 Felly mae'n gwestiwch i'n ddweud hynny, fel cymaint gan ymweld, Lleodraeth yn ymweld, rhai'n Sarah Turner. Felly rydyn ni'n cymaint o bydd y dyfodol, rhai'n ymddir i'r Dwyny. A rhai'n ddim ymweld bydd ymweld i'r bydd y pannol ymddir i'r oedd. Llyfr i ddweud o ddweud, ddweud, rhysgrif iawn ac y podcast. bod yn adonau'r ddaeth gyda pawb a'r ddweud yng nghymru, a gydag'r gweithio'r gweithgau'r ddeunydd Elef Fleming a Daniel Convoy. Mae'n gweithio'r gweithio argynno ar gydag i amherwydd ac mae'n gwybod i'r gweithio'r ddeunydd o'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithgai ar hyn oedd eu llei i'r gweithiau eich gweithio. Mae'n gweithio'n gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio. Rydyn ni'n hyn ystod gan ymweld i'r gweithio'r ddigwydd a'r ffordd yma yn y gweithio i'r pwg amgylchedd yr ARIAN. Rwy'n meddwl i'nナrdi De Yn Imbeithio, ac rwy'n meddwl i'r awrach Cymru yn ystod am gyfledd, a oedd yn gymryd ymddangos hwn o'r Yn edrych ARIAN, roedd yn ei gael ymddangos Penol yn fyw iddyn nhw, i'n cyfnodd Llywodraeth yn Ysgrifolleg Llywodraeth, ac mae'n ardal ynglynig yr unig. Felly mae'r drosbwn yn gondol, ymgyrchion a'r ffans online ar y website. Felly, rydyn ni'n fwy o'r pryddysgu, rydyn ni'n gweithio y teimlo bryd, ac rydyn ni'n gweithio'n gweithio'n ddwy'r ddweud. Yn yr hyn o ddysgu, mae'r ffordd, a'r meddwl, rydyn ni'n gweithio, rydyn ni'n gweithio'n ddysgu, rydyn ni'n gweithio'n ddysgu, rydyn ni'n gweithio'n ddysgu. Yn y 2020, y Paul Mellon Center yn gweithio'n gweithio ddysgu newid yw ffodig. Yn gweithio'n gweithio, oherwydd ymwysig i'r Jo Behring, yn fawr i'r gweithio a'r ffordd o'r ffordd yw 2019, ac yr ardych chi'n gweithio ar yr un os ymddangos yn fawr, yn gweithio'r cyfrwng yn fwy gadeigol i'r gwaith ar gael y gweithio ar y ddau'w gweithio. Mae ffodig ffocwsau ar ddweud a'r gweithio'n gweithio, Cyngor, mae'r ffordd gyngor gwyllwg gweithio gyda gweithio gweithio gwahanol gweithio. Mae ar gweithio ar y tu, gweithio ar y museum, ymlaen iawn, ac yn cynnig adon nhw. Ond y gallu'r pethau o ymddangos panel yma, mae'n ddigon i'r fenomoneg ar yr argynfaith ar gyfer yma. Ond y gallwn edrych ar gweithio ar gweithio ar yr argynfaith a'r hynny, mae'n ddysgu ymddangos newydd. A llwynt mor o ffordd o'r ffordd gwirioneddau, argynfu ar y visiwl. Mae'r panellys gweithio ystod o'r tyfnod o'r ffordd yma. Mae'n fawr i ddweud ymlaen i'r ffordd ymlaen i'r poetic. Mae'n gweithio'r gweithio'r ddysgu'r gweithio a'r ddysgu. Mae'n gweithio'r ideae o'r teimlo a'r texur o'r ffordd a'r gweithio, sy'n gweithio'r posibl o'r rhannu arddangosol, arddangosol, arddangosol a'r gweithio. Felly, rydw i'n gweithio'r gweithio'r panell, a gweithio'r leidio'n gweithio'n gweithio. Felly, rydw i'n gwneud yma i ddweud yma, gyda'n gwneud am gyfer y gweithio'r gweithio. Rydw i'n gweithio, Rydw i'n gweithio'r gweithio at y Paul Merlin Centre, ar gyfer y Llywodraeth 19 a 2020. Yn i'r gwneud i'r amddangosol yn cael y ddechrau a ddim yn unig o'r cyfrifio Brithaith Brithaith, a'r wneud o'r ffordd ac yn ddweud am yr arddangosol Brithaith Brithaith i'r gweithio. i gweithio'r gweithio a'r gweithio'r llyfr yng Nghymru, ym 2006 a yw 2016. Zac下ith yn dwych yn gweithio'r gweithio. So'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio gweithio'n gweithio, a rydych chi'n meddwl i'n rhan o'r arglwch gwrthodig ar yr artist Frank Bowling a'r arbennig yma'r erbyn y podcast ar BBC. Cathie Courtney yn yng nghymru ar gweithio'n gweithio ar gweithio, i chi i wneud yn ystafell yn 1990. Mae'n ymwneud y projiktei nhw o'i'r newydd gyda'r Cymru, penigol yn y Llyfrgell Bryd. Mae hyn yn ymwybr yw'r arddangannaeth honno o flyf ddechreu接下來ol yn y Llyfrgell Cymru. Jo Beirang yn y dyfodol yn gyfosig yn fflaes yn y Llyfrgell Gweithretoedd i'n gwneud ein gwellwch yn ddechrau amllwn, a'r fawr am inducecyn gyngor, ac yn yw'r ystod, mae'n cyfosig y newyddion gyda fi allan, ac yn ystod o'r Ffawr Mellon Llywodraeth, ac yn ystod o'r Ysgring 2020. Inigo Wilkins yw'r wrthyn nhw'n gweithio i'r leitr, Cal Arts New School for Research and Practice, yn ymgyrch yn ymgyrch gwrs mewn ysgrifennu, yn ysgrifennu sonicol, ysgrifennu gwahanol, ysgrifennu ffilosofi ac ysgrifennu. Ysgrifennu yn ymgyrch yn ymgyrch yn ymgyrch yn ymgyrch yn ymgyrch yn ymgyrch yn ymgyrch yn ymgyrch. Ras umwys, James Mansell yr profesorこれで Agoraedna sy'n gweithio fediant mirrors ynddon yn yr Wir Ynes, y croread和平ewin epicul, yn Ysgrifennu Unedig rŵan Fג기를 a mo iechyd ar gyfer Siam honno, ond rydyn ni wedi eyf yn ymgyrch wrthyn AU głfodol am amser at ynglyn Ndavis a Gweith ilsg ㅅ rwy'r sefyll yn fizzio.. Reoli a Chwnes m donc nad i rydyn wedi Llywodraeth, lea newydd a', gasol a llun o thys inserting pleis gyd dressing tydd i'r panall. o ardal. Anna, rydw i. Rydw i. Yn mynd i ddisgu'r gwrddion internet o'r ysgol, ydych chi gydag i gweithio, ac rydw i'n gweithio'n ddifenni gyda'r ystod. Dw i'n ddifenio'r gweithio ystod o'r bwysig. Rydw i'n gweithi'n gweithi'r gweithu Brytyshall. Mae'r ystod yn gweithio'r 3 cwestiynau o'r potensio'r cyfrifir ac ardal. Felly, mae'r cymdeithas a chyfnodd, a rwy'n gwybod i'n dweud y 7 o'r 10. Mae'r cwm yn y cwm, a'r cwm yn y cwm yn y ddechrau, rwy'n gwybod, yn y gwybod y pandemig, mae'r cyfnodd, mae'r cyfnodd, ac o'r cyfnodd yn y PNC, a'r llyfr. Mae'r cwm yn y cwm yn y cwm yn y ddweud, ac mae'r ddechrau'n gwybod i'r cyfnodd yn ddweud yn y cwm yn y cwm. The podcast seemed to allow for a very different engagement where the listener could be mobile, could rest their eyes, could engage in their own time. As a digital audio phallid can be downloaded on the terms of the prospective listener, I understood the podcast as a form that could be more embedded in a more helpful routine of the lockdown day. So walking, exercising, eating, cleaning, resting, then anything screen based could. Mae'n gweithio yw'n cyflwyfo'r ystafell a'ch gweithio'r ffrindio, a'ch mwy o'r ffordd gwrth ynghylch, a gallai ganddoedd a'r hunain yn gweithio'n cyflwyfo'r amser. Yn ystod, mae gwybod ym mwy ymweld ymbydd ym mwy o amser a gweithio'r ffrozdu yn y modd. Mae'r cyffredinidd yma yn y modd, mae'n ganwch, mae'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gwybod. here is a short clip from the second series of British Art Talks titled The Artist as Historian. This episode is with Ryan Ganda, who held a discussion with his young daughter, Penny, about stories and time, before introducing a countdown from 50 in Bingo calls by 50 different contemporary artists. Here's a little clip from Ryan's episode. Have we had lunch? Yeah, we've had lunch. Do you want to hear the canter, the bingo calls? Mm-hmm. OK, here it goes. PC 29. It's almost too late. Number 48. 46 up to tricks. Halfway there. 44 droopy drawers. Down on your knees. 43. Winnie the Pooh. 42. Time for fun. 41. OK, so that was from Brian Gunders, difficult truths to live inside trouble with time and the combination of humour, the voice of a child and the sense of free and easy experimentation here was really exciting and we had 50 artists and record their vocal contributions quickly and easily on smartphones and the whole production was really ludic and fun to the circumstances. And it seems to speak afresh, I think, of the contingencies and material realities of this art world in which we operate. And Ryan's episode was a great example of how the podcast can operate beyond the bounds of formalised professionalised spaces of journals and institutions, literally in space and time, but also stylistically. And that brings me to the second point I wanted to flow, which is about access. A podcast has its own restraints, especially a podcast produced during lockdown. Its audience is not real-time live and active and it entails a limited number of discursive participants, otherwise a Zoom webinar would be more critically active for intensive exchange of perspectives. So it tends towards a style, I think, that lends itself to the ear and so to a clarity of style that is different from peer review or highly specialised contexts. And yet there's no need for a podcast to be aimed so it emerges as a particular new site of encounter, I think, between specialisms and as a site of access. And this is echoed in the form. So where researchers might not read a journal paper or a tender conference beyond the purview of their area of expertise, the institute downloadability of a piece of audio content, again listened to while cooking or taking the baby for a walk, for example, are suggestive of a possible new tier of access, communication and exchange between specialisms and disciplines and publics too. I worked with the St Andrews medievalist Professor Julian Luxford to produce one of the first British art talks in a series that was made quickly and that honed in on diverse work by senior scholars. And it was also designed to touch on the challenges of conditions brought about by the pandemic. Julian's paper on the English Carthusians and the art of abstinence and lockdown confined us all to our houses was a deliberately ascetic listen, but his address to a likely new and utterly unknown audience has really stayed with me. So I'll just play a clip from that. Well, this brings us to the end of the talk. I hope you take something of value away with you, even if you leave with more questions and answers. I have a lot of questions on my own about the subject. The fact is that the joined up history of Carthusian material culture has yet to be written. Who knows perhaps someone listening to this will write one. So that was Julian Luxford's inimitable voice and I really love the way that it made this open address