The Vagrancy of Sound
Merry Sun
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There implicitly lies a distinction between space and place.
I am in and of space.
Here and there is place.
“Space is not an empirical concept which has been derived from outer experiences. For in order that certain sensations be referred to [as] something outside me… that I may be able to represent them as outside and alongside one another… as in different places, the representation of space must already underlie them. Therefore, the representation of space cannot be obtained through experience from the relations of outer appearance; this outer experience is itself possible at all only through that representation.” *
While both are components of our mutually lived world, the former sits in the a priori abstract while the latter remains delineated and retained a posteriori. Place is the juxtaposition between bodies, a collaboration of locales that forge the boundaries to from place from space, so that space may remain pure with an existence that is in and of itself on a singular scale.
* Kant, I., & Smith, N. K. (1929). Immanuel Kant’s Critique of pure reason. Boston: Bedford, A23/B38.
Space can be regarded as metaphysical scaffolding in which its existence extends exterior to time. Space builds a structure where human experience may orient itself among so that place can persist as a subjective, empirical concept derived from external experience. With its innate objectivity, space predates phenomena and is a precondition of experience. Space takes the form of the outer sense, the faculty in which we represent objects external to us, allowing for experience of that which is distinct from ourselves and our internality.
Have a seat.
Place is the vessel for memory and desire, physically contained in space. It is bounded by conscious articulation that nests internal to the self. Within a place resides the investment of intentions, meanings imbedded to create a sense of being and belonging. In place we seek stillness, a sojourn amidst the constant and unforeseeable fluctuations of space.
“From the security and stability of place we are aware of the openness, freedom, and threat of space, and vice versa. Furthermore, if we think of space that which allows movement, then place is pause; each pause in movement makes it possible for location to be transformed into place… Place is security, space is freedom: we are attached to the one and long for the other. There is no place like home. What is a home?” **
** Tuan, Yi-Fu. (1977) Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minnesota: The University of Minnesota Press, pp. 3-9.
“All really inhabited space bears the essence of the notion of home,” ***
“Memories are motionless, and the more securely they are fixed in space, the sounder they are,” ***
*** Bachelard, G. (2014). The poetics of space. Penguin Classics, p. 5.
for home stores our memories and provides rooms for imagination that we may return to in seeking comfort and shelter. Home is the place of rearing, a space for growth, and a constant to change.
and to fixate such to a site, to build a home, creates a productive place to conduct phenomenological investigations into the intimacies of one’s inner space.
Take a cup.
I am vagrant to myself.
Site perhaps is more cartographical than place: a specific locale external to the self, a destination burdened with vagrancy.
A site is a destination that occupies space and contains capacity for place, so long as that potentiality remains indentured to some fragment of time. Site is interim, a placeholder fugitive to permanence, a wayfaring transient through space.
My home is not this place,
nor the last,
nor the one past that.
I find my home in the boxes that remain unpacked in the corner of my apartments,
the boxes patiently awaiting annual migration,
await to be ferried from site to site,
await to be opened, though never shall,
vessels for things lost to time and to remain left as such.
There is an aspect of limited temporality to a site. A construction site can only be that so long as it remains under construction.
Once that which is being built is complete, the site surrenders its position and is superseded by place. A site is the ghost of a place: the space where something is, was, or will be located.
Regard your empty cup.
The concept of “site specificity” is also be bound by temporality. The existence of site-specific things inherently depends on that of the referent site. And so, as dictated by the property of transposition, their existences also become impermanent in time. When site surrenders its claim to space at the mercy of time, the site-specific vanishes with its antecedent land.
I lost my site specificity when I was moved to the states.
I am not particular to this place.
In my attempts to differentiate, I have drawn nearer to here and
further from my motherland,
though, I cannot remember what she was like,
A site-specific work is a vagrant of great power, for she possesses the potential to lend placeness to her referent site, containing within her intention, memory, and a consciousness.
and she does not claim me as her own.
A mutual codependent relationship is formed between work and site: so long as the work exists, there is place bestowed to site; so long as the site welcomes her, she is homed in its place; if the work were to cease to persist, the site’s existence becomes destabilized; if the site were to be abolished, her point of origin is erased.
“On the strength of hearing alone,” ****
**** Strawson, P.F., 1959, Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics, London: Methuen, p. 66.
Objective sound is as unknowable to us a priori as is the extent of space. Objective sound may occupy space, but it itself is not intrinsically spatial. What is ascribed as the spatial content of sound exists only within an egocentric space, a space relative to and dependent on human perception, for sound has no intrinsic spatial qualities.
Pour yourself some tea.
