University of Michigan
College of Architecture + Urban Planning

Notation A/V

Martha Skinner

Notation A/V explores the possibilities of digital audio and video recorders as tools of notation - to study and document the city. Notation A/V takes these readily available devices and exploits them - using them as drawing tools. The course is focusing on the different capacities of the medium through a series of short exercises that investigate a different condition of city while singularizing a specific feature of the tool. As the city is analyzed, taken apart, so is the medium at hand. The notations are collected on site by critical in camera editing - an improvised orchestration of takes and gaps led by the environment in observation. The context in which the notations take place has been left open for interpretation. The parameters and possibilities emerge from the individual's careful reading of each exercise and thus their specific way of coupling the city condition with the camera feature. The emphasis of the course has been placed on the act of recording: the act of thoughtfully collecting and combining sounds and images. In class, the completed notations are critiqued. The students are preparing seminars on various topics related to their interests and or discoveries in Notation A/V. With this research they are proposing a final notational project in which each student defines his or her own way of reading the city through recordings.

The purpose of this course is to take advantage of this technology and use it as yet another tool for exploration in our practice of architecture. To learn to listen and to look carefully at our environment and to inform and or to question the way we see, document, study, and communicate through the use of other tools. Notation A/V attempts to make acute awareness of the senses of hearing and seeing by the recording of sounds and images independently of each other. This approach of isolating senses, isolating conditions of city, and isolating features of tool is a way of looking at our environment through separate distinct lenses to facilitate a process of new discoveries. Various experiences of place emerge through the recordings as we deal with varying consciousness of body, to tool, to environment. The familiar, the banal something, the no longer perceived, is rediscovered. The city is listened to or looked at through a series of takes and gaps - an editing language of recording vs. not recording. Recorded as slices of life, sounds and images are literally collected to form a notation of physical and ephemeral realism of a particular place.

Contact Martha Skinner: mskinner@umich.edu

Financial Support: Walter B. Sanders 1998-99 Teaching Fellowship, The University of Michigan College of Architecture + Urban Planning. Technical Support and Equipment: Linda's Place, The Media Union, The University of Michigan.
Students: Aparajita Basu, Candice Chang, Ellen Delonis, Edwin Fung, Michael Kareti, Justin Kwok, Christopher Lanzisera, Paola Newman, and Carrie Pike.