sound
The River in 24/7 - Excerpt (2020)
What might 24 hours of listening to the Mississippi waters sound like? Can this goods superhighway, which connects to local contexts down the length of North America with global commodity flows, be made legible in sound? A durational soundpiece, The River in 24/7 takes on these questions, with the work’s seemingly impossible-to-apprehend 24-hour length echoing the scale at which the Mississippi operates according to anthropogenic demands. Included below is a three-hour long extract of the work.
The Mississippi River flows 3782 km from its source at Lake Itasca through the center of the continental United States to the Gulf of Mexico. It is a superhighway of goods: 78% of the world’s exports in feed grains and soybeans travel down the Mississippi, though shipping at the lower end of the river is comprised mostly of petroleum and its derivatives such as pesticides and plastics. This lower section of the river is called the “chemical corridor” or the “cancer alley” of the Mississippi. What might 24 hours of listening to this chemically-laden water sound like? What sets of sonic relations is made possible in these waters? The River in 24/7 is a hyperdurational audio recording of the Mississippi river and, while impossible to listen in the museum in one sitting, the fact that a visitor has to walk away from it at some point, knowing it ass playing before they arrived and will continue to do so after they leave, extends a temporal understanding of the sheer magnitude of the anthropogenic use of this waterway.
The Mississippi River flows 3782 km from its source at Lake Itasca through the center of the continental United States to the Gulf of Mexico. It is a superhighway of goods: 78% of the world’s exports in feed grains and soybeans travel down the Mississippi, though shipping at the lower end of the river is comprised mostly of petroleum and its derivatives such as pesticides and plastics. This lower section of the river is called the “chemical corridor” or the “cancer alley” of the Mississippi. What might 24 hours of listening to this chemically-laden water sound like? What sets of sonic relations is made possible in these waters? The River in 24/7 is a hyperdurational audio recording of the Mississippi river and, while impossible to listen in the museum in one sitting, the fact that a visitor has to walk away from it at some point, knowing it ass playing before they arrived and will continue to do so after they leave, extends a temporal understanding of the sheer magnitude of the anthropogenic use of this waterway.
Portal Blooms (2020)
Portal Blooms is an interactive listening booth where visitors encounter a radio they can tune to various stations, each tethered to an imagined future in Mar Menor. Lagoons like Mar Menor are fractal connectors, tying together entire continents, civilizations past and present, humans with nonhumans, sediments with atoms. Water-based ecosystems launch us into a different type of world-making, where the assemblage of a lotic ecosystem ‘generates not a singular knowledge of the world but a world multiple’ (Omura 2018). As such, Mar Menor is a prime site for multiple portals to other worlds, other ways of thinking, other futures. A portal can bridge two worlds, can weave history with the future, but it can also be a rupture.
Tomo/Veillance (2015)
The soundscape of the ocean is very poorly understood. I am interested in establishing an underwater soundscape, using the theory of transduction, where layers of cold war sonic surveillance and acoustic ocean tomography measuring climate change emerge as a way of exploring a little-known space, history, and current issue.
Underwater surveillance and submarine warfare most recently dates back to the cold war. Between 1949 and 1991 an underwater tower array system, which lined both coasts of the United States, was set up at the edge of the continental shelf in order to detect noisy diesel-engine or nuclear-powered Soviet ships. In 1991, after the cold war ended, these stations were declassified, some abandoned, and a few turned over to science. This is when acoustic tomography/thermometry began in earnest, using sound to measure the changes in temperature in the ocean over a long span of time, and essentially monitoring climate change. I was interested in the sonic evolution of the use of sonar technology and tomography, from surveillance to science and back to surveillance over the span of 60 years.
Underwater surveillance and submarine warfare most recently dates back to the cold war. Between 1949 and 1991 an underwater tower array system, which lined both coasts of the United States, was set up at the edge of the continental shelf in order to detect noisy diesel-engine or nuclear-powered Soviet ships. In 1991, after the cold war ended, these stations were declassified, some abandoned, and a few turned over to science. This is when acoustic tomography/thermometry began in earnest, using sound to measure the changes in temperature in the ocean over a long span of time, and essentially monitoring climate change. I was interested in the sonic evolution of the use of sonar technology and tomography, from surveillance to science and back to surveillance over the span of 60 years.
A Digital Reincarnation: The O'o (2015)
The Anthropocene is here. The O'o are not. This is one attempt to bring the bird, native to Hawaii, back from extinction. Technology can fix everything, right?