to a fairly unknown audience. And in fact, all of the researchers and artists that I've worked with, I've noticed through the process, have such distinctive and wonderful voices. And this moves me towards my third idea to float regarding art studies and the podcast. And that is about situated analysis or maybe situated annunciation. And the podcast can be very, can be a very in situ embodied performance of voice. And in art studies, this offers new possibilities of ekphrasis, particularly as the visual is denied. And in an article titled The Podcast is Method, geographer Eden Kincaid describes podcasts as communicating visceral elements of data through speakers voices, which seem to ring very true to me. A vital possibility for the podcast in art studies now is that it's embodied character, I think. And this character facilitates research that includes but ventures far beyond the critically reflexive, lending itself to research that operates with ecological consciousness and also to very transformational new modes of exploration through forms of speculation and fabulation, modes that foreground subjectivities. On the first point, there's a very effective moment in British Art Talks episode, the one titled The Medicinal Garden, where the Thomas Brown scholar and climate activist Dr Clare Preston in her garden near Cambridge tells the empiricist Francis Bacon's story of a nobleman who every morning insisted on being presented with a clod of freshly turned earth, which he would breathe in for its medicinal properties. And it's an image that recalls a 1503 watercolour by Dura. And this situated recounting of an anecdote really resonated across the episode and with the imperative in art studies to be acquainted with the matter of the land. On the second point, the situated character of the podcast lends itself to transformational, I think, new modes of speculation and fabulation. And this is very evident in the series three of British Art Talks experiments in art writing, which invites art writers to perform their texts and share a range of materials. It includes remarkable readings of fictions by Sherlock von Reinhold, Carol Maver, Roger Robinson, and many more, all of whom, and in specific ways in these readings, are sidelining structural inequalities and ideologies that are enacted in art studies. So I would mention the podcast form lends itself to situated analysis and situated annunciations. And this latter point above all leads me to think that it can really play a quite an exciting role in processes of transformation in art studies, not least in relation to pressing questions of decolonial ontologies and in the cultivation of helpful new ecologies. So I will end there and thank you. And I would love to invite Kathy Courtney to take up the podium. Thank you very much both for inviting me and also especially to Ella Fleming who's been helping me technologically. Podcasts remind me of artists books and for me the best artists books were about noticing and then shaping that noticing into a work where the content and the form were perfectly married. They were idiosyncratic and independent. The subject matter might be in small scope but intense and a revelation of sorts. They were the length that best suited their expression. Many were self-published. They circulated somewhat randomly. Like podcasts, many artists books aim to be democratic in terms of audience, sometimes given away. Others were produced to a high spec with specialists. My work now involves creating very long audio oral history recordings placing each person's working life in the context of their wider biography. This is for an oral history charity, national life stories based at the British Library where with the interviewee's consent the recordings are made available, many of them online. And as Sarah said, the project is most linked to tonight's conversation of artist's lives and architect's lives but there are many cross-references in other projects. The recordings contain a great deal of raw material so part of what I'd like to do tonight is to encourage the podcasters who might be among us to use this material. National Life Stories has been making life story recordings for a little over 30 years and one aspect that's become clear is that as well as capturing the material we know we're collecting there are always layers of underlying assumptions contained in the conversations that don't become clear until time has passed. I suspect that if you analyse the recordings made before 9-11 for example you'll find there's a slightly different level of confidence compared to subsequent recordings and similarly I'd say it's likely future recordings will be affected by the speaker having lived through a pandemic in ways that show up way beyond any sections that are specifically about 2020-21. So I see the podcast as an historical document in itself that will in time come to seem as a reflection of us in our own period as well as the overt content. The Paul Mellon's podcast series which podcasts about William Etty's painting The Siren and Ulyses with Anna, Mary Beard and Cora Gilroy Ware addresses questions which are unlikely to have been raised had that conversation been captured when the painting was new in 1837 and people considering the painting and the Paul Mellon's Centre podcast in 200 years will be likely to view both differently. So I've been wondering which podcasts themselves will be conserved and documented and about the fate of outtakes from the newly recorded conversations that are made for them. The podcasts that could derive from national life stories are almost limitless. An example is one my colleague Hester Wesley has made about the history of caution college of art and Sarah Turner and Joe Bering to our pleasure used extracts for their sculpting live series. Extracts also as well as being dropped into a narrative can be played as a kind of theatre juxtaposed together. I've only got time to play one which is an extract from the figurative painter Sylvia Slee which contrasts vividly from the account of the same event as told by the art dealer Kasmin in his own recording. Kasmin describes with humour and a certain enjoyment a New York dinner party hosted by his friend William Rubin then director of painter and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art. The aim of the evening unbeknownst to fellow guest Lawrence Allaway was for Rubin to assess whether or not to offer a prestigious job at MoMA to Allaway. Among the guests were Helen Frankenthaler and her partner and Allaway's wife Sylvia Slee. The evening was a disaster and ended the possibility of Rubin offering Allaway a job a kind of invisible tragedy of which he was completely unaware and which would totally probably have changed his reputation now as well as at the time. And so oral history is often very good at uncovering what didn't happen as much as it captures events that did occur and what didn't happen is also something that slips out of history incredibly easily. So in contrast to Kasmin's up-beat narration of that evening is that of Sylvia Slee in a recording made shortly before her death when she was extremely frail. In Britain she was still immensely neglected and it's only been posthumously that she's had a solo show at Tate Liverpool. You can hear in the extract that she's quite frail and she muddles up the name of Helen Frankenthaler but you can also hear her anger and it was totally to my surprise that she raised the topic of the Rubin evening because I had so little time with her I wouldn't myself have raised it because I wanted it to be focused on her but it was just one of those bits of serendipity. So in the image that's about to come up on an extract that lasts about three minutes Sylvia is the one with long hair and Ella if you could put up the image and the recording. I feel I could make a whole podcast series just from that extract with its rival Riz and the undercurrents and then using more of hers, for instance it would include the fact that Allaway didn't want to hang her paintings in their house and that it was Barnett Newman who insisted that they would be hung that's one of her paintings on the wall. So if you think there are now over 400 very long recordings in artist's lives when I say they're possibly to infinite I think they probably are and there's just one last slide with some information on it and yeah to end on a less positive note national life stories is the charity and has to raise funds for all its recordings and has a tiny staff so we can't actually afford to make podcasts ourselves so I think the notion of podcasts as democratic is true up to a certain point it's depending of course on what you're hoping to achieve thank you Cathy thank you so much let's move on to our next presentation and let's invite Joe Bering and Sarah Turner to take up the podium Thank you so much Cathy that's amazing as you said we did use some recordings from Elizabeth Frink and from Phyllida Barlow in series one of Sculpting Lives and what I particularly loved about what you just said was someone complaining about a terrible evening and them having no pudding and I love those little human touches that we can all relate to and Sarah and I are currently recording for series two and within that we were interviewing someone and they picked up on an artist and one of their quibbles was about going somewhere and only getting some peanuts and I think anyone in the art world can relate to that about making an effort to go somewhere but Sarah and I are going to be talking this evening from a