Field Crafting
Field Crafting explores the critical, playful and pedagogical potential of field recording. The work consists of 11 tracks recorded during one afternoon in a section of woodland in North Yorkshire, UK. It asks how is the field crafted and conversely, how does the field craft recordists?
Wright visited the area with a list of predetermined text prompts that included throwing pinecones at the microphone, breathing in rhythm to the space as well as recording the sound of entering and leaving the field. Additional actions were improvised and documented. Recordings were later edited and written up as cross-referential fieldnotes for playback listening.
Crafting a practice of critical play combines process, method and artform. Play can subvert disciplinary and technological norms, it can initiate new orientations of bodies, materials, sounds and space. It can also turn reality into construction and construction into reality, producing a partial, mundane and iterative study of place and self amid the labour and environmental milieu in which events unfold.
In some ways these recordings “capture” nothing of the traditional sound object. Instead, they perform an auditory glimpse into the aesthetic, ethical and minor traces of doing – they evidence the craft and craftiness of a recordist-in-the-making.
Keywords: fieldcrafting, critical play, recording, site