TRAINS FOR THE BLIND
Dublin based artist Stephen Rennicks produces art, writing and music under the umbrella name of Secret Society. ‘Making hidden history since 1999’ his tag line goes. He works both over ground and covertly but prefers to engage his audience by surprise. Always exploring context, he wants to make people think, see and hear differently.On first listening to Melissa’s material I wondered why I was finding it so easy to visualise what I was hearing. I soon came to realise that the whole sonic environment of a railway station has been designed with the blind in mind. Alarms and announcements are useful but unnecessary for the sighted; they become more information we tend to tune out until they become just another layer of sound. I have with repetition teased out these sounds and layered them beside the more obvious discordant rhythm of the constant movement of the train. The last two minutes are a necessary release from the quite tiring nature of the track; I actually fell asleep during an early playback. There’s something about electric trains you can only sense in silence, electricity is mysterious. At these moments a mood of calm can descend on a station, as plain to the sighted as the blind.Increasingly I find myself coming to the conclusion that to learn to find that universal mood of calm and contemplation in every moment of waking life, in the clatter of the body of this work, should surely be our goal. To do this might be to find enlightenment itself or to take another step towards it.
The above text is from the 2004 ESB Fringe Festival Transit Catalogue to accompany my sound piece, Trains for the Blind, CD comes with catalogue in an edition of 1000. I would like here to expand on that last paragraph.
Once I understood the theme of Transit I originally submitted a short film, ‘Home’, to be shown on a loop during the festival. For various reasons this was not the piece used for the Fringe but it summed up what I am trying to get at here.
The film took the view that in the modern world we are constantly moving, even when stationary. It began with the text, ‘Home is on the Move, Home is Wherever I Exist’. While I was careful to denote only myself with these words, having no dependents or property, I feel it as being true for all people in my position.
So what is home for us, where we live, where all our stuff is, where we were brought up, where our parents still might live? Officially it would be one of those, but I personally don’t consider any of them as home. This years flat, my parent’s house, that’s not my idea of home, not my home anyway. Even a family in rented accommodation, would they feel at home?
Our obsession with buying our own home in this country is unhealthy if we only see it as property. Don’t we first need to understand what the concept of home for us really is?
I found that concept in Transit, it being the opposite of home, a fixed stable point. Wouldn’t it be great to feel at home wherever you were? Don’t people often say to ‘make yourself at home’ when we visit them?
If you have no sense of home where do you find it? Would it not be a better world if we could find a sense of home wherever we were, at anytime? To feel relaxed and comfortable in any company or situation, wouldn’t that be a world worth calling Home?
That sense of calm I mentioned is that place, I try to stay there as often as I can.
