A New Log for an Old Practice: Introducing Field Logs, and the Ontology of Field Art

A New Log for an Old Practice: Introducing Field Logs, and the Ontology of Field Art

This blog is a new home for a practice that is not new at all.

I have been making field recordings and working out in the field for many years — soundwalks going back to at least 2007, and a wider field and atmospheric practice spanning more than thirty years. For about a decade I have recorded the ambient sound of places, inside and outside, the way an engineer records room tone: what I have called Atmospheric Tone. I collect and gather material out in the field, and then I come back and transform it in the lab, in the studio. Field, then lab. That loop is the heart of the practice, and I do not think I will ever not be making field recordings.

What is new here is the log, and the way the practice is now being revamped around it.

I already keep other kinds of logs: studio logs, novel logs, WORK SYSTEM logs, Historiotheque logs. Those logs record work done at the desk, in the studio, in the systems. They do not record the work itself out there — by the river, in the cemetery, in the park by the library, on the bike path, at dawn. So I am starting Field Logs: actual field logs of all the work I do in the field.

What fieldwork means here

My work in the field is actual, real fieldwork. It is just not the kind of fieldwork you do in ethnography. Ethnography observes people and cultures. I am observing the natural environment.

It is still, to me, a form of participant observation. I do not stand outside a scene and extract something from it. I go out, I am there, I stay, I listen, I look, I record. The observer participates by being present — by witnessing — and the recording is made from inside the situation, not from above it.

That is the shift this blog records: the same old practice, but logged as fieldwork in its own right, with its context kept, instead of the recordings disappearing into folders and surfacing weeks later, if at all, as finished pieces with the circumstances of their making lost.

The ontology of Field Art

Field Art treats the environment not as a collection of static objects, but as a continuous web of intersecting physical and lived gradients — light, air, water, sound. I position myself in it as a transducer: an artistic instrument tuned to those rhythms, converting the dynamics of a place into experience, and then into recordings, photographs, videos and texts.

Space is never empty. Every point in an environment holds physical properties — temperature, air pressure, the wavelengths of light, acoustic vibration — and qualitative, perceptual dimensions at the same time. No sound, colour or breeze exists in isolation; each one gets its character from its relations, in space and in time, to everything else in the ambient field. And the artist is not a detached observer standing outside that field. Perception itself is an act of transduction, from inside it.

A working text I developed recently — The Ontology of Field Art — puts this in terms of fields, and I am folding its framework in here as the theory behind this blog:

Scalar fields — pure magnitudes. At every point there are intensities with no inherent direction: air temperature, barometric pressure, humidity, light intensity. Phenomenologically, this is how heavy or light the air feels on the skin, the general warmth or cold of a place.

Vector fields — flows and forces. At every point there are also intensities with a direction: wind speed and direction, the current of a river, thermal updrafts, the path of the sun's rays. Phenomenologically, this is momentum felt on the body — the wind pushing against a jacket, mist drifting visibly across the water.

Spectral, or composite, fields — distributions. Some of what is there cannot be reduced to one value or one direction at all. At a single spot by the waterfront, the sound is not one volume level: it is low-frequency water lapping, mid-frequency wind in leaves, high-frequency bird calls, all at once. Colour works the same way — a mixture of dominant wavelengths, reflections, shadow and haze, shifting continuously from point to point. Even hue alone, if you isolate it, is a strange kind of scalar: a chromatic angle, 0° to 360°, that wraps back around on itself.

Because these different kinds of quantity have different units and different rules, the whole ambient space is not, strictly, a single vector field. It is a heterogeneous, multivariate field — at each point in space and time, a structured record holding scalars, vectors and spectra together.

Physics can measure that field, in decibels, degrees and wind velocity. Field Art has to hold the measurement and the lived experience together:

• Atmosphere, or mood — Stimmung. The overall tone generated by a field is not subjective decoration added afterwards. Morning fog over water carries a quietude that is physically grounded, in muted acoustics and low light.
• The horizon of attention. Standing at a bank, my perceptual field has a centre — the church steeple across the water — and a periphery — the water at my feet — and the edges blur into the background environment.
• Synesthetic co-implication. The senses do not operate in silos. Cold air on the skin changes how crisp a sound feels; bright morning light alters the perception of stillness. The rising sun on a church façade and the sound of water striking the bank are not processed in isolation; they co-constitute one ambient mood.

In the language of phenomenology, drawing on Merleau-Ponty: I was not observing a field from outside it. My senses were coupled with it — part of the flesh of the world, inside a lived horizon, not looking in at a container full of objects.

So the method that follows from this ontology is simple to state:

1. Receptor calibration — tuning attention, and the instruments, to subtle gradients rather than obvious events.
2. Spatial-temporal sampling — collecting across places and durations: before dawn, at dawn, after dawn.
3. Transduction and synthesis — back in the lab, translating what was gathered into works in Images, Sounds and Texts.