very personal and practical viewpoint on our collaboration on Sculpting Lives and the interview that don't know Sculpting Lives is made up of 45-minute episodes and each one takes a woman sculptor as its subject exploring the artworks, networks, connections and relationships of those artists and every programme I say is it was recorded at the moment we're recording on Zoom but for series one it was recorded in places that were significant to those artists in their studios when we were able to have contemporary artists as well as galleries, public places where their work is on display and includes new interviews with curators, family, friends and the artists themselves creating what we described as intimate soundscapes of their private and their public worlds so we thought we'd tell you a little bit about how Sculpting Lives started so Sarah and I we didn't actually know one another before we started doing Sculpting Lives so it's really podcasts are about relationships networks and for us that was how we got together that people within our fields had both said you should meet one another you'd get on really well and we met and we had a conversation about sculpture about our shared passions we both are lively and we are interested in art and also we just felt that the conversations that we are able to have as part of our roles we were really lucky to be able to have those conversations so we're able to go and speak to museum directors or speak to curators or get access to artists and have really great conversations with them so for us it was about sharing those conversations and giving people access to those conversations interestingly though although we thought we were sharing conversations what we soon found out was from a practical point of view when you're having a conversation with someone you don't just give them visual clues and I'm sure Cathy will agree with this that a lot of the time you realise that you give supportive noises so when someone is speaking you say oh really oh yes oh no and then when you listen back you realise you've completely ruined it so it is quite even though what you're presenting is a natural conversation it's quite unnatural when you're having it because you have to basically mute yourself and just give lots of encouraging nods and things like that so I've created a little slideshow to show you let me share my screen with you that's the end so this is it so this is us on tour so as I said we wanted to give you this kind of personal idea of behind the scenes of sculpting lives and I think from a work part of you obviously giving ourselves sculpture to describe was quite a hard task sculpture is that kind of most physical of art forms people have a really visceral reaction to it you know phyllida Barlow says you can't just see sculpture from one angle you have to walk around it obviously with sculpture light is a protagonist space is a protagonist so it was a really hard task for us and this I think this the first slide is from when we went to Yorkshire Sculpture Park and we've literally got our map we've got our little portable recording equipment and we would go off and we did a lot of practising recording describing things and would be slightly unsatisfied with the results as we started off this is up at the Hepworth Wakefield so a lot of the things that we did were as I said about relationships, speaking to people getting really getting into the sense of it the kind of the nooks and crannies and I like what was said earlier about the idea that it's what's left out actually of books and things like that which are the really interesting things so what doesn't happen is also interesting so we're able to talk to Eleanor about what again with Hepworth and her career the things she was really trying to achieve have to be really quick and then this is when we went down to St Ives and again that was one of the most successful episodes I think for us was our Hepworth episode just because of those soundscapes we were able to create and the importance of atmosphere in a podcast so we were in Barbara Hepworth Studio Garden in St Ives and there was a moment where it really felt like a communion with sculpture because the churchbell of St Ives began to toll as the Tate Curator began to tell us about Hepworth spirituality so it really was a really special moment I'm going to hand over to Sarah in a minute but what I wanted to make the point of which I'd love to discuss a bit more at the end in the Q&A and the discussions is that a podcast isn't just a podcast it has a life which exists outside of the podcast so we created an Instagram page for Sculpting Lives we thought women sculptors was quite a niche subject but we there's a little community that just go, I mean it's great and the conversations and the comments just goes bananas about certain things on our posting so there's other ways that you can create a life for your podcast so it would be interesting to maybe discuss that in the Q&A but I'm going to hand over to Sarah now because I know we're short of time Thanks Jo and talking of soundscapes I know working from home we have all the sounds of life going on behind us and I can just hear my baby screaming as he's taken for a bus but I think that's one of the things that we learnt through editing and getting comfortable with the format of podcasting because as Jo said we hadn't done this before it was really a research and learning process for us and I think when we started out we had this idea about very professional clean audio quality and as we went on we realised that actually some of those sounds of the studio in particular when we were in Philodobalo studio recording sometimes it was quite challenging to pick up her voice because there was welding going on someone lifting very heavy materials on a chain but actually we learnt that those are part of what we're trying to talk about about women's lives and how women are making sculpture and the environment in which they're working and living so instead of trying to make this perfect audio experience we wanted those incidentals and those sounds coming in so again learning about that and also learning about the technical aspect and really like Jo said we wanted to be a little bit more practical and to give people who are listening who are thinking how do I do this can I do it obviously you do need some equipment but it's fairly low cost to start off and you can get more professional and you can get into studios but you can also get your H4 Zoom recorder and I'm sure there are other models available but you can go out there and make recordings there are obviously things to think about to do with agreements with your speakers as Cathy said you're going to preserve your sound recording how will you release it on which platform so there's all this kind of ecosystem and infrastructure around a podcast that I think is worth thinking through as you're thinking about the audiences you want to reach what kind of production you want to make and as well as someone who is invested in thinking about research on British art how we reach different audiences new audiences and also how we preserve and champion and protect and celebrate the process of research I do think the podcast offers an interesting way of thinking out loud and a way of staging research as collaborative as it is with Joe you know sculpting lives only exist because of the two of us coming together to talk about this you know it's definitely a collaborative process and a collaboration then with all of our contributors and speakers so I think it allows you to stage a different thinking which a lot of us are kind of that idea of the lone scholar I think has been really sort of broken down or questioned what some of us want to just find different ways and different channels different modes of getting our work and doing that thinking with others and having a different kind of engagement and response so I think that's where I want to end on that process that idea of collaboration and conversation thank you so much to Sarah and to Joe great to see some of those images as well and we're now going to go on to our next panelist and that is Inigo Wilkins Inigo I think you are you're muted there sorry you can hear me now okay I'm going to talk about this from a few different ways firstly I want to just talk about so my my topic of research in general is noise and so noise can be understood in a number of different ways most usually it's understood as unwanted sound and kind of opposed to music and then in acoustic science is described in terms of like complex frequency compositions then you can also think about it in terms of interference so those details which are kind of excluded as irrelevant or insignificant so we then think about the unheard or the marginalized and on the other hand we can think about noise in terms of protest or resistance or friction so I'm kind of calling attention to or making oneself heard so I think noise pertains to silencing and amplification and to the economy and ecology of information and attention there's also we can think about misinformation and disinformation as kinds of noise and noise can also be the result of an excess of information or a lack of it so all of these senses of noise might be relevant to a discussion of podcast art and art history so just for example like the modernist negation of the distinction between music and noise or the invention of acoustic and digital audio technologies and the establishment of radiophonic practices and sound art but then also I think the rise of the