The Harmonic Oscillator
Tate Exchange 25 June - 1 July 2017
About the Project The Harmonic Oscillator is an international arts and health collaboration conducted between the UK and Australia, 2014-2017. This project began by exploring the wealth of research that shows excess sounds in hospitals cause increase in medication, stress levels, length of stay, issues relating to the cardio vascular system and disturbed sleep. We asked, “How might a contemporary artist, who is interested in sound, explore these issues through open ended creative investigation of place?” Over three years, Australian artist Vic McEwan worked with Clive Parkinson from Manchester Metropolitan University and Vicky Charnock from Alder Hey Children’s Hospital, Liverpool UK, to engage with patients, families and staff to create new artwork in response to and with the aim of exploring the sonic environment. This artist led project has multiple outcomes including; a radio documentary, an exhibition of interactive and media artworks, a series of compositions created from the hospital environment, a publication, original research on sound in hospitals, and the creation of a mobile app that allows patients, families and staff to explore their sonic environment within the hospital. This app is being created as a resource for roll out in hospitals throughout the UK and Australia.
Aims of Tate Exchange The aim of being in residence at Tate, Liverpool was to share some of these project which were in development. We offered a space for people to reflect on illness and recovery and invited visitor feedback on the project outcomes and a place for conversation in acknowledgment of the fact that illness and recovery is something that is experienced by all. Through this project, and through the Tate Exchange, we are hoping to offer more ways to open up conversations about shared humanity.
Target Audience One of the strengths of The Harmonic Oscillator is that the target audience is diverse. The project addresses ideas of illness, trauma, recovery and the human experience, and as such, can be meaningful to all people regardless of socio-economic status, gender, culture, age and ability.
What new approaches or opportunities does your event offer? How will you know if this approach has been successful? The Harmonic Oscillator at the Tate Exchange offered a week of interaction with the artist and project partners, along with an in depth forum that explored the project in itself, but also placed it within an international context of both arts and health and socially engaged artistic practice. The success of these were evident by the depth of engagement by visitors to the gallery during the exhibition times and by the large time dedicated to questions during the forum.
How do you hope participants will benefit? The Harmonic Oscillator allows space for people to not only consider the human experience of illness and recovery, but of every-day life. It allows for an immersive space to explore, through contemporary arts practice, deeper ideas of emotion, fear, hope and healing as a response to very practical issues of illness and treatment. Participants were also able to consider the role that sound plays in their lives and to reconsider and even “re-hear” the sound around them. Feedback suggests that this project gave people a way to consider and reflect upon the way that sound affects us. By creating a musical performance on something as functional and aesthetically unpleasing as a hospital bed, participants were able to experience beautiful sound being played from a medical object, allowing them to engage deeply with the projects proposed purpose of “re-hearing”. The artist, Vic McEwan, has a long history of basing his experimental contemporary arts practice in collaboration with communities often undergoing trauma or exploring difficult circumstance. Central to Vic’s practice is the idea that in order to explore these issues practically, we have to learn how to deal with them emotionally. Through contemporary arts practice we are able to offer opportunities for this emotional navigation. The Tate Exchange had surprising outcomes in the number of visitors who engaged in deep and meaningful conversations about their personal experience. Several visitors expressed that the work in the Exchange space had helped them make sense of particular experiences in their life. The forum event we held was very successful. An hour long presentation, a 5 minute performance and nearly an hour of audience questions meant that a wide ranging event allowed a very deep and genuine sharing of ideas and reimagining of processes of care.
