Field Report #4 - (3rd go Round) pt. 2

Naturalmystic (Tomahawk #2) was another piece in the Haggerty that grabbed my attention through the use of sound. Filmed in a soundstage, a voice actor made vocal sounds of what sounded to be a dive-bomber or bomb falling from the sky. It is done three times (each a tad differently) and then the video repeats. It was hard for me to fully grasp the concept of this piece since I had no visuals that I felt related to the audio I was listening to. Why the soundstage? To me it looked like the behind the scenes of what a foley artist can do. I felt that this piece was stronger with just the audio by itself or if it had different visuals to better support the audio.

However, the audio by itself, I felt was fantastic. If it weren’t for the imagery of the soundstage I would’ve never known it was a human voice recreating these “dive-bombing” sounds. Maybe that’s the reason why this particular imagery was chosen? The artist wanted the viewer to know the audio was not from the real source, but still feel the “realness” quality of the sound as if it were from a real source. If that was the artist’s intention then I can better understand his choices.

This juxtaposition reminded me a lot of Kulbeka’s Our Trip to Africa only that in a sense it was reversed. Kulbelka takes real audio and juxtapositions it with an unrelated image creating a new meaning (like the sound of a gun shooting off a women’s hat) but Anri Sala takes the real image (soundstage) and juxtapositions it with a fake sound (man imitating a dive-bombing sound) to create a new meaning. What does this new meaning create in my mind? That I’m still debating. Maybe it’s a depiction of how the experience of war impacts humans and stays with them the rest of their lives? I’m not quite sure. Either way the experience of hearing human vocals recreating a real sound made me believe that the human had actually heard the real sound and it had impacted his life. His recreation to me was a way of sharing his experience as best he could much like a storyteller tells a story. Only this time the story was not in words but through sound.