“Tactile Rituals as Means for Transportation” is an audio-visual response to a direction set by Otherset entitled Deep Listening. The project explores the transformative qualities of mundane tasks.

DISCIPLINES
EXPERIMENTAL

LINK
OTHERSET.CO

TIMELINE
JULY 2024

“Tactile Rituals as Means for Transportation” is an audio-visual response to a direction set by Otherset entitled Deep Listening. The project explores the transformative qualities of the mundane.

Through recording, reflecting, writing and visualising, Tactile Rituals documents the daydream-like state one can enter when performing repetitive or tedious tasks.

Tactile Rituals as Means for Transportation — 3:39
[Best experienced with headphones]

“Tactile Rituals as Means for Transportation” started as a need for understanding.

For the last decade of life, my relationship with food and the acts of both eating and cooking has been extremely poor. Often finding myself avoiding meals altogether, the once beloved act of cooking became a burden. Using this brief as a platform, I attempted to understand the catalyst for this ailing relationship.

Out of all the meals avoided, breakfast has been the most neglected. Excuses like “I’m running late” or unfulfilled promises akin to “I’ll grab something later” have been my meal-replacement shake more times than I’d like to admit. For this experiment, I spent a week making time for, recording, and reflecting upon… breakfast.

For seven mornings, I recorded the processes of both cooking and eating breakfast. At the end of the week, I listened back through the recordings once just to listen, and another time with a more critical ear. The audio files, ranging from nine to twenty-three minutes, sounded completely different from each other. Some were swift and nearly silent, others long and loud. But the thread that tied them together was not the sound itself, but where my head was while recording.

I found myself forgetting the recording device was there and either leaving it across the room as I went to chop onions or whisking pancake batter right next to the microphone—the latter making for an extremely unpleasant editing process. More than forgetting about the device, I found myself completely not there for most of the recording process.

Where I did find myself was in dreams (those more learned than I may say maladaptive, but that’s a completely different project). With each tap of a spoon or shake of a carton, I was launched into memories, some good and others not so much. 

The audio file itself is a condensed combination of two cooking sessions. One in which I finished feeling grounded and content, the other leaving me with a sour taste in my mouth (not to discredit my efforts, the food was great). 

To represent the audio, a canvas divided into as many cells as there are seconds in the audio file (bisected vertically for the two cooking sessions) was filled in using a scale created to chart my state. The chart can be understood as follows:

0000 — 3000 : Present / Actively cooking / “Here”
3001 — 7000 : Somewhere / Actively dissociating / “Neither”
7001 - 9999 : Distant / Actively daydreaming / “There”