You Can't Hear the Sounds You Make

'...so I decided to stay in Cambridge overnight'

For several years I have earned an honest crust selling 'the arts' to the unsuspecting public. A night at the theatre, a dance and a giggle, an afternoon with a face painter and juggler; you thought it was just you and the artist? Oh no. I was there as your mediator. Only yesterday someone asked me what I did for a living and I said 'arts marketing'. 'What's that?' 'Well, it's when you persuade people to take part in arts activity ...'

One of the areas which I have not enjoyed marketing is a whole new 'artform' which used to be called 'new media' before morphing into 'digital arts' and then becoming what is now apparently called 'new technology arts'. It sort of took up from where performance or live art left off. That is to say, you could be guaranteed about 5 people in an audience and mostly made up of the artist's friends and family (actually I don't want to knock friends and family as a marketing device, they're an extremely useful audience segment: easy to contact, will attend anything, loyal and easily pleased).

In May 2007, Everyday Eavesdropper was working on the 'Enter' Festival in Cambridge which brought together the great and the good of the techno art world. Thankfully, EE wasn't there for his marketing abilities but because the Director is a friend and she persuaded EE into some free volunteer help. These are the domes on Parker's Piece where most of it happened.


Let's cut straight to the chase. Despite fears to the contrary, the art wasn't at all bad. EE didn't see it all and as always, later on you get to hear about the most amazing event of the festival that you missed. However, it is EE's opinion that events fell into five categories:

• Atrocious pretension
• Great ideas poor technological delivery
• Clever technology looking for an idea
• Hmmm, yes that's quite interesting, makes you think doesn't it?
• Mind-warping

Some of the ones that worked for EE made interesting use of GPS (the system that locates you in time and space that you have in most mobile phones and car mapping systems that tell you where to go). 'Active Ingredient' (see their blog here) had a game called 'Ere Be Dragons' which used a heart monitor and gps to ... [sorry I've cut out the paragraph here where I try and explain this - you'll just have to check their website!].

The best one of all came right at the end of the weekend and fitted into the category of 'Mind Warping'. If you ever get a chance to try out Sounds from above the ground by Duncan Speakman do take it up. He uses technology to transform what is a simple but clever idea. In this case, EE joined a group to walk round Cambridge city centre with the artist a few metres ahead with a sensitive microphone and the audience following a few metres behind with headphones on, listening both to the artist's commentary on what he sees and feels and to all the noises which are being picked up. The sounds and speech are electronically filtered and changed (slightly) and the overall effect is completely mesmerising and very moving.

You can get a glimpse of what it is like and what people think, on Duncan Speakman's website here. Of course, it is personal and as we know, EE likes listening to the patchwork of everyday sounds and conversations anyway; but hearing a miniature snippet of two young people in conversation: "... so I decided to stay in Cambridge overnight" was even more fascinating than normal. To some extent this broke the Datada rules in that they didn't know they were being listened to - EE was 30-40 metres away - but it was so beautiful to enter into and out of someone else's life so rapidly.

There was more too it than this though; something about re-discovering what you thought you already knew. Like Francis Ford Coppola's 'The Conversation', a 1974 film starring Gene Hackman as a surveillance expert who's perspective on the people he is surveying gradually changes through repeated listening to the tape. Even better (and now EE looks certain to get pretentious) in the poetry of TS Eliot (Four Quartets):

"Sudden in a shaft of sunlight

Even while the dust moves

There rises the hidden laughter

Of children in the foliage."

'Sudden in a shaft of sunlight' beautifully encapsulates those minutes in Cambridge on a Sunday afternoon in May, 2007.