The sound track is created from a series of field recordings. We hear a collection of mixed sounds, many of which are produced by walking: foot-fall, clothes brushing against clothes, ambient reverberations from coastal walks. The raw sound is cut, layered and serialized to suggest the whooshing rhythms of the sea or the ocean, even a locomotive train, in an imaginative recycling of the sounds of natural and mechanical motion that exist in the artists’ everyday locality.
Imagine sitting on the rocks on a beach in Cornwall, together with a friend or lover. Surveying the shapes and rhythms where waves repeatedly meet the slopes of a beach- the ocean, alive, resonating its presence, you watch the chaotic coordination of dancing droplets, spraying and dragging shells and varied life forms across the surface of the sand. Here, the longer and more closely you observe, the more strongly you can recognise the complex audiovisual, phasing patterns that evolve in Packet Switching.
Southworth and Simons create the audio and the visual elements of the piece independently. They negotiate the content, structure, texture and the feel of the work through conversations and by creating collaboratively drawn spider diagrams. Neither strand of the work is there to illustrate or to constrain the other. One might expect this process to lead to either long periods of disjunction in the work or to an undifferentiated sameness in the relationship between audio and visual tracks. But instead it offers a demonstration of the inevitable emergence of a new complex strand arising from the dynamic interaction between established, distinct forms.
This work does not reflect one individual's internal psychology or singular skill, but declares the artists’ mutual way of working as two individuals, exploring their experience of the world, between and around them. In the current theoretical debates surrounding media art practice there is a growing interest in the potentials of digital media to facilitate collaboration. These can range from the abstract to the ideological and claim to do some of the preparatory work for artists- to create the field. Packet Switching is an explicit examination and imaginative response to love, landscape and liminal space; rather than relying on already constructed theories or prescription it develops through process as an actual manifestation of collaborative creativity.
[ Marc Garrett and Ruth Catlow, Co-Directors, Furtherfield.org ]
1. Tor Norretranders, The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size, published 1991 (in Danish), 1994 (in English) by Penguin Books.