Bones – johnrobertferguson.com

This collaboration between John Ferguson, Peter Thiedeke, and Chris Stover weaves musical and visual arts together. Peter Thiedeke is an interdisciplinary image-maker whose practice is concerned with post-digital critique and urban acupunctural interventions in the city. John Ferguson is a post-digital/electronic musician and sound/multimedia artist who builds and performs systems that foreground tactile interaction. Chris Stover is a composer, trombonist, and music scholar; his research interests include philosophies of time and process, affect theory, gender, queer, and post-colonial theory, phenomenology, and critical improvisation studies.

This research was peer-reviewed by an international jury and selected/presented at the 29th International Symposium of Electronic Art (ISEA) in Brisbane in 2024. ISEA explores the intersection of art, science, and technology and is one of the most significant international gatherings of artists, researchers, and professionals in experimental and electronic media arts. https://isea2024.isea-international.org/bones/

We re-begin with two ideas: breath as an elemental human life-function (which is also how sound is produced on the trombone) and the materiality of the instrument itself. Importantly, we are not considering the instrument in the abstract, but rather a particular instrument, a 1956 New York Bach Stradivarius model 8, serial number 5620. This instrument displays the physical evidence of decades of travel around the world, with dents, scratches, worn bits, and patches of rust. The photography and video in this project foreground these markings and reimagine this physical history as a catalyst for sonic and visual experimentation using a range of digital tools. In imagining how a physical object becomes an audiovisual world, the overall goal is to transform ordinary experience into an extraordinary one. We begin by amplifying human presence via an emphasis on breath and breathing (sound and rhythm), then deploy a range of sonic and moving image technologies to reimagine the history of a specific instrument and the culturally received memories and expectations of that instrument. The focus is on bending perception; reaching (forward and back) into our individual consciousnesses to elicit the idiosyncratic and experimental resonances that we all carry with us.

Research Background: The research field is immersive sound/video installation, exploring room-sized multi-projector and surround-sound technologies in gallery contexts. Key practitioners include: Nicolas Bernier, Christian Marclay, Vicki Bennett (People Like Us), Ryoji Ikeda. Our work seeks to engulf, but the perceiver is free to move and change perspective, so the experience is different to the immobilization of cinema. Informed by John Whitney’s (1994) notion of ‘audio-visual complementarity’ and Louise Harris’s (2021) examination of the nature of audio-visual experience, our research question revolves around: imagining how a physical object can become an audiovisual world, the overall goal is to transform ordinary experience into an extraordinary one.