podcast is part of a general shift away from broadcast media to a more decentralized information ecology and that has to some extent made audible voices that have been marginalized and silenced and kind of rested control away from establishment or narrow cannon but at the same time it's amplified and enabled racist, sexist and homophobic abuse trolling et cetera you know the rise of the alt right and again you know it's made possible a greater access to information outside of those traditional channels but it's also led to a saturation of attention and a new industry of decentralized disinformation propagation sub-puppets, troll factories et cetera disinformation and misinformation thrive in a condition of information saturation which is noise and under current conditions I don't think there's any real remedy to that and of course the boom in streaming which podcasts have surfed on has occurred within neoliberalism or platform capitalism surveillance capitalism which where profitability is based on a small workforce, low wages AI enabled information extraction speculative financial speculative financialization so to put it shortly I think the answer to the problems of political economy and to information saturation are one and the same and that's a shift towards post capitalist forms of social organization firstly this includes collectively articulating revisable commitments to political scientific or philosophical truths and providing trustworthy and accessible means for others to become informed about a podcast being one of them. Secondly it means repurposing platform economies for the benefit of the many rather than a few or the construction of decentralized anarchist communist networks of mutual care attentive to both local and global concerns at this point I'm going to kind of shift to talk quickly about listening and art before we finish so I think we can have a scientific realist understanding of what sound is which would account for the different ways in which it can be represented and apprehended and that dissolves the conflict between sound in itself and sound for us that has been prevalent in sound studies so listening for me is a situated form of inference that is structured by a meaningful relationship to the world so what is heard is a task related context specific and scale relative abstraction so a low dimensional representation of a high dimensional reality and so this kind of model just follows from but modifies a computational model of auditory cognition that is present in contemporary cognitive science which is called predictive processing philosophy and that's based on the idea that there's a two-way flow of top-down and bottom-up processing geared towards the generalized uncertainty reduction and so top-down you have a generation and organisation of prior expectations or hypotheses about sensory content and bottom-up you have a stream of sensory error signals that cascade up the processing hierarchy provoking transformations of expectation at ever higher levels of representation so basically one does not hear what is out there in a manner of direct realism or classical wax-heal model of perception instead we project a flexible hypothesis according to various acquired or constructed expectations so we listen with and through bias and according to constraints that are biological neurological, social etc so within this modified framework it's possible to promote a critical listening positionality which calls for self-reflexive awareness of how race, class, gender sexuality ability and cultural background shaped the way we hear sound without opposing that to a mind independent sound in itself that would be free of perspectival constraints Lastly I want to stress that art is a form of reasoning so it provides a medium for thought that is other than language but also intersects and enters into dialogue with it so it's the construction of a sensory effective content that provokes a transformation in perception and conception and it's because perception is not raw but pervasively structured by expectation that it's necessary to examine and update what is sensed by what could be thought of it and conversely those expectations that structure thought must be continuously perturbed and challenged by sensory perceptual encounters and that's why art is an important aspect of critical thinking so history is the agency of the self and of social interactive systems for revisionary constructive change critical feedback loop of self-conceptional transformation that crosses art philosophy, politics and science Thank you so much so much to think on before we move on can you tell us what your background image is? Oh I can't remember to be honest I think it's I just chose it because it looked like I'm centered in some kind of vortex of psychedelia That's great, thank you for it Okay so we'll move on to our final panellist and welcome to James Montsell, please take up the podium Hi everyone, really good to be here I also write about noise so it's maybe worth knowing you're getting too perspective here back to back from noise writers so I want to begin my comments by returning to a line from the description for tonight's event which I found very thought provoking and that line was art and art history has a new soundscape so I wanted to start by saying that I share the enthusiasm contained in that line it's a very hopeful line and that's I think an enthusiasm for the immersive intimate conversational democratic potential of the podcast and I think most people here have mentioned those things in one way or another but in my contribution I want to share a few insights from my work in the area of soundscape studies or as it's usually known sound studies which has things to say about listening as we've just heard but also the podcast as a form and I want to begin with a slightly different proposition to the one that was in the event description a different proposition about the podcast and the soundscapes of art and it's this to speak of art on the podcast is to enter the auditory worlds of art sounds which were always there but which perhaps remained unheard so I'm going to return to some of the things that Joe and Sarah were mentioning because I re-listened to the sculpting lives podcast first couple of episodes which is fantastic and the advantage I think the advantages of the podcast as a medium are there for all to hear in those episodes the listener gains a real sense of personal connection to the presenters and guests but what I heard more clearly than anything as a sound researcher were the acoustic worlds of the artworks that were being discussed as Sarah mentioned so I could hear the light and the fresh air in Barbara Hepsworth's Sints and Ives and then I could hear in contrast to that the heavy echo of the art gallery and a connected scene that very stark change of acoustics as you enter the world of the art gallery so I really enjoyed hearing Sarah apologise for the lawnmower sound in the Orchish Sculpture Park and for the road traffic noise during the interview in central London that sometimes threatened to drown out the interview and those sounds for me made me realise that an ostensibly sign an art-like sculpture does have a sound world that has a soundscape whether it's the echoing art gallery designed to encourage quiet visitors or it's the sounds of birdsong in the sculpture garden that is intended to connect art and nature but art also already has voices I think it's worth saying speaking around it podcast also brings that into clear auditory focus podcasting I think draws our attention no matter what the subject matter or genre to the qualities and power of the voice who has a voice to speak of art what expectations do we have of the art voice questions of accent confidence and hesitancy the gendring of voice and so on those are questions for the sound culture of the podcast but they're also questions for the sound culture of art and I think podcasting about art makes those soundscapes audible it puts them front and centre and invites close listening podcasting about art causes us to listen to art and its sounds and I like that about podcasting I think that's a really interesting and good thing but I also think it raises some important questions about the politics and ethics of soundscapes as we've just been hearing so that brings me to my second proposition I've only got two I'm keeping things brief and the second one is that soundscapes are not neutral the ways in which we hear sound the ways in which we listen reflects and reshape culture just as powerfully as the ways in which we see look and create visual form so to create audio media like podcasts is to direct listening attention to sounds and through ways of hearing those sounds and that's really one of the major insights of the academic field of sound studies as it's developed and I wanted to bring that as my contribution to tonight's panel and it's not to say that I'm offering that as a critique of the podcast as such but it's really to point to the possibilities that the podcast contains as an audio medium to reshape how we hear in ways that we might wish to embrace as researchers and sound makers so I want to finish by briefly talking about how I've tried to bring these thoughts to fruition in a project at the National Science and Media Museum which was mentioned in my introduction so I've been working with the National Science and Media Museum which is in Bradford which has a collection of sound technology objects and the project which is called Sonic Futures I can put