The pick was [then] used to hammer on the surface, and by this means, the Angle Ditch was discovered. The sound produced by hammering on an excavated part is much deeper than on an undisturbed surface, a circumstance worth knowing when exploring a grass-grown downland,though not applicable to cultivated ground.”
[Augustus Pitt, Rivers. Excavations in Cranborne Chase. Volume IV. 1895]
The relation between such techniques of archaeological prospecting and TEMPEST, the study of compromising emissions (including sound), can easily be made with both interventions pointing towards a certain revealing of that which is. In highly paranoiac manner, psychogeophysics seeks to expand the terms of this simple equation to embrace psychogeography and urbanism, proposing an exchange between imaginary realms, the digital and the observed, which allows for speculative notions such as data sedimentation or for the application of techniques including those of version control to urban locales. Martin Howse will present and demonstrate a short series of psychogeophysical investigations and interventions with particular attention to the epistemic aspects of sound.
Martin Howse operates within the fields of discourse, speculative hardware (environmental data in open physical systems), code (an examination of layers of abstraction), free software and the situational (performances and interventions). Heavily improvised, playing with the collapse of massed, barely functional salvaged equipment and software systems made manifest in sound/noise and image, Howse presents a complex, process-driven constructivist performance; the symphonic rise of the attempt to piece together fugal systematics is played out against the noise of collapse and machine crash at the deserted border of control. Howse has performed and collaborated worldwide using custom software and hardware modules for audible/visible code/noise generation.
