Charlotte White
is an artist, sound engineer and musician based in Brighton, UK. Her most ambitious work to date, Eternally Unfinished Attempt to Grasp Everything as it Happens (in only one language) as featured in Cathy Lane’s book Playing with Words: the spoken word in artistic practice has now been exhibited in Brighton, Southampton, London and Hull, UK and Calgary, Canada.
A recurring theme or interest in White’s work is the use of unpredictable or unknowable elements as a catalyst for creation.
Charlotte is currently exploring new ways of working sculpturally with sound, overlapping time-loops and their resulting patterns, and random behaviours using electronics and automata.
She works as a freelancer at Brighton-based post-production studio, out post sound.
www.myspace.com/charlottewhite
www.charlotte-white.net
www.outpostsound.co.uk
Eternally Unfinished Attempt to Grasp Everything as it Happens (in only one language) (extract)
This is a recording of the piece ‚Eternally…‘ in situ at The Phoenix Gallery, Brighton, UK.
The installation presented statistics aurally. From eight speakers a cacophony of voices announced ‚facts‘ based on information collected. Voices were triggered in accordance with their relevant statistic. For example, for the statistic “Every two seconds a baby in India is born”, many recordings were collected of people announcing “A baby in India has just been born” and every two seconds one of these sound samples was chosen randomly and triggered by the computer to one of the eight speakers at a randomly selected volume level. The sonic effect always sounding similar, yet never sounding exactly the same twice. One listener called it “calming, like a babbling brook” another, “hectic – like the inside of my head”. About 150 different statistics ran concurrently, some of them were emitted as frequently as every 0.4 seconds, others only occurred once every few weeks.
This extract was recorded using binaural microphones. It is best to listen to it using headphones.