Ethan Dorer

In this piece I set out to distill the sounds and feelings of my experience in elementary through high school down into 60 seconds of noise. The goal was to create a soundscape which captured the essence of school by extending beyond the mere ambient sounds of a school hallway. Some of the sounds from school that stuck with me were from the mind-numbingly repetitive educational videos.  I wanted to play with this idea of repetition and the sounds included were from things I remember experiencing in a repetitive and often routine way such as saying the national anthem every morning, watching Bill Nye when the science teacher was too bored of teaching, or running the PACER Fitnessgram test. The chaos of these compounded noises is somewhat guided by the authoritative sounding voice of a 1950's school documentary narrator yet in the end everything is ruled by the sound of the school bell. https://soundcloud.com/user-287357877/60-seconds-of-public-education

I was inspired by the McLuhan quote "Environments are invisible. Their ground rules, pervasive structure, and overall patterns elude easy perception." My process for this project was influenced by the idea that the patterns elude perception so instead of searching for the environmental rules I collected images in a stream of thought manner in hope of seeing the elusive patterns when choosing my photographs for this collection. In choosing the names of my photos, I relied on a mechanism outside my own control by having a friend choose the names using a random word generator. In this way there is no intentional name for each image yet patterns of meaning emerge from the pairing of word and image. I found Flickr to be an easy to use art venue and liked how it allowed for albums to be shown as slideshows. The site made it very easy to upload my images as well as provide names and descriptions of each photo.