a link in the chat after I've finished it is about co-producing with local audiences from the Bradford area new ways of listening to sound technology objects in museums and part of my inspiration for doing a project in this way was a project called What Is This it's the What Is This intervention at the National Museum of Beirut when they invited ordinary people into the museum to record themselves talking about objects in the museum's collection for a new alternative audio guide to the museum audio guide is an interesting precursor to the podcast in many ways and that new audience generated audio guide captured the social life of objects and offered a new way of hearing the museum so in some ways similarly in the Sonic Futures project one of the strands that we we led through that project was an audience listening group made up of visitors and local communities around the museum who were engaging with the historical media of the sound postcard that's just as self-explanatory as it sounds it was a postcard with an image on one side and a vinyl record on the other side that when you received it in the post you could play on your record player they were popular in the first half of the 20th century but now when I talk about them most people don't really know what they are I haven't really heard of them so what happened in that project was that they made a sound they made an image and then they made and sent a real physical postcard to each other to one other person in that group and we happened to be doing that in lockdown which was also added something to the atmosphere of doing that task and the idea of doing that was to recreate a past atmosphere of listening through a contemporary community of museum listeners the postcards will go on display in the museum and they're currently on display and then we set about recording the group talking about their listening it's explicitly reflecting on what it had been like for them to receive a sound in the post to recreate a historical mode of sound communication and I hope we haven't made the podcast yet I'm working on that with my collaborators Alex Delittle and Alex Kolkovski I hope is that the podcast that we create from those activities will capture a soundscape from the past the sound of sound postcards but in a way that doesn't centralise the listening ear of the sound historian but rather makes the task of working out how to listen to the past a public task a matter of giving museum publics a voice and I'll just finish by saying after all listening is something we do together both in the past and in the present thanks Thank you so much James what we're going to do now is start some discussion and shortly I'll take questions from the audience so please start putting your questions into the Q&A box and all raising your hand so that you can talk in your own voice which obviously in this event is what we want to hear and ask questions and please don't be backwards and coming forwards I would love to pick up on some of what James is talking about around the publics and to pick up on a strand that came through everybody's papers which was about access and publics and I think that art history and art studies if we're talking about that hasn't got the reputation for having been the most accessible dimension of scholarship and what we're looking at here is an enthusiasm for the podcast is a form that might perhaps transform that or has potential to transform that does the podcast have the possibility of making of opening public scholarship is there a public scholarship going on here within the art domain and if so what are the drawbacks of that perhaps we could open that question out to our panellists Sarah you look like you're I was just thinking if you want anyone in particular to speak first but I think it's it is a really interesting question and I think again all the speakers touched on that and in a go particularly thinking about the audio access access to audio who speaks who doesn't speak and I think there's a way of staging those questions through the podcast format as well I mean just very personally and anecdotally I have been interested by the ways in which people have said to me that they've listened to sculpting lives who you know I know they wouldn't have come to a conference or a lecture so it's kind of again thinking about the ways in which that material is available and where you make it available so that you know it's just to draw on that personal communication with family members as well you know sort of people who are also close to you as well as those people that you don't know as well who are listening to your work so that's just it's provoked for me thoughts about who's listening and how they're listening and I think you said this as well about where people are listening when time is short so much these days that people are listening on the move as they're doing other bits of their daily life so I think that speaks to the ethical and political dimensions that a lot of speakers touched on I was actually this discussion has been really interesting for me because it's made me think about the people that we interview so who we give a voice to actually I've kind of completely taken that for granted and that is really just our network and our relationships and those are existing and oh maybe people we've read about or who've written so those are people who already have a voice so actually that was a really interesting point that you raised about access not only listening but people who maybe have interesting things to say who should be appearing in these podcasts or financially and you said that Kathy about the costs involved in making a podcast so although it is ostensibly this most democratic of sharing of art histories potentially it isn't and those were things that I hadn't actually considered properly before this evening so thank you Kathy I really hope that this might be a means of reaching young people who don't even know about art history and at the British Library where at the moment working on something that will go online about theatre design on the same basis that a lot of people don't even know that there is a profession of theatre design so one of the things that would make me most hope about all this especially your idea of Instagram joining in as well is that those people who haven't had access to any kind of education that would lead them in this direction might be really excited by it both for their own sake and also I think our history numbers are going down aren't they in universities so we need to reach people in as broader context as we possibly can The Instagram the life of the podcast outside the podcast itself is so fascinating so the Instagram page is brilliant and we posted a picture of the Maggie Hamling the sculpture for Mary Wollstonecraft and obviously that provoked a ferrore in the press but equally ferrore actually sent me a WhatsApp saying you threw some petrol on that fire because actually it just it all became a kind of a breeding ground for everyone's comments and people who are getting so involved and it's fascinating to see that happening it's all linked to the podcast but equally it has its own separate life and people can have an engagement and a conversation revolving around the themes that we bring up in a separate environment maybe it's worth saying a few more things about community podcast are great for building community but on different kinds of scales I completely agree with all the things you've been saying about reaching to different kinds of audiences for art history and I think that's really powerful and compelling but those things can work on different scales and I think what I was trying to achieve with some of the work I was doing in that specific museum was about using sound and listening as a means to create quite an intimate small scale community around that museum around particular collections on quite a sort of local level so that the aspiration was to get this podcast out on a station like Bradford Community Broadcasting which is all about creating a sense of listening community around the museum that was something we felt quite strongly we wanted to do it has this new sound technology collection and we wanted to give it I suppose a listening audience and of course people can come from far and wide and engage in that but we wanted primarily to start thinking about what it means to have a listening community in the city around the museum and what it means to bring people into a museum to listen because ultimately the objects we're working with are sound objects like echo effects units and sound postcards and speaker sets and headphones and so the question was about how do we create a community for listening and creating audio media is a great way to do that on different kinds of scales but I think it's it can work in different ways for different kinds of projects and I wanted just to push that a little bit further and what people think about the transformation of methods that takes place in the podcast format because there is the shift towards storytelling and listening and informal conversation that might seem at some moments like noise but actually then ends up in insights just as Cathy demonstrated and it does seem to be a shift away from the critically reflexive methodology that might be familiar within scholarship does anybody have any comment to make on that transformation and how the podcast is facilitating it James I mean I really really like that about academic podcasts there are quite a lot of academic podcasts now