Artist and Agency: Technologies for Exploring Self and Place

This chapter explores how software-based compositional processes can be used to explore relationships between self and place. The process of creating these works—such as the ways in which sound can be edited and manipulated through digital means and how visual material can be rendered—offers commentary for critically assessing relationships between artists and creative software. Creativity can be stifled by software if intuition and individual innovation become subsumed by an over-emphasis on how a tool ought to be used. This is the paradox of greater knowledge: with understanding comes assumptions, and with these assumptions comes constraints. Technology can be used to disembody sounds and images from its origins, resulting in sounds that seemingly emerge from a void. On the other hand, technology can also be used as a tool to reconnect sound and images with personal experiences and with the cultural and historical experiences of place. This chapter will focus on creating soundscape compositions and audio-visual work and how approaching music-making and technology with an open-minded, experimental approach can open new possibilities in reconnecting with place and self. As an example, the author will discuss how one of their works, The Lost—an audio-visual, digital piece—was composed using a combination of sound editing software and a graphical sequencer—and how these tools helped in creating a work combining the history of place (through the use of historical maps and references to cultural history) with the author’s personal history of grief and loss.