How does this event relate to your wider objectives as an organisation? Vic McEwan is the Artistic Director of the Australian organisation, The Cad Factory, whose work is based on objectives that relate to The Harmonic Oscillator at the Tate Exchange. The Cad Factory is an artist led organisation creating an international program of new, immersive and experimental work guided by authentic exchange, ethical principles, people and place. We are a multidisciplinary organisation that engages with the real world to extract poetry from lived experience. We place people at the center of our arts practice, believing that if the arts is about an exploration of the human condition, then engagement with human beings is the best way to make meaningful work. The Cad Factory embraces opportunities to expand contemporary arts practice by working with diverse sectors such as health, business, education, community and the environment. We work independently and in collaboration to create new contemporary art and performance. We devise, deliver and evaluate what we do within an ethical framework so we can confidently push ourselves and others. Our programming is based on breaking down hierarchies and binaries that exist within our contemporary world; such as the division of regional and urban, man and woman or human and nonhuman. We understand these realities as being in complex, intra-connected relationships, rather than in opposition. The Cad Factory believes some of the best, most original, innovative and exciting ideas exist just beyond the things we know, where real and imagined borders are porous.
What was in the Tate Exchange space? The Longest Heartbeat
Video and Sound Installation, 2016-17 WATCH THE VIDEO In the north of Scotland, there are underground oil tanks buried in the mountains where sounds lasts longer than anywhere else in the world; in this place, the reverb time is 2 minutes long. What would it mean to record the heartbeat of a patient who’s heart has a limited time left to beat in this world, and to replay and re-record it in this space? Creating a single heartbeat that lasts for two minutes. A short film about the process accompanies a small hand-made box that allowed uses to have an intimate and individual experience listening to this heartbeat.
Imagined Instruments
Interactive Sound and Video Artworks, 2017 These three “Imagined Instruments” create an opportunity to not just think about sound and human experience, but to sit with it, play with it and respond. Listening as a place of entry. These three instruments have been made by taking a recording of a child’s cry, a sneeze and a soft moan and tuning them across the range of musical keyboards to create an interactive musical and video experience. The interaction goes beyond an interaction with technology, inviting a connection with a sound created from direct human experience. Visitors were able to sit at these three instruments called Bone, Sneeze and Cry, and to play the musical keyboard with triggered sounds and video manipulations creating an immersive experience.
Textures of Absence
Sound and Video Installation, 2016-17, made in collaboration with Elisha Carter WATCH THE VIDEO A hospital room is a bare and stark place, white walls, white sheets. AS we undergo immense journeys of treatment in these spaces, we face issues of life and death devoid of the intimacy of our home or familiar spaces. This installation included a hospital bed with images projected onto the mattress. These images were photographs taken by Elisha Carter, they were textures that were around her house, her school and the streets of her town. They evoked ideas of absence and presence and the places in between. The Bosavi people of Papua New Guinea believe that upon death, people become birds. The call of the birds in the jungles of Papua New Guinea are considered to be the sound of an absence turned into a presence. A presence which makes absence audible.
Compositions
Installed as ambient sound across the gallery space, were compositions created using sounds recorded in Alder Hey Children’s Hospital. These compositions transformed the space into an immersive experience the moment visitors entered. Vic McEwan created these compositions by recoding hospital sounds and playing instruments in response to them; extracting musicality from the sonic materiality of our hospital experiences. The soundscape could be heard wafting throughout Level 1.
Orchestra of Tears
Video on the Tate Exchange Screen, 2017 This documentation video is of a large interactive artwork in development. Users press a red heart buttons that triggers projections, water pumps and chime bars to create a large instrument. This work will be a future interactive installation in a gallery space
EMF - ICU
Video on the Tate Exchange Screen, 2016-17 This video explores the sounds that exists outside of the human hearing range. but still has a physical and psychological effect on us. It was created by recording the “unheard� sounds that are emitted from the flotilla of life supporting machinery that surrounds patients in intensive care.
EMF Interactive
After watching the EMF - ICU video and sound work, visitors were able to use specilaised equipment to explore the space in the Tate to uncover ‘unheard’ sounds. This participatory experience encouraged an exploration of place and a consideration of what lies just outside those things we can’t perceive.
