Pauline Oliveros – The Goddard in the Dan Harpole Cistern Listening Report

 The first thing that came to my mind while listening and watching the video of Goddard in the Dan Harpole Cistern, is the eerie atmosphere that gets radiated from the location. Especially the first shot which shows a long construction ladder leading down to an old concrete space. It is very dark and only the light coming from the upper hatch and a small lamp illuminate small parts of the frame. There is a long part of setting up the scene. We see three people climbing up and down the ladder. This could mark the official beginning of the musical piece. It has the character of homemade video recordings. Humming and other sounds that are produced by voices start and resonate with the space, echoing and reverbing back and forth from the walls. It is a big space like the name “Dan Harpole Cistern” indicates. This gives it a more heavenly feeling, especially the humming produced by the female voices. The idyllic singing gets disrupted by possibly metal objects falling to the ground. It can be put into question how intentionally the sounds were planned. Most sounds seem random and arbitrary. The focus is not on the production of sounds but on how they can be manipulated by their surroundings. It is more about listening than producing. This resonates with the concept of “deep listening”, a focus shift from the actual sounds to an almost meditative state of listening that played a big role in the works of Pauline Oliveros. This is an interesting concept, like Lavier’s I am sitting in a room, that emphasizes not just what we listen to, but how it was produced. It raises the question – Does it really matter how we perceive art? It could be possible that the medium in which art gets shown is equally important to the art itself. This is not just to be found in music. This question causes heated debates about how we watch films. Why should we bother wearing jeans and driving to a cinema when we can watch the same film in sweatpants on the sofa? For me personally, watching a film at home is totally fine, but there is a part missing that adds to the spectacle of films – the big screen, surround sound, and getting mentally drawn into the canvas of moving pictures. Oliveros shows us that it does matter how we perceive things instead of just putting emphasis on what we are seeing.