Welcome. 

What is the HARK project all about? It is a shared exploration of ways of seeing and listening. We develop a number of media: video, sound, music, to encourage play, creativity and improvisation, which we host in interesting acoustic spaces. This latter activity is co-creative enabling participants to ‘find their voice’.

How do we support this exploration? First we invite you to make a sensory, meditative journey using the video/sound clips on this website. We offer some prompts as to how one might approach this engagement. The posture we suggest is one that is spacious, permissive and open, to engage with the videos with a suspension of our usual critical faculties, to adopt a ‘negative capability’ in our looking and listening. As you make the sensory, meditative journey we offer some articulations of the experience to encourage you to become aware of yours and we also offer some reflections on reflecting — that is to say we encourage ourselves to notice what we notice, to become more aware of how we attend to what we see, hear, perceive and interpret.

So we are exploring a practice and developing a certain discipline. We are taking play seriously as the way in which spaciousness and creativity emerge. We can later move on to sharing these experiences and activities with others in co-creation and improvisation, but first let us describe a little more the sensory journey on this website.

We begin with short minatures, what we call Ikons. These are usually less than a minute and often in Instagram format. You could start with, for example: RainRace, Lightform, Haar, Run or Headspace. First we are likely to regard the clip as an art object, something made for consumption, a finished article. We may also find it intrinsically interesting or amusing. These are forms of transaction that we commonly deploy. If we dwell for while and look and listen again we might become aware of what we find interesting, what draws our attention — a line, a cadence, a pattern, a shape, the light and so on.

We might begin to consider how we are looking and listening. We might be able to create a space of reflection which allows something in the experience to be significant without at this point being able to articulate exactly what or why that should be. This is the first aspect of spaciousness. So we might note that some experiences can have significance and value without us knowing exactly or clearly what or why that is, and staying with this is interesting.

We might then move to slightly longer clips called Haiku which are usually about 4-5 minutes long. You could start with Wake, or Frond. These take the Ikon approach deeper. In the case of Wake and also later Frond we show how the musician responds over time to the images in a series of improvisations. This shows that here are no fixed versions of these works, that they are always open to co-creative exploration. 

As well as the attending, dwelling  and reflecting that we have begun to develop towards this material we also may notice a new tendency with Haiku. This is the thematic or narrative notion, we might think that the Haiku has a defined subject, topic and this leads us both to an interpretive frame of reference and also to assume some motive on the part of the creators. This push towards a cognitive grasp of what the clip is and what it might be ‘for’ or its use, is then open itself for reflection.

There is no right and wrong here it is to notice, to notice what and how we notice and also to explore what suspension and inattention feels like in the engagement or immersion. So what might become available on reflection is the shift we make from significance to meanings in our desire understand. We suggest in one of our meditative prompts that this tendency is a form of closure, a desire to grasp subject matter in what we theorise later as a ‘convergent epistemology’, but more of that later.

Here right at the start with short minatures we can begin to see the habits of our looking and listening, and the rich repertoire we deploy. We are perhaps engaged in a paradoxical process of both finding interesting the feel, detail, shape of our experience and also finding moments of reprieve in which we are taken in/out of ourselves by the way we inhabit the visual/sound world of the work. We realise that we possess different modes of knowing.

The Haikus Wake and Frond are somewhat abstract, and one might suggest that making abstract is part of the exploration which allows associations, sense impressions, to be experienced in greater spaciousness that focussed object oriented approaches allow. What, however do we find ourselves wanting to say about these works and our experiences of looking and listening? If we proceed to Lines, or Crepuscule, Mobius Train, Weathermap or Caravan we may find that we have  much to articulate and reflect on both in terms of what we make of the works and also what we learn about our own engagement.  

So as we noted above about our repertoire of looking/listening we can notice many aspects of this. For example in the Haiku Wake we might find ourselves caught by the movement, fixed on the leading edge of the wave, noticing how interesting it is to stay right upon it, and when we do how we are also able to have the peripheral vison of the whole. Then we lose a focal sense and let the image move change its shape and swim before our eyes, and in some parts of the clip it seems impossible to focus on any particular thing or part of the wave. We feel the urgency of the left to right movement, the direction of written text, yet the image turns and we face a wall of water in an image that would be impossible, the atmosphere lows and the vertical feel softens to image. And so it goes in a cycle of attention, to detail, to objects, to pattern, movement, from focussing on parts to unfocussed whole, all the while our experience is coloured by the feelings that arise, and our interest, even pleasure turns also to thoughts and ideas. If we can suspend our art-object criteria, our technical appraisal, our reductive explanatory tendency (what we might call our habitual reactions) we might be able to allow the ideas to be nested in the experience (to fashion responses) and open up a creative responsive space for articulation and expression. 