What is changing in the revamped practice

Four things, starting now:

1. Context is captured, not remembered. On October 25 I set up my phone to gather a wide range of data around a recording: a GPS app that gives me the coordinates of where I am — and the elevation, which I was glad to see — that I can copy into my notes; weather data, not just the temperature but the whole set of relevant conditions, including screenshots from OpenWeather in the browser; an app called FieldLog.net for logging the recordings themselves; and an app called NoiseCapture, also with screenshots. I take photographs of myself and of the surrounding environment as well. The aim is that the context of a recording can be reconstructed afterwards, from all of these sources together, as completely as possible. One part of the procedure changes from here on: the GPS app seems to give only approximate locations, so I will note the location in an app called Organic Maps — which will also let me retrace my steps when I go on longer walks, around the neighbourhood and in other areas.

2. Recordings get a common naming system. I am going to start trying the Universal Category System — UCS — for my field recordings: a standard, public system that puts a category and subcategory code at the beginning of a filename, so that a recording carries what it is in its name, and a growing library stays searchable instead of becoming a pile.

3. Experiments with two recorders. I have two identical Tascam DR-05X recorders. I am going to buy a proper shock mount — the suspension mount that diminishes handling and vibration noise in a recording — and the wind protection that goes with working outside, and some GorillaPods or the like, and start experimenting with recording on the two recorders simultaneously, in different placements and spacings, trying to recreate and compare different effects.

4. Every outing gets a field log, with a standard data block. From this first log onward, each field log ideally carries the data that makes the material findable and correlatable later:

• date, start and end times, and timezone offset;
• place, and — when captured — GPS coordinates and elevation, weather, and noise level;
• for audio: recorder, bit depth, sample rate, stereo or mono, low-cut filter, and level; every filename with its duration, and the total recorded time;
• for photographs and video: device, filename range, counts, and — for a representative first frame — aperture, shutter, focal length, ISO and dimensions, with the other dimensions noted when they vary;
• the context captures themselves, by filename: weather, GPS and noise screenshots, FieldLog.net entries, and notes;
• a correlation note, stating plainly what has not yet been matched up — for example, audio timestamps still to be read once the files are uploaded to the computer.

What a log does not carry is an exhaustive per-file dump. One representative set of camera settings stands for a run; the full data stays in the files themselves, where it belongs. The log keeps the keys — filenames, times, settings, totals — that let everything be correlated afterwards. Locations in these logs are described objectively, as Waypoints for Field Recordings: named places, with coordinates. The log below is the first one, and it was amended on October 26 to add the full data captured for October 25.

None of this methodology is finished. I will be developing it more, formalizing it more and more over time, figuring out what best practices work for me, for my equipment, and for my skill level.

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Field Log 001 — October 25: Dawn on the Richelieu, and a Day in the Field

Date: Sunday, October 25, 2026 (all times EDT, GMT-04:00).
Waypoints for Field Recordings: W1 — Quai du parc Saint-Henri, on the Richelieu River, looking across to the church of St-Mathieu-de-Beloeil; W2 — near the train tracks; W3 — Pavillon Isaac-Vandandaigue, in the park; W4 — Bibliothèque Armand-Cardinal, interior.
Kind of work: Photography, video and audio field recording, with context capture.
Reconstruction note: This log was written on October 26, from my report of October 25, and amended the same day when I supplied the full capture data below. The weather values for the afternoon are transcribed below, from the screenshots, and locations are given as Waypoints for Field Recordings, with coordinates. No GPS or weather capture exists for the dawn session — its temperature, in section 1, comes from historical weather data consulted on October 26. The exact timestamps of the audio recordings are not yet known: I still have to upload the audio files to my computer to read them, so that they can be correlated with the photographs, videos and screenshots.

1. Early morning — the waterfront, 7:19–7:51 a.m.

I went out early, right after dawn, a little after the Blue Hour as they call it.

Waypoint W1: Quai du parc Saint-Henri — a small dock on the Richelieu River. Coordinates: 45.57105, −73.19479 (two on-site readings, 4 m apart; the city's waterfront-access page pins the quay about 19 m to the south, at 45.57088, −73.19477).

Weather: about 4 °C a little after 7:00 a.m. — from the historical weather data for the Réserve de la biosphère du Mont-Saint-Hilaire, consulted on October 26; no weather was captured during the outing itself.

Photographs: 43. First photograph of the run at 7:19 a.m., last at 7:51 a.m.

• Device: Samsung Galaxy A16 5G.
• First photograph: f/1.8, 1/120, 3.98 mm, ISO 160, 9.4 MP, 2296 × 4080.
• Dimensions vary across the run: 2296 × 4080, 2556 × 3408, and 4080 × 2296 among them.

