Aberdeen Bestiary: Sound-Image-Narrative

Aberdeen Bestiary: Sound, Image and Narrative aims to examine and explore the transformative possibilities of the text-image-narrative structure of the Aberdeen Bestiary when it is situated in imaginative aural settings. This specially may mean the following:
- Act of aural imagining: to situate non-aural artefacts like the Aberdeen Bestiary Collection in aural settings means to conduct a series of distinctive, yet correlative activities, such as ‘imaging’ these fantastic animals, ‘imagining relationships among these sound-images’ of the animals, and ‘imagining possible events and actions’ (Casey, 1976; Kim, 2010). Such imaginative acts, however, are not limited to the Collection itself; they are also concerned with (imaginative) authors, owners and keepers (both of the past and of the present), (imaginative) readers of the past, and readers of the present;
- The ‘here’ and ‘now’ of aural experience: aural experience always presents itself as the now and the here whereas the experience of a narrative lets us contemplate the ‘then’ and the ‘there’. This is significant, and is potentially the main factor to the transformation of the text-image-narrative structure as the aural settings force the reader-listener to confront the Collection;
- Reimplacement of the animals: to situate the Aberdeen Bestiary Collection means to create an imaginary habitat for each of these animals and reimplace them there. We are particularly interested in giving them a habitat that is closely related to where the Collection is currently located—Aberdeen. We have been recording various places in Aberdeen with a four-channel recording system, and begin to realise that this project is so much about the imagination of a possible, if not plausible, habitat for these animals as about the understanding of our place, where we are.

A series of compositions were created by responding to a selection of images and texts taken from Aberdeen Bestiary.