On Thin Air
An Interview with Peter Hill on the making of Thin Air, 2003.

Peter Hill: In a recent series of works you made sound recordings in different parts of the world. These included Alcatraz, The Whispering Gallery in Saint Paul's Cathedral in London, and a Buddhist temple in Japan. Can you speak a little more about this project and how it developed?

Martin Sims: The idea of recording silent spaces came to me in April 1998 at the new British Library. I had just returned to London from a trip to India where I'd travelled with a micro cassette recorder using it as a sort of diary, or sound journal. One of my reasons for being on the subcontinent was to record stone 'musical pillars' at the Vittala Temple in Karnataka, which also undoubtedly influenced my thinking about the idea. So I started to consider a series of audio recordings taken from institutionalised spaces of silence such as libraries, prisons, monasteries and so on; I established seven categories in all.

PH: And how did the project progress?

MS: After returning to Sydney, the first fully coordinated recording was made in 1999 at the State Library of New South Wales. Later that year I travelled to Japan to make sound recordings for another project but also used the opportunity of being in another country to develop the silent spaces concept. This led to recordings at a small Zen temple in Southern Kyoto and then in the galleries of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museums. In essence that's how the project came into being but the conceptual and imaginative ramifications of course, took on more currency as the project gathered momentum.

PH: Can you expand on how you made the recordings? Did you edit them at all, or were they all made in real time?

MS: I used a professional DAT recorder, mostly with a stereo microphone but in some instances two directional microphones. All the institutions I wanted to work in have been generous in accommodating my requests, allowing me to set up the equipment wherever I chose. From the outset my intention has been to record in real time - it is a fundamental conceptual issue for the whole project, an uninterrupted extended recording of one hour is my preferred unit of measured time. But there are a few exceptions to this and I have had to make editorial interventions for overall coherence. For example, the recording of the state Library of New South Wales is in two half-hour sections reflecting the acoustic identity of two very different reading rooms. Similarly, the recording of Nazi concentration camps in Poland is also in two half-hour parts. The first was made at KL Auschwitz I situated in the town of Oswiecim and the second at KL Auschwitz II at Birkenau (Brzezinka) three kilometres away. The recording of Enryaku-ji Buddhist temple includes five minutes of an initial, impromptu visit to the site. Apart from these instances and a few minor technical changes in the transfer to CD, the tapes are all seamless takes.

PH: So how did your project develop after Japan?

MS: The project as a whole began to take on more structure in my planning even though I anticipated not being able to record at some of the categories of place that I'd established without considerable effort and luck, for instance inside a fully operational prison or a university final examination. So with an opportunity to travel in 2000 I visited certain places in the UK, Europe, USA and Japan again, yet remained open and flexible about what sites were to be selected. A small anecdote; before leaving Sydney I had written to the prior of a Carthusian monastery in England, which is an order strictly devoted to silence and asked him for permission to record there. I never heard back (which would have been perfect - perfect silence!) until the eve of my departure when I received a small card politely declining my request but with an invitation to view their website and note their CD of night chants.

PH: How important is travel to your way of working?

MS: My ideas have not so much driven the travelling agenda but rather have travelled with me on whatever trips I have been able to undertake, accompanying me at any given opportunity. This quality of randomness is slightly at odds with the indexical nature or the potential for the idea. In other words the project could be 'all prisons' or 'all libraries' but this becomes too proscriptive for me. I want these improbable conjunctions of different site recordings in close physical proximity to each other - there are 12 in this set - so that the listener will speculate about their collective and adjacent resonances. Similarly, using a formulaic approach to each site such as recording at a uniform time of the day and year would have imposed further limitations at the expense of foregrounding the innate atmospheric identity associated with each place, its iconic status if you like.

PH: Is building an archive as important to you as creating an artwork?

MS: I'm interested that you use the word archive. In some senses that is what I am constructing. But the project really has no end, so after five years and twelve locations I want to draw some kind of demarcation around it. The title Thin Air has become very special to me. There is just enough diversity and similarity between the sites recorded to set up some charged associations. Bringing sound into hard copy gives a palpable identity to a lot of work and - I choose the word carefully - meditation on what I was doing. To see these discs sitting on a shelf reaffirms my original ambitions, but it will be the context and manner of their re-presentation as a listening experience that will make the artwork.

PH: And is photography an important part of your work?

