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Abstract
This article introduces Pulse Project (2011–), a doctoral performance research project that engages in critical discourse between art and science through the creation of digital soundscapes that weave together artistic, medical, technological, ancient and modern methodologies. Pulse ‘reading’, case histories, notations of pulses and programming soundscape compositions are all used together as methods for exploring the cultural encounter between artist, participants and diverse medical practices. Pulse Project seeks to provide an examination of the means with which the temporal materiality of touch can be used together with audio programming to form a translation and synthesis of different ecologies and disciplines, e.g. medicine and art, Eastern and Western practices, touch and digitality, etc. Drawing upon my experience as a clinical acupuncturist (with training in biomedicine), I use Chinese pulse diagnostics together with SuperCollider (an audio synthesis programming language) to inform the composition process of each soundscape. In this way, Pulse Project interrogates the aesthetic and philosophical axioms underpinning contemporary medicine, technology and cognitive embodiment through the exploration of their corollary ‘others’—traditional Chinese medicine and music theory—in order to generate a fresh approach to embodiment and soundscape composition.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Dr David Ryan, Dr Milla Tiainen and Dr Richard Hoadley for their excellent guidance of this research project. I also wish to thank the Cultures of the Digital Economy Research Institute at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge for their generous support of this research.
Supplemental material
Three sample ‘pulse’ soundscapes referred to in this article can be accessed on the Taylor & Francis website: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14626268.2015.998681
Audio Object 1: Mélanie Copenhagen 1 (2014) © Michelle Lewis-King. 1:46.
Audio Object 2: Ed Copenhagen 11 (2014) © Michelle Lewis-King. 1:37.
Audio Object 3: Sandy V&A 7 (2014) © Michelle Lewis-King. 2:00.
Notes
1 This concept aligns with Elisabeth Hsu's (Citation2000) ‘Towards a Science of Touch, Part I: Chinese Pulse Diagnostics in Early Modern Europe'.
2 Techne is creating knowledge through embodied doing and making, as in the development of a craft or the creation of an artwork. Techne is defined by the Merriam and Webster Dictionary Online as ‘art, skill, the methods of making something or obtaining an an objective’.
3 Originally trained as a sculptor (1986–1994), I began working with sound and sound installations when I studied for my MA in sculpture at Chelsea College of the Arts in 1994, and continued to exhibit my sound work until returning to university in 2002. Between 2002 and 2005, I studied biomedicine and Chinese medicine: acupuncture at the University of Westminster, receiving a BSc in acupuncture in 2005, and continued my studies on Chinese herbal medicine and biochemistry during 2008–2009. I also ran a full-time clinical practice between 2005 and 2011 before undertaking my current PhD study.
4 Please refer to the Glossary at the end of the article for a definition of this term.
5 My interest in the other is aligned with Emmanuel Lévinas's assertion that the other is of more importance than the self and that the alterity of the other places upon us the duty of discovering (but never fully ‘capturing’) the other. In the clinical encounter, of course interest in and discovery of the other is a crucial and central practice. See Lévinas (Citation1999).
6 Chinese medicine, very simply defined, examines the temporal relationships between living organisms, nature and cosmological influences, and seeks for way, through deeply apprehending these interior/exterior, natural/cosmic relationships, to augment the well-being and longevity of living beings (particularly, but not exclusively, humans). Chinese medical concepts will be developed further in this article.
7 Out of the eighty-plus people who have participated in Pulse Project between 2011 and 2014, only one person knew what Chinese medicine was and could share in some form of active exchange of knowledge about this medical system.
8 Artist, psychoanalyst and philosopher Bracha L.Ettinger has developed a theory of the matrixial gaze that challenges and counters the phallocentricism of the object–subject gaze in Lacan. The matrixial gaze also challenges their notions of feminine ‘difference’ developed by philosophers Deleuze and Guattari. Ettinger resists the traps of (phallic) binary subject/object or mind/body relationships through focusing on concepts such as co-emergence, intersubjectivity-as-encounter. The matrixial gaze perceives and affects rather than probes and authorises. Refer to Ettinger's book, The Matrixial Boarderspace (2005) for more information.
9 Constraint is a term used James J. Gibson to define a ‘property of relation’, an object or system that specifies the way in which agents will relate (Greeno Citation1993, 338).
10 Throughout the three years of my undertaking this study, the fact that all but one participant did not know what Chinese medicine was goes someway towards demonstrating the predominance of biomedical (mono)culture within British and European societies.
11 I use the term ‘Chinese medicine’ here to signify a medical tradition and practice that spans from Early Chinese civilisation (1000 B.C.E.) to contemporary practice of Chinese medicine across the world.
12 Refer to the Glossary for a description of this term.
13 SuperCollider is defined in Wikipedia as a programming language and environment that enables users to create ‘real time’ algorithmic compositions. SC uses an object-based language that is split into two components—a server (scsynth) and a client (sclang)—that communicate through using an open sound control object. For more information and tutorials, see: http://supercollider.sourceforge.net/. Please also refer to the Glossary for further definitions of scsynth and sclang.
14 More audio samples of the project can be heard at https://soundcloud.com/cosmosonicsoma/sets and http://clang.cl/pulse-landscapes-2/.
15 Refer to the Glossary for a brief explanation of these terms.
16 Refer to the Glossary for a brief explanation of this term.
17 See Glossary.
18 See Glossary.
19 For an explanation of the classical Chinese pentatonic scale and methods for tuning used in these compositions, please see pages 44–48 of Cheng-Yih Chen's Early Chinese Work in Natural Science: A Re-examination of the Physics of Motion, Acoustics, Astronomy and Scientific Thoughts (1995).
20 Refer to Albrecht Durer's woodcut, ‘Draftsman Making a Perspective Drawing of a Reclining Woman’ (1525). See http://www.metmuseum.org/Collections/search-the-collections/366555.
21 American composer Pauline Oliveros is credited with coining the term in 1991 according to an interview conducted by Alan Baker for American Public Media in January Citation2003.
Additional information
Michelle Lewis-King is an artist-acupuncturist, lecturer and PhD research fellow for the Cultures of the Digital Economy Research Institute, Anglia Ruskin University, and her research investigates the cultural interfaces between art, medicine and technology. Michell's artistic research explores the practice of Chinese medicine as a critical and performative intervention within the contexts of (Western) biomedical clinical praxis. Michelle's research has been published in the Journal of Sonic Studies and ELSE Journal for Artistic Research, and her work has also been recently exhibited at the V&A Museum, Ex-Teresa Museum (Mexico) and Spike Island.