l’Alternativa: Deborah Stratman to present Sonic Rambling workshop
24 Festival l’Alternativa (Activities in English)
Faith, freedom, sonic subterfuge, expansionism and the paranormal are usual topics we can find at Deborah Stratman‘s filmography. Her multi-disciplined art practice has been recognized and supported by a number of prestigious granting organizations and awards. Likewise, her 36 films to date have also been screened at festivals and museums worldwide.
Last year, L’Alternativa Film Festival showed “The Illinois Parables”, which is the latest film of this filmmaker, and now it is time to know more details about Stratman‘s art and experimental work.
“Sonic Rambling” will be a 3-hour workshop about the politicised relationship between audio and public space, exploring how sound can disturb, camouflage, animate and construct environments.
This workshop will be given in English language in order to develop it more dinamically.
Deborah Stratman typically designs the sound for her own productions in addition to the rest of the whole work a film needs (direction, shooting, edition,…) and all her films allow and stimulate controversial thoughts.
Prior to this intense workshop on sound, which will take place in Barcelona followed by a DIY construction session, where attendants will outfit themselves with passive amplifiers and set forth on an aural stroll around the neighbourhood, Cinestel had the privilege to ask Stratman a few questions.
– Sound is something we cannot see with our eyes, but how could we make ourselves sure that it has unrecognizable shapes?
Deborah Stratman
I don’t think sonic shapes are necessarily unrecognizable. To an attentive listener, they might be discerned. Some people, the blind, for instance, or trained acousticians, or musicians, have a very acute sense of sounds in space. The increased rounded bass of the edges and corners of rooms for instance. Frequencies have specific physical sizes. The higher the frequency, the shorter the wavelength.
Because of this, certain frequencies fit snugly into certain objects and spaces and cause them to sympathetically vibrate, or can cause ‘standing waves’ – a special sort of oscillation which are a bit like a feedback loop, but generated vis a vis architecture instead of electronics. Hans Jenny and others instigated the field of Cymatics, which is basically the visualization of standing waves. And others have experimented with acoustic levitation, made possible only because the standing patterns have very specific shapes, or ‘states’, in which something light – a ping pong ball for instance – can be trapped and levitated within.
– Without fear of looking like a paranoid, I want to ask you if sound could be a mode of domination.
Absolutely. We are very easily influenced by sound. It affects us strongly, often subliminally. Just think about what makes a scary movie frightening – more often than not, the sound track does most of the work. The entire industry of Muzak came out of using sound as a form of social control. As have psyops divisions (psych ops) of various militaries, and any number of new “non-lethal” sonic weapons.
– And strictly in the case of cinema and other visual arts, do you think that there is a gap between sound and image functions?
Yes – thankfully, there is a gap. The gap is where meaning is made, where dimensionality comes from, where we produce the size of the cinematic universe, from the most intimate, say inside someone’s head hearing their internal thoughts, to the most vast, like an entire cityscape.
Vision is over there, in front of us.
Sound is 360 degrees, all around us, we are in the middle of it.
Sound situates us more profoundly than image.
– Since no prior knowledge is required for attending to your workshop in Barcelona, what is the essence of your proposal at l’Alternativa Film Festival?
The workshop will be a very brief introduction to some histories of sonic control and subterfuge, to very basic properties of sonic propagation, and a chance for us to reorient ourselves so we might navigate using our ears more. Listening goes way beyond music. It’s a radical proposition. Listening can upend power structures, promote tolerance, make us more present. Plus, it will be fun and irreverent.
©José Luis García/Cinestel.com