actually there's ones in literature that are talking about sound in novels it's quite difficult to write about that it's so much easier when you can speak about it in use sound effects there's podcast about podcasts there's a whole academic field of podcast studies and I really like the fact that it opens up the kinds of conversations that academics have with each other and their research partners to anyone who wants to listen and I think a few people have mentioned that process that comes before a publication or after a publication and that people can access that and I think that's a really powerful thing I think we can't just assume that because we put it out there people will come though I have some skepticism about that generation of the audience doesn't happen automatically and magically does it that side of it takes just as much work as they're producing Does anybody like to respond to that or we might move on to our first question from our audience so we have Lucia Farrinati who would like to have a comment for the discussion is she someone that we can unmute Dany She has no problem Hi can you hear me? Thank you very much for the fascinating panel Yes mine is more a comment because I've been looking into audio recordings historically and I would like just to flag up something historically that before the internet there was a segmentation with recorded interviews and production sound and here I would like to remember the audio arts magazine which was established by William Follong in 1973 and a lot of comments that you a lot of things that you said tonight remind me of that recording that happened on site editing process because audio arts was no like a BBC radio at that time there was a radio a mainstream radio and so the sound magazine the idea of having a magazine on tape is more related to the tape culture on the 70 where people were exchanging things through tapes mixed tapes so tape culture and of course now we have internet so I question a little bit the notion of the podcast as something new is the technology that is new but not the mechanism but not the mode of production the production was ready I think in the public realm when the portable recorder was introduced in the late 60s and there are also sound magazine by artists I mean sorry, sound magazine they are only focused on sound noise I mean and ratio pan so there is also that part of experimental noise and avant-garde music that come through sound magazine is new for me I think is what Anne said is the scholarship is the challenge to actually embrace sound and sound recording as a new practice as a new critical practice for academia and not only for artistic experimentation and that was happened to me when I did my PhD on audio arts I was allowed to present audio instead of written thesis and that was quite something because it's not new PhD requirement they have quite different traditional form of writing so yeah I want just to to bring and I think the idea of the podcast differently from radio is that it's not time specific everybody can join in and listen in their own time so there is a discussion about time specificity you know the radio you have to tune in where the podcast is there all the time but I would like to thank you very much for bringing this issue thank you thank you Lutia would anybody like to respond to Lutia's comment or we can move on to another question oh Cathy Cathy this isn't perhaps quite a direct response I totally agree with what Lutia is saying but I just wanted to say that one of the reasons we started Artists Lives was I had been working with artists and I also came into contact with the Book Fair associated with the Association of Art Historians I was quite young at the time and I naively imagined that the art historians would be terribly interested in meeting the artists I was working with and I discovered this is in the 70s that they would sort of hold up crucifixes and garlic rather than actually meet and count the artists and I think actually that was also part of the way Gombrick operated too we have a little recording with him maybe I'm being unfair so part of Artists Lives is a kind of rage with art historians about the discrepancy of those worlds and the discrepancy of the language between those worlds and I think there's been a complete sea change now but that may have I mean it's quite interesting to think of scholars now listening to the recordings and working in an academic play which is a sort of reversal the artists even if they're dead now that was what I wanted to achieve was that the artists at that point on the whole were not being allowed to speak in their own way so now anybody say writing a monograph on a dead artist who's been recorded has got the responsibility I would say to listen to their recording as well as I mean Carol Waight for instance was an artist that we recorded very early and he's a painter you could really project almost anything you wanted on and you still can but you perhaps have to listen to Carol as well and that was the point was to leave some evidence really I just love that idea about raging art historians and I hope you've kept some of that because I think interesting things come out of that position I promise you I have okay let's move on to our next question from the audience okay so Christina Faraday I'm really interested in the issues the participants have encountered in transforming something visual and spatial into something audible Joe mentioned this briefly in relation to sculpture are there strategies you overcome to overcome the challenges of making art accessible that you've found particularly effective I suppose really with us I think Sarah will agree it was trial and error so there's hours of recordings that got ditched but I think for us it was really even now when we approach a sculpture or a site it's first and foremost a very basic description so I might say to Sarah where are we what can we see and also there's things that we don't describe which I was delighted that James picked up on that kind of echoing of Hepworth Wakefield that big gallery or just the sense of that communication with nature in Yorkshire Sculpture Park you get those things that you don't have to describe so there's a kind of citing description there's also we do some formal criticism but equally bringing in as many voices as possible and also really talking about again kind of getting to the heart of what sculpting lives is it's practical it's personal so we talk about how things were made just to convey that sense of physicality I don't know if you'd agree with that Sarah it's different for every work of art I think as well when we're doing that trying to overcome those obstacles and leave the listener with a sense a kind of a rounded sense of its citing and how it communicates in the space and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on and and so on and so on and so on and so on shortلي go ahead and say that she is saying Do you think that the Factor listener to an art history podcast can't see the work that's being discussed take something away from the experience or add something new to it I mean I could certainly do a quick response ac mae gennym ni'n gweinio gweithio hynny am y byddai bethau ar gyfer y tawr i gyd i gyd. Mae gennym ni, mae gennym ni'n gweithio ychydig gyd i ddiogelwch â'r cyfweld, ac mae gennym ni'n gweithio ar gwaith o'n ddechrau. Mae gennym ni'n gweithio o'r gweithio, oherwydd dyna'n gweithio, oherwydd dyna'n gweithio i'n gweithio chi i'n gweithio i'r ynnog, ac mae gennym ni oedd yn y ddiogelwch yn y gweithio. Felly byddwn i gementio ei dyn nhw wahanol gofynigant o ymwyaf ar gyfer gorfod o gweithio'r warchs a gennym eu rhoi cais o gweithio'r warchs. Mae'r fawr heffordd i chi adael ar gyfer. Mae'r fawr heffordd eich bod chi'n ellesau, felly byddwn i chi'n ei ddim wneud roedd yr awdd. I iddum i ddim yn dwylo'n dwylo cyhoedd ac i ddim yn dweud yma yn ddechrau. Felly wedi gweld yn fath yno gweithio eich ddweud am gweithio'r warchs a ydych chi'n gwneud o'r fwyaf. a of course you can you know we're so connected up that we can look up images very quickly and very easily to sort of get a sense ultimately of what they are, but this deep description that was included in many of our episodes was something that really did add a anybody else like to comments on that? Kathy. I think I'm saying too much actually, but when we started artists lives, We were worried about that it is only audio and not film and it turned out to be one of its great advantages because all the way through the recordings we're having to say to people please could you describe it. And what's been very interesting is they're very often some of the sort of dual moments of the recordings are when they say I hadn't quite realised that myself when they're talking about it because they've known something subconsciously but they've rydyn ni wedi'i enthwynt i ddim yn ymgyrchefnol i'r ffordd erbyn nhw. Rydyn ni wedi choisi ddau i ddim yn hyfrifol yn ysgrifennol, yn what we're creating through the podcast, and how we're asking people to listen and to think with us about and through art objects. That sort of creative dialogue that's going on there, that you're not offering this static object or image for examination, but you're asking people to bounce ideas and thoughts about the work of art or the object or the image with you. Felly, ydych yn gwneud, dwi'n rydyn nhw'n gweithio, ychydig bod yma'r ffordd ymlaen, yn ffordd y ddechrau pobl i'w gael ddarparu ddim yn yr un yn y dda. Felly mae'n gweithio'n gweithio pwy ffordd yma, mae'n