It is possible to assign direction and distance to sounds, as well as that which emits or causes them, though there does not exist a purely auditory concept of space. Auditory space is selfish and humanistic, a symptom of the human condition. In the apprehension of sound, one adopts pure sound into her phenomenological reservoir of knowing, at the same time implicating it with her subjectivity.
Take a sip of tea.
Even in earnest attempt to examine sound objectively in a mathematical form, it is still but mapped onto geometrical space: another socially constructed artifice, albeit sophisticated in its futile attempts to organize the natural world. We are all still bound to the cartesian grid. Objective sound owes itself to nothing: not the source that produced it, nor the medium through which it is propagated, nor the listener that receives it. As sound departs its origin point, it is molded toward a form fit to traverse space, holding no more obligation to its source, free to shift as space commands it to. The medium of travel is only demonstrative of the figure of sound, humming physical evidence. This figure of sound dwells in the subjective realm, and subjective sound and the instances of its perception belong as much to the producer as to the perceiver.
What of the tea in the kettle before it had been poured?
Continue to drink your tea.
Regard its positionality between porcelain and flesh.
Consider some objective sound that occupies a space.
The tea in your cup, is it the same as that in mine?
Once this sound is apprehended and transposed into a subjective sound instance, the space it was and is presently occupying now is regarded in egocentric terms, thereby regaling it with qualities of placeness due to phenomenological specificity.
The heard sound lends itself to our faculties of understanding, then ceases to be, leaving behind a ghost, an echo of memory to be indefinitely retained.
Take another sip.
That which is vagrant is free;
I remain shackled to my vagrancy:
I know not what I am, but what I am not.
Sound is a lawless being, asking favor of its neighboring medium to carry out its bidding. Objective sound gives to its closed system the gift of entropy in its outward projection. Into subjectivity it heaves disruption as to bury itself into perception. As one apprehends the wild sound within her subjective faculties, she attempts to position it, assimilate it in accordance with her understanding. Objective sound remains transient, untamable to fit subjectivity.
Recording sound is a further step towards its domestication, for to capture sound implies a prior wildness that persisted before the recorded instance. Sound becomes severed from the system in which it partook in deconstructing, stripped of its kinesis. There it awaits to be transposed, temporarily rehomed to a site, awaiting to contribute further entropy into space.
Sip.
“To layer some places onto another is to cast off all the material demands of architecture and leave only the structures of the imagined place intact; the most quiet memories or imagined gatherings meeting invisibly in the newly created ephemeral space.” *****
***** Katt Hernandez (2020) ‘Aural Transposition, Psychogeography and the Ephemeral World’, VIS – Nordic Journal for Artistic Research, 4
The act of transposition is location dependent, taking some “object” from position x to position y. Transposition implies movement, in that the object transposed has some agency to travel at equilibrium between positions. This fluidity of identity, the transposed free to assume shifting forms, comes with it the consequence of impermanence, suggesting that an identity may be limitlessly mapped from position to position within space, from site to site, from a place to some other place. Sound, when spatialized, takes some space and transposes it into a site that is a referent to a specific place.
Pour the rest onto the floor.
Again, present here is a vagrancy. A specific place may be transposed from site to site, sonically framing out the referent place to be given through aural apprehension.
Regard the tea as it meanders away.
The framework of this construct serves as a terrace for which memories may lay. Once the piece resolves, the structure disassembles and disintegrates into the medium of space.
My place is in vagrancy,
for vagrancy is my home.
Wash your cup and reset the table.
What evidence remains of that sonic architecture is a non-dimensional blueprint of its memory, an echo in the mind of the listener.
Regard the warmth within, given by the tea.
The possibility that there exists a homeland, or motherland, in my possession has troubled me for some time now, as I am uncertain if theory aligns with practice here. The ideology of a motherland is one of personal, historical significance—a place of rearing during the formative years of a life, but I was not raised on a contiguous land distilled to collective culture. I was brought up in the crevice between two countries, on the sill of the liminal, in constant stagnant motion, at a place of uncertainty stitched together by contingencies. It took time to see this clearly.
It is this continuous oscillation between certainty and uncertainty that defines my work. My practice regards migration and the vagrancy of self to self. It addresses memories and their denial, teasing at the distinction between not knowing and forgetting. This is the excluded middle of being and belonging, of the human condition itself. I’ve traveled east to go west, been west to be from the east, and gone back east to become a stranger again. I’ve wondered aloud how many revolutions I’m obliged to take before I am allowed to simply be where I am. It seems that once you depart your point of origin, there is no finite amount of retracing steps can bring you back to sojourn there again.
Merry Sun is an artist that works amongst the sonic, sculptural, and written realms. She received a BFA from Washington University in St. Louis, in both sculpture and philosophy. She currently attends Columbia University in New York City as an MFA candidate in the Sound Art program.