What if we then  allow our ideas about to be the start of making? What if the spaciousness of our attending to them allows us the possible expressive space to have co-creative voice with these materials? This takes us to a participative mode. This possibility we link to the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’ that is, to the connection between staying with the creative source of our responsive associations, the ideas that have emerged (the inside) and placing these in the context of an opportunity for improvised expression. (the outside). This is play, and exploration where significance, value, expression, improvisation and co-creation can thrive without reaching after meanings, interpretations (on the inside) or  by constructing and designing (on the outside). So what we seek to explore is that which arises in us, for us, with others in the safe co-creative space. We have shown already how these image and sound conversations between players can be very productive. We note in another of our reflections on how you might take part in such events with the HARK Collective as a resource and support in finding  your voice.

In the website journey we now move to another level of engagement. With what are called Studies. Here we have taken a particular feature of the environment, Grass, Rivers, Streams and made an in depth and surface study of its character — patterns, light, reflections, shapes, forms, flows and process. These can work just like Ikons and Haiku yet also allow abstract concepts like flow, change, process and form to arise and be the focus of meditation, and also some theorising.

Finally we have what are called Pieces. There is just one at present, and as with all these materials it is a ‘hyper-text’ that is  it is always being worked with and through into new combinations of co-creation. It is available for example as a backdrop which can be used over which to recite text, poetry on the implicit subject matter. 

The theme and narrative of the Piece which is called Hiraeth (Welsh for homesickness, exile, linked to emigration) is a journey in 4 Atmospheres: Exile, Wayfaring, Sacrifice and Ruin. Each Atmosphere can be worked with alone and the whole piece is about an hour long.

The Atmospheres have been used as the backdrop to sound/music improvisation by the HARK Collective and there is a link to that file below.

As participants in the project work with these materials they can also join the HARK Music Collective in a supported improvisation session with a video of their choice from our store here. Participants may bring their instrument/voice/sounds into a unique acoustic space which is the Silo. This space has a 12 second resonance and therefore provides support for the creation of harmonic structures which therefore have a longer sound life, and this duration also allows for sound/music conversations. We record our sessions in the Silo and these can be edited for later use by participants. 

So these are the elements of the project and the sensory journey that begins on the website. Please explore as you wish.

The HARK project can be viewed from other complementary perspectives. By this we mean that this exploration of what we are describing here: participative, embodied ‘knowledge practices’ including looking (and its attendant elaborations, focussing, unfocussing, watching, gazing) and listening (and its attendant aspects) can be schematised and also theorised. These ways of considering the HARK project  are in a different register and mode of knowing. We have noted the possibility of articulating ones responses to the material so that these responses can be folded back into a creative process by retaining the embodied experiential mode of knowing as part of the process of creative transfigurations. It I also possible to theorise the project without loss to that process.

Theorising can also be a creative process rather than a purely explanatory one. We try to avoid reductive explanatory approaches which seek to explain experience rather than to celebrate and enhance it. We would call these ways of theorising ‘convergent epistemologies’.

We therefore provide a footnoted/referenced version of this introductory welcome Note for those who wish to explore in this mode of knowing.  

For now you are invited to make the sensory journey through the website and enjoy the materials you find there. 

You will be offered a series of meditative prompts I text as you make the journey. These are intended to keep folding back into the experience and also provides ways to explore other ways of knowing — interpreting and theorising— in other spaces. So the first meditative prompt as you begin is about the notion of ‘meditation’.

Let us try and free ourselves from, and suspend, certain assumptions: that meditation is focussed on subject matter and that contemplation is wordless, and that the latter is more valued. That meditation is going inwards into deep interiority, with eyes closed for that purpose and also in silence. That meditation is spiritual whereby real knowing lies elsewhere in some beyond. Rather might we not, with eyes and ears open, be in the world, allow what is happening before us to unfold, and to explore our perception of things as they are an enjoy and notice how they are transfigured in our seeing and listening? To experience experience, to notice. Can we make space to set aside our desire to interpret, explain, find meanings, deconstruct, critique, of fixity, of certainty, of familiarity, of tameness, in order to attend, dwell, behold, notice, the intrinsic nature of form and its, and our, ever changing entanglement? Can we start by exploring the simply human? So we invite you to meditate/contemplate in, with these Ikons and Haiku — go wayfaring though a sensory journey.

Ikons

Text by Huw

Haiku

Text by Huw