Videos: 3, totalling 4 minutes 50 seconds — durations 0:40, 0:41 and 3:29.

• Filenames of the form 20261025_072505.mp4; 0.9 MP, 720 × 1280.
• One of the water, at the waterfront by the Richelieu River;
• one of the view of the church of St-Mathieu-de-Beloeil, across the river;
• one video discourse, about the autumn day shortly after dawn, and how magnificent I found the colours and the light.

I later uploaded that video discourse to Instagram. Which duration belongs to which video is not yet correlated in this log.

2. Morning — a second run of field photographs, 8:30–8:38 a.m.

Another 6 photographs, between 8:30 and 8:38 a.m. — 49 field photographs in total for the day. Those were all the field photographs.

Photo filenames for the day run from 20261025_071908.jpg to 20261025_155824.jpg.

3. Afternoon — context capture, notes, and the audio recordings

After the field photographs, I took screenshots of the different apps and websites, logged things in FieldLog.net, made notes on my phone, and made the actual audio recordings. The later recordings were made along a walking route, at three waypoints. The first of the later recordings was made at Waypoint W3 at about 2:19 p.m.

Waypoints for Field Recordings (afternoon):

• W2 — near the train tracks: 45.56740, −73.19177. The first photographs and screenshots of the walk were taken here.
• W3 — Pavillon Isaac-Vandandaigue, in the park: 45.56622, −73.19074. The first of the later recordings was made here, at about 2:19 p.m.
• W4 — Bibliothèque Armand-Cardinal, interior: 45.56554, −73.19002. One audio recording was made here.

Screenshots and captures, as timed:

• 1:34 p.m. — one screenshot of the OpenWeather website: Screenshot_20261025_133420_Chrome.jpg.
• 2:12–2:26 p.m. — 6 more captures, including 3 selfies and one of my shadow cast on the ground while I was sitting on a park bench. Among the screenshots in this window:
• Screenshot_20261025_141222_My GPS Location.jpg
• Screenshot_20261025_142449_GPS Status.jpg
• Screenshot_20261025_142647_Noise Capture.jpg
• 3:26–3:31 p.m. — another 7 screenshots.
• Screenshots are 1080 × 2340.

Weather — for Mont-Saint-Hilaire, CA. Temperature, pressure, humidity and dew point are the scalar fields of the afternoon; the wind is its vector field — speed and direction together. The 2:19 p.m. row is my OpenWeather capture, in Chrome. The values in my 1:34 p.m. OpenWeather screenshot were wrong and are discarded; that row is reconstructed instead from the historical station data for the Réserve de la biosphère du Mont-Saint-Hilaire (timeanddate, consulted October 26), interpolated between its 1:00 and 2:00 p.m. readings:

From about 4 °C a little after 7:00 a.m. to about 14–15 °C by 1:34 p.m. and 16 °C by 2:19 p.m. — that swing is autumn in Quebec.

Audio recordings: 6 files, 17 minutes 56 seconds in total.
Recorder: Tascam DR-05X. Settings for the session:

• Bit depth: 24-bit
• Sample rate: 48 kHz
• Stereo
• Low cut: 80 Hz
• Level: −48 dB

Correlation status: partly settled, partly pending. The places are now settled, as of my clarification on October 26: the first recordings, in the early morning, were made by the Richelieu River; the later recordings were made along the walk — at Waypoint W2, near the train tracks, and at Waypoint W3, the Pavillon Isaac-Vandandaigue, the first of them from W3 at about 2:19 p.m. — and one recording was made inside the Bibliothèque Armand-Cardinal, Waypoint W4. Which of the six files belongs to which place is still pending: the audio timestamps will be read when the files are uploaded to the computer, and each file can then be matched against the photographs, videos and screenshots above and renamed under UCS.

UCS — the Universal Category System, first use. UCS names a sound by a CatID — category and subcategory — at the start of the filename, followed by a description, the creator and the source. My creator ID is AG; the source for this log is FL001 (Field Log 001). The assignments for this day's sessions:

† CatIDs to be confirmed against the official UCS 8.2 list when the files are renamed; the Category / SubCategory assignments stand. UCS applies to the audio files; the photographs and videos keep their camera filenames, which are the keys this log correlates by. The library recording is the clearest case of the whole system: an interior's room tone, recorded as Atmospheric Tone, now named as what it is — AMBRoom.

Closing note

That is the first entry in this new practice: a dawn session of looking and recording — scalar and vector and spectral fields all present at once, the temperature and light, the river's current, the whole spectrum of colour on an autumn morning, with the church across the water at the centre of attention and the water at my feet at its edge — followed, the same day, by the context-capture work and the audio recordings that the revamped practice is built to hold together.

The next field logs will add what this one is still waiting for: the audio timestamps and their correlations, the per-file UCS renames, and two recorders running at once.

— A.G.