these different levels of perceived realness.
In Nathan for you, Nathan Fielder parodies a reality show helping struggling businesses by suggesting absurd ideas to create comedy. However in doing so creates something much more genuine than what he is mimicking. The show wouldn’t work if they didn’t use real people reacting genuinely and although the ethics around lying to these people to create a show they are not aware of may be a little off, it is refreshing to see the world presented wackily but truthfully.
I wanted to similarly “parody” a voice note or nostalgic seeming recording but for the opposite effect. To create a soundscape that doesn’t try to be realistic or even try to be dreamy, leading to the same uncanniness felt in reality tv but swapped so instead of fake posing as real it is real posing as fake. But also it may not be that simple as this messy amalgamation of wildly different recordings could somewhat be more true to the whole reality of a persons memories.
It is also interesting to think about the accuracy of memories. Without the recordings would I have these strong associations, would I even remember the moment at all? This plays into the idea that a recording is just a reproduction and with my use of non specialist equipment perhaps an inaccurate reproduction.
I was reminded of Kate Carr’s guest lecture where she shared some work where she recreated field recordings using various instruments and rubbish. This toyed with the uncanniness of something deceiving that I also wanted to achieve.
https://taliastevenson.com/Sound-Art
I found this artist online who’s almost the same age as me exploring similar themes in their work, using pop culture references to explore childhood memory. She was also inspired by the pov youtube videos but I feel she doesnt expand on them enough and in fact the pop songs and idents cause it to lose its specificity. I did like the notion of not being able to trust our memories that she conveyed with more fantastical elements that I perhaps could have played with further.
https://www.gillianlever.com/sound-art
Linear path
‘I am interested in how multiple impressions or memories build up a perceived sense of place.’
‘I am combining these multiple impressions into a constructed, imaginary whole.’
nostalgia cloud 1
‘Multiple versions of personal identity are presented, assembled from fragments of my recorded memories.’
Both these works by Gillian Lever very effectively convey the illusion of memory. Linear path uses recordings of several walks along the same path and nostalgia cloud uses fragmented text to do so. Thinking about my piece using Lever’s words the ‘perceived sense of place’ or the ‘constructed imaginary whole’ would be my mind or an imaginary place built by my mind as I used wildly different impressions of different places in mine and my phones memory instead of the same setting (path). I also liked the way she used text like I tried to but inversely I used one identity where she used multiple.
This just reminded me of the song Hard Drive by Cassandra Jenkins but I think I’m going on and on!