Frustrations of a Media Artist

As I began walking around the Lake Park area in Milwaukee doing some audio recording I heard geese and a few songbirds flitting around. But there was always too much noise between the mics and the birds for the sounds to really pick-up. So I started looking specifically for birds. By the Lake, in the woods, on the ravine trail: nothing. As I walked out of the park into the neighborhoods near Lake Drive and Locust Ave. I thought there was a larger chance of getting some nicely mic’d bird songs in the low residential trees that line the sidewalks. However, there seemed to be no birds in Milwaukee that afternoon. Just before heading back to the car with a full mini-disic or two of audio recordings, I found a tree full birds. I began recording immediately. After about twenty seconds of adjusting audio levels a door behind me slammed, silencing the birds. A man walked about to me and loud enough for me to hear through the headphones asked, “You recording the birds?” At which my feathered subjects fled the tree. The audio I did get was unusable.

During both of my previous treks, audio and video recording, I found a great gap between human actions and their environments. Few of the people had any awareness of their surroundings. While this made candid shots of people easy, it also made recording images and sounds that purposely excluded humans difficult. I have an audio recording of a child asking me if I’m looking for UFO. Many pictures have the edges of people who were ignorant of the camera, or were curious enough to interrupt me during the taking of a photo.