This performance explores field recordings of electrical generation and transmission.
Source 1: Navajo Generation Station, Page Arizona. At 2.25 gigawatts, the largest coal-fired generating plant west of the Mississippi. It delivered power to Arizona, Nevada and California. It closed in November 2019.
Source 2: Potrero Point, San Francisco. AKA Warm Water Cove, Toxic Beach. Electricity generated in Antioch enters the city here via an underwater cable.
Infrastructure Soundworks examine the hidden works and underpinnings of the Industrial Antrhropocene era, primarily through the physicality of sound.
As of 2018/2019, preliminary material and exploration is being made for a piece about the end of coal.
“Oil and Gas” is one such sonic journey through desert landscapes of fossil fuel production, composed of field recordings made in the shale gas fields of the San Juan and Green River Basins of Colorado and New Mexico. These lands are an epicenter of fossil-fuel extraction for the present and the near future, and are positioned as strategic energy resource for energy security for the United States.
A wilderness filed with machines, vast areas of remote high desert territory are spiderwebbed with access roads, pipelines and wellheads. All this industrial infrastructure is what makes possible an energy-use profile unprecedented in the history of life on earth. We turn our ears toward this infrastructure, to better understand ourselves within the world.
This is a subset of, an extension of, and an alternate direction for the material from Listen Toward the Ground, an audio tour formatted piece which was shown at ISEA2012.
A sound poem about the Federal Food Safety Enhancement Act
Food Safety Enhancement is sound piece, a soundpoem of sorts, commissioned by dancer/choreographer Rowena Richie. It was created as a kind of personalized response to a piece of legislation which was being discussed a lot in the spring of 2009 – the Federal Food Safety Enhancement Act – and in particular a part of it which some were calling “Scorched Earth” – which promoted the idea of creating “Sterile Buffer Zones” around farmer’s fields. But really the piece is about disconnects: About technocracy trying to regulate the interstice where commerce and industry meet growing things. It ended up taking this fragmentary, internal narrative sort of form, hinting at internal imagery and confusion at the information in the news.
Also published on The Unobserved:
http://theunobserved.com/culture/food_safety_enhancement/
A meditation on environmental collapse: Slow and gently crossfading images projected onto a large spiral of diaphanous fabric, drifting from a rotating tree-trunk bark-scape to a daydream of gold-green flowering branches wafting in breeze.
Sound of urban beehive activity, filtered so that the bees themselves are nearly absent. Followed by a soundscape of distant crickets and electrical wires in mist, punctuated by the violent and banal passing of a minivan speeding through the landscape.
A small bench awaits in the center of the spiral, a place to sit and listen to small, naked speakers dangling from wires, playing heavily processed and edited bird recordings.
At the center of the spiral, a “trunk” is formed of discarded etched panels, bright copper on white fiberglass.
A wicker garden bench is positioned outside the spiral, so one might sit and regard the spiral as one might regard a garden.
In making it, I was thinking about the relationships and interfaces between humans and nature. As beings who regard ourselves as beings, we can see ourselves as part of nature or as outside of it.
work details:
This video is a four-minute walk through the gallery space.
Narrated Walkthrough:
Installation work for CCA Playspace Gallery, San Francisco, July 2009
Prior versions of this material were exhibited:
“Synchronous Forest” in collaboration with Lindy Lyman, Regis University, Denver CO, 1998
“Synchronous Forest 2.0” in collaboration with Lindy Lyman, Museum of Outdoor Arts, Englewood CO, 1999
Digital Video, Stereo sound, 2002
DeFused Ads are short abstract films which use television commercials as their sole source material, transforming them from commercial messages into meaningless things of beauty.
Defused Ad no.2 is made from a TV ad for an indy 500 style racetrack. The hard-hitting voiceover is now a drifting chitter, and the screaming racecars are now soft colored blurs.
The technique involves “averaging” the texture, color and tone of the original material into luminous drifting masses. The original fast-cut promotional message is transformed into a slow-time mode. No edits were made, the processing simply acting as a lens to distort time and space.
Digital Video, Stereo sound, 2002
DeFused Ads are short abstract films which use television commercials as their sole source material, transforming them from commercial messages into meaningless things of beauty.
DeFused Ad No.1 is a luminous, ambient electronic landscape made from an interstitial cable-TV promo.
The technique involves “averaging” the texture, color and tone of the original material into luminous drifting masses. The original fast-cut promotional message is transformed into a slow-time mode. No edits were made, the processing simply acting as a lens to distort time and space.
In 1996, I met a student in Ontario who grew up in East Berlin. The cold war being such a looming reality in my youth, I’d always wondered about life on the Soviet side of the iron curtain. “Did you get western TV in East Berlin?” I asked her. The answer was yes, of course, but it was the next part that threw me. “Oh! The commercials! – they were so beautiful. I just wanted to live inside the worlds of them.”
At the time, my job was working in a recording studio in Denver which did a lot of commercials. I myself was engaged in the craft of perfecting these short mass-media messages intended to incite an audience to partake in commercial transactions. I started to think about how, in a way, television ads are some of the high-art of our civilization: the most refined, concentrated, compelling experiences that can be created in sound and light.
Eventually the obvious connection was made: to absolve these messages of their meaning, rendering them objects of pure beauty.
