Category: Texts
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Sonic Voyages
Imagine a child of the ‘jet-age’ living in an unobtrusive coastal village, mid-way between the dwelling of Blake, the artist, poet and visionary and that of his friend, the scientist and astronomer Halley. The child proceeds with eyes wide open to technics and ears tuned to poetics ……
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Electrical by Nature
Theoretical papers often quote Plato’s Cave – such a nice, primitive dawn of consciousness image, with its shadowy representations flickering sootily across the cave’s rear wall and the line of onlookers warming their backs by the fire! Strangely there is scant mention of the crackle of burning wood, or the sounds of those protagonists prancing…
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2 + 2 = A math primer for the hard of hearing.
2 + 2 =….. was delivered as part of the “SoundCulture96” conference to parallel the “Silent Forest” installation and “A Silent Forest” radio broadcast. As such the paper provides a brief overview of some of my general interests as a sound sculptor in a confluence of morphology, spatiality and technology. The text, which follows remains…
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Prometheus Bound; Art, Science, Creativity and the Imagination.
The small Sussex fishing village in which I spent my childhood contained two significant buildings, significant not for their formal qualities, they were both simple cottages, but because one had been the home of Halley, the astronomer and the other the home of William Blake the poet. Without being conscious of the fact, I grew…
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Nigel Helyer’s Silent Forest by Doug Kahn
This essay is a version of the exhibition catalogue for Silent Forest shown at the San Francisco Art Institute as part of SoundCulture96. As a recent transplant to Australia, I welcomed the opportunity to write about this work, to introduce it to the city where I have spent much of my adult life. In framing…
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The Plural Forest
The Plural Forest is lodged here, in an un-adulterated state, as a text that was written in 1994 primarily as a result of my research travels throughout northern Thailand and Vietnam and is co-incident with the gestation period of the “Silent Forest” project.
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Vist the Drawings Gallery
I have boxes and boxes of drawing books ~ ever since I was forced to keep them at Foundation College in Sussex. The weekly scrutiny of our books was at first excruciating for me (convinced I would never be comfortable drawing) now it gives me delight, even though I simply draw to think things through!…