gweithio'n gweithio, rydych chi, ym mhwy fawr, yn yw'r adon, fyddech chi'n gweld i chi'n gallu gweld i ni. Felly, mae gennym i amlwg, playing tickets. Mae honoredははw there's a, as a boat effects, in some ways off when when you quite way when you've got less information because you've got one sensory modality that's a that's taken away from you then, you have in some way one effect is you have an increase in the waiting given to your pryor expectations. yn y bwysig o'r holl gawr ymlaen. Yn ddyn ni ni fyddwn ni'n sallo, oes ei ddweud hynny, yna, yn deunydd o'r cydwys ar gyfer y tro. Diolch i'n fawr. Yn iawn, os ydych yn gwybod, nad yna, y maith yn ei ddweud y dyfod o'r holl. Mae yna'r cwestionio πwyso o'r mynd i fynd i'r mynd Mae'r ffordd yn ychydig. Mae'r ffordd yn ymddiol yn oed yn y lleol. Mae'n ddweud o'r ddweud o'r prydau cynllun heddiw. Dwi'n meddwl, adnodd o'r ffordd ymyddio, ond mae'n meddwl i'r ffordd eu masygl, a gennym ni'n meddwl, ac mae'n meddwl i'r ffordd yn ddweud o'r ddweud o ddweud o'r ffordd. yr aqusmatic, y dylai, a fydd. Thanks, Joe. Did you have anything to comment on? Yeah, I just wanted to build on what was being said, actually, about, and it just made this discussion, also made me realise that when we go to describe an object, actually we describe its surroundings first, so the importance of its surroundings. So, for example, for series two of Sculpting Lives, we go to Parliament Square a we discuss in the Gillianwearing, but actually before we even get to the Gillianwearing, before we even described it, we explain where we are and the other sculptures within it. So how it's cited and what it's interacting with is of crucial importance. So it just in terms of kind of getting setting the scene and helping people and me and Sarah understand actually the object and the conversations that it's having. I might just briefly add that that really it picks up on the point I was trying to make about that that acoustics around of art being very much part of what the object is. And I was just going to briefly plug a book that I think is really good on this. It's called The Sculpted Ear, subtitle Orality and Statuary in the West, which is about the connection between sound and statues that shows that all the way through history, sculpture and statue has had a rich sounding life of cultures of listening, sounding, encounter. It's really, really interesting and it really makes the point quite forcefully that that sonic mode of encountering, particularly statue, is a very important part of the way in which it's functioned socially and culturally. I think we'll have to interview you for series two, James. Great. We'll move on to another question and this is one that perhaps Inigo might be might be well placed to respond to. It's a part one of a question by Meng Feiliu, and she's saying I would like to ask the panellist how to engage with the podcast audience besides sharing on social media platforms. Are there any tips or suggestions around alternative forms of distribution? Inigo, did you have any thoughts on that? Or is that an impossibility? I'm not sure. Yeah, I think. Well, I think that's a difficult thing, but I think that probably I can't think of any good answer to that yet right now, but I think that there are ways to collectively organise on social media or through various platforms that would be better able to support each other in understanding those things. So perhaps it's not necessarily a matter of going off those platforms, but a matter of organising on those platforms, first of all. And secondly, of course, I totally think we need to have alternatives to those platforms, but that's like a long term project, and it's not an easy thing to do. I mean, does anybody else have any comments to make along those lines? I mean, for example, the format of the podcast is being very much based on sponsorship, for example, and the problems that might come with that. Is there anyone else who likes to talk about it? Sarah? Yeah, I guess it just builds on some of the things that we've already said about. Yes, there is this kind of DIY mode to it. You can do it easily. But then thinking about who your speakers are, are you going to pay them a fee? I mean, I think these conversations again about the transaction that's involved in asking for people's time and expertise. How does that work if you don't have sponsorship or the podcast isn't supported by an institution, such as PMC or your Passman Museum or James is talking about academic podcast. Quite a few people will have research grants or the university will have agreed to finance those. So I think it's always a good thing to examine before you start as well and before you get into those situations with speakers about how much you're going to be paid. I think you need to think about those and that transactional quality. Is this conversation just been had for the sake of it or are you paying for somebody's work and time? Perhaps that's not always discussed. Sometimes these conversations particularly in the art world are kept behind closed doors when it's about money and fees. But I think increasingly we're having those kinds of discussions about what does it cost. To follow up on that question, Meng Fei has asked the panist to talk about the community building around a podcast and around some of the practical approaches that are taken to that. Would anybody like to talk about approaches that they've used or that they've witnessed or read of? James, did you have a thought on that? Or I can describe some of the approaches that I've used. They weren't designed specifically for podcasting but they will end up being used for that in some of the ways that we're working. But a technique that I've established at the National Science and Media and Media Museum is the audience listening group or just a listening group. I know this is something that the British Library have used for sound archive material as well. Just the idea of collecting a group of people to sit and listen and then to discuss their listening is actually quite a powerful way of creating connections between people and allows an airing for audio material that otherwise would be quite difficult to access. I found that quite a powerful thing to do with groups of people. There's something about sitting together and listening that does forge really quite powerful connections between people. Then we asked that group for working on the sound postcards to carry on working with each other pretty much over a year. That whole process of making sound postcards together and posting them to each other and then meeting on online calls as well and having a quite drawn out conversation with each other about listening and what it means to listen because the recordings they made were taken during the time of the pandemic. There is something about that shared experience of encountering a sound world and trying to make sense of it and trying to reproduce it for an imagined future listener because I think when you're working with museums that's always part of the equation. You're aware that someone might come back to this record of listening that you've created because the postcards were intended to be lodged there. I think the group were aware of that responsibility that they had to create something for future listeners. We felt at least that it created a different sense of togetherness that other kinds of interaction do but that was partly because we had this quite intensive period of working together through gathering to listen to listening online. We had listening parties. We would share moments of listening on the WhatsApp group so when people received their postcards they would record them being played in their living room and then share them on the WhatsApp group. We tried to go through quite a lengthy process of learning what listening is through that set of activities so that what we ended up with wasn't just our mode of listening but it was a collectively produced sense of listening. Thank you James. A further question and it picks up on what you've just described in terms of togetherness from Christine who says that she really appreciated James drawing the connection between the podcast and the museum audio guide and I was wondering she says if any panellists could speak about how museums today before and after the pandemic are using the podcast in conjunction with their temporary exhibitions or permanent collections and it seems like it could be a really fruitful way to use sound on the podcast. Can anyone comment on podcasts in the context of art on the pandemic? I mean I could respond to that immediately in terms of saying that it was using the podcast in terms of the PMC programme was a really kind of incredibly valuable and kind of audience transforming and building activity and I think that it was such a kind of in the moment shift between the kind of scholars and audiences so new audiences, new scholars coming into contact and in a really particular and intensive context so it felt like a really exciting moment in 2020 to produce audio content in incredibly restricted conditions so there was no opportunity to kind of even you know go and interview people face to face or go to go to pick up soundscapes because it was all incredibly locked down but it did feel like in that in that kind of moment of struggle and challenge that it was there was a real intimacy and a real need for content to share with audiences who were kind of also you know locked in their own situations. Would anybody else like to comment Joe please maybe in terms of