IMAGES/+
installation and intermedia work
Paper Membranes
A paper membrane considers the activity of frottage as an act of recording. These pieces, in a similar approach to the use of field recording in my recent work, collapse the idea of truth, creating imaginary ‘recordings’ of physical space, objects, and textures. These fictional landscapes, merge interior and exterior spaces, where interior wall, tree, and stone become part of the one tracing, a recording of an impossible surface.
Trace Constellations
Alte Münze, Berlin, July 2021
‘Trace Constellations’ is a kind of sound installation as slippage, a collapsed, imaginary surface of the sonic life of the Alte Münze courtyard and the interior resonance of Raum on Demand.
I’m thinking of this as a ‘constellation’ because that kind of approach to mapping seems to hold within it the idea of multiple nodes of inquiry sharing a space with inferences and connections able to be traced into different shapes and relation. A wide ranging study of the space via:
...dreamed leaf creatures, etymological trails, feedback, breath and bronchioles and rhizomes, field recordings from the listening position of plants that no longer exist, traced histories of bamboo in colonial Europe and shopping mall replications, breath, ye olde text to voice cliches, humming, large scale graphite drawings, multiple temporal metabolisms, institutional aspirations of mainstream German jazz via its so-called ‘emancipation’ from Blackness and accountability, weather, coins, haunts, cello tracings.
During the course of its making, this piece somehow developed its own logics: primarily, that of an inquiry into what forms might emerge when something remains without its originary context; without its body or frame, when it slips outside its own temporal scaffolding. It moves towards how we might configure remainders, traces, parts, into a rendering of a new whole, how we might recast losses, ghosts, and artefacts into their own dimensions (in terms of measurements, spaces, or dwelling places).
This refers not only to things past, but the reaching for, the tending toward future iterations, or horizons. This courtyard is, in many ways a witness to the slow extinctions/extinguishing of cultural imaginaries in progress, from its past life as a coin mint ‘outside’ of capitalism in the DDR, to a future jazz centre without Black leadership or connection to local community, without reparations.
This work takes place in an attempt at a sort of blurring; of weather, uncanny layers, days and spaces collapsed then replayed, hallucinations, visions and fragments, glimpses of alternate leaky versions of now.
Using audio material generated by the Raum and Hof themselves in the form of feedback and field recordings, layered with interpretations and contributions undertaken away from the space, this work lives in a porous position, in-between document and fiction.
The Alte Münze courtyard and I haunted each other for a little while, leaving traces to follow in our respective absences. As much of me leaked into this space really, as it in turn leaked into my own; a courtyard nested inside my own apartment, inside a quarantine, dragging along with me as far as summer solstice permanent daylight in the north of Norway, embroidering and burnishing a ‘place, out of place.’
Povinelli asks: what if we reconsider the limits of ourselves, our bodies, how we mark out the edges of us, where we might end and the world begins, ideas of limit, contagion and entanglement. Humans often think of our skin as one limit, one sort of edge, but she asks us to consider "Where is the human body if is viewed from the lung?"
Breathing puts us in intimate relation with other systems of respiration; a leaf, green plants, bacteria, animals, microbes; it forms a porous exchange with multiple systems, eco-systems, scales, cycles and spaces. In living, we cannot avoid taking in the world, we cannot avoid breathing ourselves back out into it.
This piece is intended to be something that breathes; that allows for multiple simultaneous spaces emerging, disappearing, opening, focusing, interrupting. Something that might sneak up on you, that you may or may not really notice, depending on your timing, depending on your luck.
Work in progress for durational sensorimotor drawings and massed recordings
MARCH - MAY 2020
Work in progress for durational sensorimotor drawings and massed recordings is an exploration of how we might represent duration, labour, and massing through sound artefacts. It is also a component of my research project Shaking Studies. Built slowly from a daily practice of mark making guided by physical impulses of the body and the resistance of marker and paper, this visually gestures towards seismographs, electrocardiograms, or polygraphs: recordings and measurements of impulse, tremor, truth, or signs of life. This work was intended to be experienced as an installation, with the unspooled drawing spanning my studio space at HIAP Suomenlinna, with the audio of each recording stacked into a massed sound work of jagged micro-rhythmic events and noise.
Photo 2 by Sheung Yiu with thank to HIAP
Video by Shubhangi Singh with thanks to HIAP
Work for two hands and massed recordings
MARCH - APRIL 2020
Rammed Earth tests
Gravel collected from Suomenlinna and Finnish red clay
APRIL - MAY 2020
Absence Makes the Heart Grow
Analogue recording device tests: clay - MARCH 2020