MS: Sometimes it most definitely is, such as the shots I have taken at dusk on the Hay Plain of New South Wales in 2000, which were integral to a sound installation and subsequently part of a larger project that is evolving into a sonic portrait of vast geographical space. Otherwise, with Thin Air I have moved between some very conscious documentation of the surroundings at some sites to almost forgetting to do so at others - in fact being disinterested in doing so and just taking perfunctory shots of, for instance, graffiti and masonry on the exterior of Saint Paul's Cathedral. As I'm talking, I can remember that I wasn't permitted to use a camera in the Whispering Gallery nor inside the Rothko Chapel, although I do have one slide of its severe exterior. All of which gives quite a distinct visual character to the project as it now takes on a concluding form. The nondescript shots I took in the vaults of the National Sound Archive at the British Library are strangely attractive in their banality.

PH: For me the title Thin Air emphasises your move away from the sculptural physical object - which probably happened some time ago - and into a more 'sensitive' area, sensitive in that your work involves senses other than, or in addition to, the artist's traditional one of vision. Reflecting on the past few years, was your lighthouse project a bridge between the old and the new way of working, and can you describe that project?

MS: Sensing forms rather than visualizing them. I like that. Listening has certainly come to the fore in my thinking about art, listening with the whole body, as Cage would have said and the Zen masters long before him. You're quite right about the shifts in my work but they happen slowly. A sense of physical objecthood is still very central to what I do now with sound and video. There seems to have been a natural evolution from the large temporal installations of recent years, all of which were defined by a robust physicality, to using these tools for 'insubstantiality' that are able to capture an acoustic trace or appearance, then re-present it elsewhere - at another time and place - all of which to me is enigmatic.

PH: And the lighthouse project?

MS: No, I don't think of the lighthouse work, One Million Candelas as any sort of bridge. It was just 'the next work' and required the use of a video camera. More accurately, these projects overlap, intersect, mesh and then digress from each other indiscriminately. One Million Candelas, which uses extended passages of real time to depict a lighthouse lantern turning through dusk and dawn, compresses a sense - that word again - of 24 hours into 40 minutes and it was essential that it be silent; I had originally intended to present some sound recordings from Thin Air for this installation but decided against it. The work was made specifically for a church interior, exhibited in Sydney in 2002 and projected onto a large screen suspended above the liturgical space. I have had subsequent misgivings about exhibiting the work Ð it's been shown twice since then - in circumstances that do not support it's essential site-specificity; it should only be projected in a church, temple or similar sacred place. Interestingly, the lighthouse I videoed was built at about the same time as the church c.1878. I'm in no doubt that One Million Candelas derived considerably from my reflections on sonic minutiae and silence as it occurred in the Thin Air project. The installation received a lot of positive commentary, which is always gratifying but that apart it is the most 'complete' work I've made for some time. In fact everything I've been doing since, over the last twelve months, has been with a video camera coming directly from the experience of this installation.

PH: I'd like to finish by asking you about your building site project and the videos that are currently emerging from this investigation?

MS: I first spoke about this idea to my friend the Japanese artist, Nakahashi Katsushige last September when he was visiting Australia; ever supportive and encouraging he urged me to pursue it. The essential issue to bear in mind with this work is that I have videoed a construction site in its initial phases of excavation, at a time when massive amounts of earth and rock are being removed to create an increasingly deeper cut in the ground. There are too many metaphorical possibilities in this motif for me to risk declaring any one or other at this stage of its development. However, the working title, Tabula Rasa will indicate where my thinking is directed. This construction zone is a monumental project by urban standards anywhere in the world and I was fortunate enough to get very privileged access to the site. There is no direct relationship in iconographic terms with the previous work but there are connections with my continued use of static shot, real time recording methods. Huge bulldozers, pile drivers, rock saws, trucks and backhoes move in and out of frame like players in an immense theatrical performance. I am considering a dual screen installation for this work that is complemented with footage I've taken of windmills in the Australian landscape on a wind farm in Central New South Wales.

PH: What distinguishes these actions? And does the element of sound and silence relate to your project in Kyoto?

MS: The construction site action is inexorably slow and although I recorded with sound I won't use it despite being a marvellous cacophony of industrial mechanisation; sound would accelerate the visual momentum too much for my purposes. Reflecting back on the recordings I have made for Thin Air, to be still and quiet at the site of recording, sitting monitoring the equipment became a vital part of the work and its making. Nakahashi understood this when he sat with me during my initial recording at Enryaku-ji Temple in Kyoto. The microphone was pointed at a sacred chamber where three lambent flames have burnt unextinguished for twelve hundred years; time and our complex experience of it is at the core of this work. In the same way, sitting with the video camera running for an extended period of shooting connects me to the work's unfolding no less so than those more conventional dynamics of studio practice; ultimately our studio is in our head.

Sydney 2003