Critical Care Postcards
READ THE POSTCARDS Clive Parkinson, Director, Arts for Health at Manchester Metropolitan University, has been observing and participating in this project. In September, we will launch a book called Critical Care that traces the journey of human experience negotiated through this project. Audience were able to take a beautifully printed set of postcards that share snippets of Clive’s writing.
Diary Entry - Day 7: 25th March 2015
A1 sticker on the wall, 2015 extract from Vic McEwan’s diary entries from his time at Alder Hey Children’s Hospital. Day 7: 25th March 2015 What artists and scientists have in common is the ability to live in an open ended state of interpretationand reinterpretation of the products of our work. Daniel J Levitin, Your Brain on Music At approximately midnight, I took a one hour long sound walk through the corridors of the Intensive Care Unit. It was very busy. “We are normally this full, but usually the patients are mostly stable, tonight, there are many who are not well.” A sound walk is an opportunity to have focused time listening to your environment, understanding the range of sounds that exist and how they change from place to place. This walk took one hour and was less than 80 meters long. To take an hour to walk that short distance is quite a task. I was recording the walk with two omni direction microphones attached to me, so as well as walking incredibly slowly, with headphones on, listening to an amplified version of the environment, I was also having to control my breathing to some extent so as not to have an effect on the recording. This is quite a meditative process, an intense experience. During the walk, I was able to closely watch all the goings on around me, to observe the flotilla of machinery that arced around some of the beds flashing information:
Administering Morphine Administering Dopomine Administering Fentanyl Administering Atracurium Administering Midazolam Administering Adrenalin The list goes on. The range of beeping machine, rhythmic machines, sometimes playing together, sometime off doing their own thing. Overheard conversations, the heavy burden of decision making on the head doctor. Big decisions having to be made in the blink of an eye, and the soundtrack is a sigh, released heavily between each sentence. The hospital is different at night. Less people walk the corridors, a little bit of reprieve from the relentless din. Family members who remain for an all night vigil by the bedside are hunched over in a state of uncomfortable half sleep or just sitting staring into the distance. Late night visits to the snack machine, then hunched over their child, soft strokes of the hair or holding hands for (their own) reassurance. During the daytime, the never ending sound of machinery, beeps and alarms seem almost lost in a huge dominating and suffocating soundscape. Despite the fact that each beep is transmitting information, they are still part of an acoustic overload. At night they emerge more as a language, a code. Sometimes soothing, sometimes annoying. In amongst such focused, intense, practical activity, I question my place in it all. Tonight I intended to spend a couple of hours photographing and videoing in the Intensive Care Unit but when it came to it, although I had permission, I didn’t think it was appropriate. I was unravelled by my hour long sound walk which led me to question my place in all of this. “I should be a nurse or a doctor, not an artist,” I thought. “Providing direct practical help for people,” I told myself. “I have known a few artists who have stopped practicing art to go into helping professions,” I remembered. “What if something happened now and instead of holding a tool of assistance, I was holding an audio recorder and two omni directional microphones,” I feared. When I was leaving in the early hours of the morning, some of the staff seemed surprised, hoping I would stay all night. And I realised that I wasn’t a burden by being in a place such as this, but in some way hopefully giving it another type of voice, another way to be understood. I base a lot of my arts practice in non-arts settings and I always question myself about the ethics of what I am doing. Sometimes this questioning comes from the intellect, sometimes from the heart and sometimes it shoots straight from the gut. To be up in the middle of the night, when most of the country is asleep, and to be entrenched in a secret place such as this, a protected place of intense care and healing is a very magical thing, full of very magical people.
