May 30

May 30 Hearing Enlightenment

Performance, Products, Projects, Sound, Writing

As one walks through a place like the Enlightenment Gallery in London, it becomes apparent that, although the budding museologists of the Enlightenment Era tried their best to be 'universal' in their choice of what to collect and categorise, there are important objects missing there, there are important voices missing there. Categorising culture leads to as many omissions as it does inclusions. When I decided to make a sound map of the Enlightenment Galleries at the British Museum, I knew that I would have to echo this idea of omission within the structure of the map itself. I recorded the Enlightenment Gallery for an entire day, recording one hour of continuous sound in each of the seven sections of the gallery. Each of these hour-long recordings was then time compressed into seven minutes, without changing the pitch or applying any effects. The result is a 49 minute piece of echoes – tiny samples of the original sounds, whipping by the listener in fleeting glances, sometimes registering, sometimes not. The majority of the original sonic events are lost, yet they are all still there somehow as well, like ghosts. We hear echoes of voices, of footsteps, of security guards’ walkie-talkies, of keys being rattled – sonic events easily associated with a visit to a museum, yet presented in an extracted, possibly more haunting, form. In this excerpt from the completed 49 minute sound map, the listener is presented with an approximation of an experience, an analog to the fate of museum objects: things taken out of both their time and their original context, and re-presented as an echo of what they once were, all of their physicality there, lacking their original voice.

Hearing Enlightenment: A Sound Map of the Enlightenment Galleries at the British Museum is a book and album project published by Museum of Portable Sound Press that documents a day-long public performance and recording project which resulted in a sound piece that collects and presents the sonic environment of the Enlightenment Galleries in a manner reminiscent of the collection and display practices developed by the world's earliest museums during the Enlightenment era.

The seven hour performance involved sitting for exactly one hour in each of the seven different topical areas of the Enlightenment Galleries. While present in each of the galleries, I made sound recordings; I also made visual sketches of sounds I heard, and read a different book in each of the seven areas.

Once collected, each one-hour recording was time-compressed (without affecting its pitch) to an arbitrary length of seven minutes, producing a glitchy 49-minute sound piece. This intentional manipulation serves to wipe out the majority of the sounds collected, leaving only faint traces of echoes – which acts as a metaphor for the colonialist Enlightenment era's attempts to 'collect and display the world' in early museums, which inevitably missed more than they included, and silenced more voices than they made heard.

  
    <a href="http://johnkannenberg.bandcamp.com/album/a-sound-map-of-the-enlightenment-galleries-at-the-british-museum">A Sound Map of the Enlightenment Galleries at the British Museum by John Kannenberg</a>
  

A 30-page full-colour printed book documents the performance, including the original mapped plan for the project along with the drawings produced during the performance, as well as all the photographs I took during the project.