 |
Out My Window and Everyday Law artist: Owen Chapman composed between Decemeber 2008 and February 2009.
|
| These pieces demonstrate how sample-based music can be both a form of critique and advocacy. The issue explored: how sounds around us contain messages about law. The pieces utilize samples from a variety of commercial and non-commercial sources, as well as field recordings. Their relationship to the theme of surveillance can best be understood through referencing Foucault’s articulation of the “panopticon” from his work Discipline and Punish, wherein he extends Jeremy Bentham’s design for schools, jails and other “discipline” oriented buildings. Foucault deploys the panopticon (a structure featuring a singular observation location, wherein one can view the denizens of any number of “cells” at any time, without these persons knowing exactly when they are being surveilled) as a metaphor through which to describe the self-policing we all enact as members of modern societies. The impacts of the rule of law on everyday life are ubiquitous, and can be heard in current debates around the legal acceptability of music that samples from copyrighted sources, but also through the particularly insistent tenor of police sirens, seat-belt chimes, radio newscasts, school bells and ticking clocks. The pieces strive to engender contemplation about how law affects everyday life using sequences of heterogeneous sonic events/samples that don’t present a singular “rule of law” so much as they point out the “family resemblances” (to borrow from Wittgenstein) amongst different law-laden sounds. They were originally commissioned by Desmond Manderson and Tina Piper for the McGill Faculty of Law. They were used as part of an installation entitled “Through the Looking Glass: Art as the Mirror of Law” presented at Bravo McGill, Feb 10 and 12th, 2009. The sound works accompanied two separate slideshows of images, which are available at http://www.mcgill.ca/law/ (look under page 4 of the “Features” section on the bottom right hand corner of the page). The audio tracks are also featured on my latest full length album, “Calling the Voice-O-Graph”, which is available for free download through http://callingthevoiceograph.net. Out My Window [mp3_embed playlst="http://mobilemediagallery.org/wp-content/plugins/mp3-player-plugin-for-wordpress/mp3/owen_chapman_Out_My_Window.mp3"]
|
|