connections? I was just thinking in terms of because at the Ingram Collection we were doing a show last summer at the Lightbox in Woking and it was a show about women artists and the plan had been previously to potentially use some of the sculpting lives and make it again have a so that sculpting lives could have a life outside the podcast that there would be a linked exhibition that we could do some work around it but as it turned out just you know thinking practically and also in terms of accessibility there wasn't the budget to cut down the podcast so you know podcast is a 45 minute production you've got to think about people's time span what they have along they spend in an exhibition with the headphones on in front of an object they're not going to spend 45 minutes doing that and there was not the budget to cut that down and also PQP wants Sarah said in terms of the fees and permissions you know so so when someone is you are interviewing someone and they're giving you your expertise what if they agreed to you know how many times can you use that and in what format. So there are lots of things to consider I think within this kind of accessible and democratic format of releasing expertise and it was something that we we couldn't afford to do actually at the light box which I think is an interesting consideration. Thank you Jo. I can maybe add a couple of things from my own perspective it's more from a museum world perspective than a gallery one but I think it's worth mentioning audio augmented reality I'm supervising a PhD student who's doing some really fascinating work that allows for the further development of some of these podcast themes but into into spatialised situations so essentially you can connect sounds to objects in space and create a spatialised experience so one of the things we're doing with the postcards next is to have postcards with images of collections objects that people can stick on their walls at home and the postcards will be recognised by a mobile phone that will trigger sound and that the sound can be spatialised in left headphone right headphone so that you can create a kind of soundtrack exhibition using collections objects in your own home which is obviously a pandemic response as well but you know there's also really fascinating possibilities for deployment of podcast light material through augmented reality techniques in galleries themselves either through image recognition on the phone or the most recent version of the the apple air pods have head tracking as well so you can control what sounds come through when someone moves their head towards a particular item in a museum or gallery I think that's where things are going next with audio and museums thank you James we're drawing towards the clothes and so it will be the time to get in any final questions or comments and we still have an audience of over 70 people with us so what I would like to do is pose a question from Miriam and it's a slightly future-oriented question which is quite nice where we're talking about the kind of recordings as they won't be listened to in the future and she asked the question that would be perfect but I think Kathy perhaps first to respond to in your interviews with artists how do you deal with silences in the conversation if you edit these out how does it change the nature and dynamics of the encounter and subsequent impression of the artist's character and concerns as conveyed for the listener well um there's several strands to that answer firstly we absolutely love silence and one of the things when training somebody to do oral histories is to get them to relax about silence and not to come in with their next question until there's been a pause because very very often the person will start up talking themselves and it will be something that they've been led to through the conversation that you couldn't possibly know to answer to expect or to ask about so learning not to be embarrassed about silence and the fact that it usually isn't going on nearly as long as you think it is is one of the key skills actually and I should have said really that little excerpt of Sylvia Slay was heavily edited what Joe was saying about how long somebody will listen in an exhibition that actually was used in an exhibition and about three minutes about all somebody will stand in an exhibition with headphones on or whatever way they're listening so with the artist's lives recordings themselves and with all national life stories recordings they're never edited at all we've no more edit than then you'd scratch something out on a valid manuscript um and then you come to all sorts of ethical questions about when you are editing for use such as Joe's talking about in the exhibition how faithful you must be in order not to misrepresent them so it's essentially love silence and then worry about the ethics when you're mucking about with a recording for some other purpose it's my message Sarah does it relate to that the other thing that I've come to really appreciate is kind of hesitation and uncertainty and the way that the podcast format can embrace that and sort of knock down the sense that we have all the facts at our fingertips and we know everything immediately because often when you're speaking you say oh that exhibition happened in 1972 or actually was it 73 and I think there's a real value in leaving that uncertainty in which is very different to a text publication where you would fact check it and you know you've got your footnotes but in this form you don't really you don't have your footnotes in the same way um even if you've done you know you've done all that reading you've done all that research and preparation but I think just opening up that um yeah the ums the rs the hesitations the gaps the stuff where you know knowledge drops in between which we all know is how we build up our interests and our lives but you know in some other formats we have to kind of get rid of that and pretend we do know and for me it has just been a way of or saying to Joe do you know that what that date is or you know to the person we're speaking to so yeah I'm learning to embrace not knowing. Well that feels like a really great theme in which to kind of draw conversations to a close in terms of this new domain of unheard and uncertain territory and I remember having a conversation with Kathy as well about the way that a lot of her recordings are embargoed for for many years so that so that this these kind of wonderful unedited conversations and histories will not be disclosed um for years to come and um I guess it might be nice to comment on um for anyone to comment on on the panel on what they what they think about the the kind of future for the podcast is um what do they think it will will it will it continue to boom will it will it um continue to transform art histories or studies or um or otherwise would anybody like to make any final comments in a go. That's such a big question and we we we don't know what the future will be but I mean one one of the things I did think about when you know in this discussion I you know there's um there's a way in which again we talked a lot about the kind of democratisation that the podcast offers and we've said you know of course this isn't you know this democratisation is kind of constrained you know by various factors um I would say that you know if we take it to it it's extreme like this kind of like the possibilities of of opening up podcasting to everything to every aspect of life you kind of get to this kind of breakdown of the distinction between life and art that you saw kind of championed in the 70s right but in a in a terrible way right in this way in which life becomes the spectacle you know the absolute spectacle you know and you you see that in in some ways on social media and and in surveillance of it of those aspects of our life so I mean to me that's why it's such a pressing political concern at this moment is like what do we do as we're heading towards these new possibilities about how we you know are able to kind of make our lives available via technology. Sarah any final comments? Just to say that I've really enjoyed having this conversation with everyone and the people who are out there as well listening and thinking about what we've said and I can see things sort of lining up in the chat box about other projects and so it feels like there's there's still so much more to say and but it's been a really interesting process of like reflecting on what we're doing now and then this this last question which has prompted us to think about the future as well so just to to thank all fellow panellists as well I've really enjoyed thinking out loud with you. I would like to thank all of our audience and also all of our speakers Joe Bairing, Kathy Courtney, James Mancell and Inigo Wilkins thank you so much for your contributions to such an interesting exchange and events and thanks also to Ella Fleming and all of the PMD staff who've helped to run this event thank you to everyone. We look forward to future conversations soon about the medium of the podcast and in the meantime you can find all of the episodes of the British Art Talks and Sculpting Lives podcast on the Paul Mellon Centre website. The third series of British Art Talks experiments in art writing is in production at the moment and will be released on the 14th of April and the second series of Sculpting Lives is in production shortly and will be released in the autumn of this year so please do look at the website for information on those. Thank you so much.