Graeme Miller described his first work of art to be an act of provoking. In the playground, as a child, he repeated the word circus continuously to the other children until the word lost its sonic resemblance to what it had before. This action became a group performance of sorts and appealed to Miller as it was an act of sharing, doing, and happening.

Miller’s background in performance has led him to have a diverse perspective on the boundaries of performance and art and the combination of the two. Anything from walking to talking to existing can be art, as to Miller “Art is process.” Miller posed the idea that you, your consciousness, your body and distance are all working paradoxically at any given time. This implies an underlying tension exists, creating cognitive dissonance in which experience is tangible and evolving. If ‘art is process’ to Miller then the concept of all aspects of our being working paradoxically creates ever-changing conditions in which we work.

The idea of erasure was recurring throughout the talk. Miller did not necessarily describe it as something negative, more as just a thing that happens, intentionally and unintentionally.

A work I was particularly drawn to presented in the talk was “Years and Years”, a music concrete style, tape-recorded, hand-edited, song. Sampling an elderly woman telling stories of her youth with themes of fragility and memory with the recurring phrases and words. The fragmented speech gave so much emotion to the piece, although there was not much variety in the words used, the presentation told a detailed and powerful story. “Years and Years” also relates to early ideas about the phonogram, and how it “preserves voices of the dead” 

Linked 2003 is a sound walk/ social sculpture comprised of radios broadcasting interviews with the people who were driven out of their homes due to the building of the M11 motorway between Hackney Marshes and Redbridge roundabout. Miller used to live in one of these houses that was demolished in regeneration, adding a personal reason to want to make this work. To complete the sound walk you have to collect a transmitter (this is currently not possible as The Museum of London and local libraries stopped distributing them) and walk the route. The radios are attached to lamp posts and broadcast 8-minute loops of audio, permanently, and continuously. As the transmitters are not currently accessible to the public the radios have become, in Miller’s words, “Pools of energy with no one listening, silently speaking to the world.” I see Linked as a form of archive, a way to preserve the community that ones existed within this area, and an important political act, especially in the time of extreme gentrification across London. Another reason it seems Miller endeavoured on this project was that architecture can archive layers of time through a sort of collage of buildings from different time periods. By removing these houses a small piece of history was lost, so the interviews can stand in place of it. London has collected so many architectural styles throughout time but this is now being erased. This leads us to consider the narrative of space, when your point of reference is lost the narrative is completely different, how will this change over time, within our lifetimes? The interviews are about the past but presented in the present tense, Miller said it was hard to get the subjects to adjust to speaking like this, assumingly as it is quite an unnatural way of talking, from the snippets I heard I feel it was worth the challenge as it immerses the audience within both the physical and mental space.

Millers final comment on Link was the idea of ‘before the before’. To build (the now erased) Victorian houses, fields of crops were erased, I suppose this cycle repeats itself forever?