Beneath The Beach, The Cloud  
Beneath The Beach, The Cloud was made using archival research + experimenting with machine vision + resituating archival recordings + travelling to Cornwall + spending a week in Berlin + LiDAR scanning + creating custom synths + field recording
Spending a Week in Berlin

I went to Berlin for Transmediale 2023, as I have been watching lectures from the conference for a long time. It was really interesting to me that they embraced the fluidity between performance, lecture and screening and this, combined with the Site Writing module made me more experimental with my own work. It was amazing to see that academic outputs can still be engaging and really just cool. It was here that I had the chance to talk to McKenzie Wark and Farzin Lotfi-Jam, who are both working in the same field as I am.

Experimenting with Machine Vision

Before I found Porthcurno Beach, I found it really hard to pin my project to a specific site. This was not only a problem because of the nature of the course, but also it made it hard for me to concretise the abstract philosophical and theoretical concepts that my project was dealing with. I attempted to create an intervention where people’s movements in a space would create sounds, however this turned out to be beyond my coding ability. This was lucky, because later I realised that it would not have gotten to the core of what I was talking about anyway, so I could focus on other things. I used Max MSP, and some of the sounds made are linked below.

https://on.soundcloud.com/YspU4


Creating Custom Synths

After experimenting with how to make sounds from machine vision, I wanted to see if I could create a closed pipeline of sound making by connecting machine vision and machine learning. I was still using Max MSP, and I used cameras and microphones to pick up how people were moving in spaces and what that sounded like. Unfortunately the ML/AI toolkits in Max are very preliminary, so I was struggling with making something that was actually listenable. The things I learned from this, however, would later come in handy when I used similar processes to make the sounds for Ground Truth. I also started to experiment with how radiowaves can interact and distort each other, a more lo-fi version of making sounds from people in a space.





https://on.soundcloud.com/jgPxZ
Resituating Archival Recordings

While researching military simulations, I came across a bunch of videos describing SimNet and ArpaNet. I used these and my machine sounds, combined with the radio experiments for the first trial of my intervention. People were invited to take move a pocket radio around, and discover in 3D space “clouds” of sounds. Using two hidden radio emitters, they could physically explore virtual space. It was staged in two versions; the first used looped recordings playing simultaneously, cancelling and amplifying each other, which was staged in Here East, the second version was more linear and pre-recorded. This was displayed in the Barbican Centre as part of “What’s Happening on the Inside?”. It was really great to see how people interacted in both places, and although it started out as part of the intervention, it later became a structural element of my film.

https://on.soundcloud.com/X6yRN

Travelling to Cornwall

In the summer I went to Cornwall to see the PK Museum of Global Communications. I have struggled in London to find spaces that are open to any sort of visiting, as most telecommunication infrastructure is labelled as a “national security target”. The inaccessibility of these places made it very hard for me to find a grounding for my project - where Transmediale made me discover a theoretical ground, Porthcurno became a physical one. I was amazed at how beautiful and historically rich Porthcurno beach was, and the fact that it was made to look like a beach again and again was incredibly interesting to me. So when I first visited the museum and the archives, my project suddenly just clicked - it was amazing!

 
Archival Research

While I was in Porthcurno, I had the chance to visit the museum archives. They had an amazing amount of documents and images, and Alan Renton, the archivist was incredibly knowlegable and open to my questions. This stood in stark contrast with my other attempts at gathering information, and it was just really lovely to sit on the seaside combing through lovely books and documents. He also told me about the “Cable Guy”, Bill Burns, who runs https://atlantic-cable.com, an immense archive of everything related to the Atlantic Telegraph Cable.

Field Recording

In September, I wend back to Porthcurno to shoot my film. Because of the limited number of public transport options, I was mainly hiking, which enabled me to stumble upon a number of hidden military buildings. In my film, I used videos of these, combined with archival images and sounds made from field recordings in Cornwall. It was really nice to work with my hands after spending so much time with these fluffy concepts and complex research, and the process of filming also enabled me to work through my ideas.

LiDAR Scanning

Because of my limited time and budget, I created scans of the beach as a means of engaging with it from a distance. This enabled me to do some of the filming from home, which resonated with how I have been working on my project for a long time. While spaces in London were inaccessible due to bureaucracy, Porthcurno was inaccessible because of time. Yet this remote filming mirrored how information travels thousands of kilometres in milliseconds.

Aron Weber 2023