In order for us to use the university library as a site for our performance it is important to study the surroundings in depth and to document any observations we may find. This will be useful when devising our performance as it will provide us with relevant stimuli.
A sensory investigation of the place could be particularly useful as it can give us plentiful information. I spent half an hour last week in the library taking recordings of the sounds around me. There are links to my recordings below:
This first recording is a collection of sounds around the entirety of the building. These include things such as the printers, people talking, the lifts and other things that are familiar to us within the building but that we perhaps don’t pay very much attention to. Yet they are part of how the building works everyday. The coming and going of people in the library is a constant rhythm of the same sounds and these play a part in what we associate with our library.
This second recording is taken exclusively on the third (silent) floor, although quiet the place is definitely not silent! In the recording you can hear various library sounds like keyboards, footsteps and if you listen closely towards the end of the recording there is the constant ticking of the clock. It is certainly an interesting idea to explore the sounds from this area that are supposed to be devoid of sound altogether, we can perhaps interpret this into our performance. The sound of silence does actually contain plentiful sounds if we open our ears. The artist Francis Bacon famously said that we
“Read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted, not to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and consider” – Sir Francis Bacon (1625) p.44, The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations
We can certainly apply this to the third floor of the library, the people should be there not to talk to eachother but to study and to ‘weigh and consider’ what they are reading which does not require any sound at all. The building blocks for their knowledge is silent and all in their mind, there is no neccesity to make it audible. Interestingly Bacon is also well known to have said
“Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few are to be chewed and digested” – Sir Francis Bacon (1625) p.44, The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations
this is Bacon comparing the process of us reading books to that of human digestion. When we digest food we eat it, take all the nutrients and then disperse of the waste, this is a similar process to building our own knowledge. Although it is not a physical process like that in our stomach we take in what we read and then organise it within our minds, we take what we need from our books whether it is entertainment or education and then we sometimes forget the parts of the book we didn’t take notice of. Often when reading we’ll skip pages to the parts most relevant to us, particularly when studying there is no point reading the whole works of William Shakespeare if you only want to read A Midsummer Night’s Dream for example. This famous quotation is present in our library building in the architecture as you can see in the photograph of a first floor window below
Fig.3. Dodds, Kate, First floor interior window (2014)
In class we were assigned a task of drawing perspectives around the building, drawing is a way in which we can really look at a certain thing in detail and create our own representation of that object, place or view. Here is one drawing I created of a view from the second floor corridor
Fig. 4. Dodds, Kate, Library view sketch (2014)
This was my own unique take on the view which consisted of a layer of windows, the interior and exterior layers and inbetween them was the exterior brickwork in which the word ‘good’ can be seen. Here is a photograph of the same view
Fig. 5. Dodds, Kate, The actual window view (2014)
I took this photograph of the actual place in order to link my drawing with its realistic perspective. As I am not the greatest of artist’s it can be said that my drawing looks nothing like its photographic counterpart and it is possible that from my drawing alone if it were used as a map an outsider would not have been able to match my drawing with the location. This idea of using different people’s visual perspectives of the building which don’t accurately match the physical views of the location in order to create part of our performance could definitely be used. There is a good mix of old and new architecture here in this photograph which represents the current character of the building. What people saw when this building was a functioning warehouse would be very different to what people see now that it is a library.
Exploring our library from a sensory perspective and familiarising ourselves with our familiar surroundings and being aware of them is a key part in understanding the fabric of the building. Here is an article from the BBC regarding a sensory installation at Bristol Central Library
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-bristol-26152634
I came across it on the internet and thought it to be very relevant to our site specific. The installation uses motion detectors to show certain sensory aspects to any visitors. It is part of their 400th anniversary celebration and is not created to amuse but to give visitors a clear reminder of the sensory stimuli a library contains, there is nothing new about these stimuli. They are merely being presented in a new and interesting way which we could apply to our own performance. Lets show our audiences what they do not appreciate about the university library!
Works Cited
(1992) The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, ed. Angela Partington, New York: Oxford University Press
Fig.3. Dodds, Kate (2014), First floor interior window [Photograph; Francis Bacon quotation on the glass of an interior window on the first floor of the university library] Self-Sourced
Fig. 4. Dodds, Kate, (2014), Library view sketch [Photograph; Sketch created in class of a view out of a first floor exterior window] Self-sourced
Fig. 5. Dodds, Kate, (2014), The actual window view [Photograph; Taken of the view sketched in fig.4.] Self-Sourced
BBC, (2014), BBC News, Online at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-bristol-26152634 (Accessed 21st february 2014)