How do you hope participants will respond to or benefit from your event? Interesting interactions in the Tate Exchange Space 1. A disability group came into the space with their carers. When they walked in, a blind woman was talking to her carer about how she can hear electricity. They were standing near the door and hadn’t come into the Exchange space yet, so their conversation was a complete coincidence. I listened in for a while because what she was talking about was one of the things that the Tate Exchange residency was exploring, those sounds that sit outside of “normal” hearing range, but are still present and still have an effect on us. The EMF - ICU and EMF Interactive artworks explored these issues. This visitor was able to hear the EMF frequencies without the need for special equipment, presumably due to her lack of sight prompting her hearing to develop beyond standing hearing ranges. I approached them and we had a long discussion about EMF frequencies and her carers and friends explained that she has been trying, for years, to explain to them what she hears, but they had no idea what she was talking about. So I replied, “Would you like to hear what your friend can hear?” and gave them the EMF microphones. They were all so excited, teary and overwhelmed to finally get a chance to hear the frequencies that this woman has been hearing for years. She was so excited that FINALLY others could hear what she has been trying to explain for YEARS. They were all ecstatic, as was I. It was such a special moment to share in (and facilitate).
2. Later, with another disability group, the carer watched the video about The Longest Heartbeat, then listened to the heartbeat, and walked up to me with tears in his eyes and fell into my arms and quietly sobbed for about half a minute. We had a long talk and he was so moved by the project. He said to me “This is what art galleries should do, move people this much.” He said he was going to go back to the “office” and have a session where he showed the videos from the project to his group and colleagues, to lead a discussion about the themes explored. 3. A dementia nurse had a long discussion with me about how the work on show in the Tate Exchange has encouraged her to explore new ideas with her clients. 4. Four individual people during the week, who spent a lot of time in the gallery engaging with the work, shared that the artworks had helped them in processing their own experience of working in a hospital environment. 5. One man approached me and said, “Thank you, you have made me realise that all things are connected.” 6. A participant at the forum told us how they had been a long term patient in the old Alder Hey Hospital and had extremely fond memories of it. She talked about the sounds she would regularly hear which, rather than being a negative thing, would give her comfort. Now, as an adult, she had chosen not to go into the new hospital because she wanted to preserve the memories (including sounds) of the old building. She chose to come to the forum to share this story.
Audience Engagment
Over two days, we evaluated the engagement of 219 random audience groups, documenting the length of time they spent in the space and also some notes regarding the way they engaged. We also compared this with the amount of time the same visitors spent in the Constellations exhibition. The reason for doing this was that in the first three days we observed the difference between the way people engaged with The Harmonic Oscillator work compared to the Constellations exhibition, both in terms of duration of engagement and depth of engagement (as far as it was possible to observe). Through our assessment of 219 people, we found that the average engagement time in the Tate Exchange space was 5 minutes and 54 seconds, compared to 8 minutes and 33 seconds in the Constellations exhibition. The major considerations in drawing conclusions from these numbers include: 1. Size – The Harmonic Oscillator shows seven artworks in one small room. The Constellations exhibition showed (40?) artworks across two large galleries, so the amount of content for people to engage with was substantially larger in the Constellations exhibition. You could assess the average time on a per artworks basis, which would show you that 51 seconds, compared to 13 seconds per artwork (this is just based on an estimate in numbers of artworks in the Constellations work, how many artworks are there). 2. During the gathering of data, the artist Vic McEwan, made a conscious decision to allow time for people to explore the space freely. Rather than engaging in activity, the artist was interested in what engagement was had when people were left to explore the space on their own. All
other times during The Harmonic Oscillator, whilst the artist was present to engage deeply with visitors, the engagement time was substantially longer. 3. Depth of engagement – Of course the duration of time with an artwork cannot reveal all of the information we might be interested in. Throughout the week long Tate Exchange residency, the strength of the engagement was in the deep emotional responses that people were having. This was evident by tears, long conversations and participants sharing the profound responses they were having. 4. The comparison of time and resources available for preparation and presentation at the Tate Exchange, compared to a full exhibition experience, reveals the Tate Exchange to be creating a massive impact from the resources available. 5. The notes on peoples engagement reveal that many people returned to the space a second time, the duration of these additional visits was not recorded in the overall time, so this could add substantially to average figures.