Kusum Normoyle

Born 1984, Newport, NSW
Bachelor of Arts, Electronic Arts
Graduation show: 2008
Graduation ceremony: Didn’t go!

Artwork in Space YZ  

Volitional Bus, 2010 
Dual channel HD video, 2.1 audio
3840 x 1080p, 11:45 mins

Location videography: David Haines, Brent Grayburn
Video edit and sound design: Kusum Normoyle

Volitional Bus, 2010 

• Volition (noun:) The power to choose something freely or to make your own decisions.
  

• Bus (noun, computing): A set of wires that carries information from one part of a computer system to another.

• Bus (noun, audio engineering): (Alternate spelling buss, plural busses) is a signal path which can be used to combine (sum) individual audio signal paths together. It is used typically to group several individual audio tracks which can be then manipulated, as a group, like another track.

S.I.T.E: Screaming In The Everyday, represents a period of work in which I performed vocal noise works in both specific and non-specific, public and non-public places. In Volitional Bus (2010), vocal performance is taken to two kinds of extreme locations; a median strip set within in Sydney’s night time Broadway traffic, and a cliff named by the English Colonisers as Lincoln's Rock, which looks southward over Kings Tableland, in Country belonging to the First Nations Gundungurra people, during extreme weather.

This work invites the viewer to consider the machinations of a performance practice concerned predominantly with audibility and indeed, loudness, without the empirical sound source of the (video) performances. By exchanging the amplified vocalisations of the performances in location with an 40Hz hum, the work naively experiments with ideas surrounding the interchange of seeing and hearing in documented sound performance.

As a 20-year-old, there was something otherworldly and all together non-sensical about travelling two hours to Kingswood in the western suburbs, to attend an Electronic Arts degree. Years on, my immediate recollection of the environment is its likeness to a satellite, a scattered ecology of buildings and walkways embedded into a semi-barren, bushy zone. Through the community developed in this oddly inspiring locale, my most formative of connections were made. There is almost too much to say on the matter!

Z block at UWS was fundamental to so many things I hold dear; my ability to lose, find and consider the importance of control in audio feedback; a listening practice; an incisive, fierce and embodied criticality with regards to a vast set of sound and contemporary art space; and, the space to make proper trouble – it is such a necessary force.

Volitional Bus (stills), 2010