Something remains for wild wasting

sound installation

open duration , 2020

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A multi-media sound installation using several kinds of recordings (home audio, field, studio); different kinds of playback devices (speaker monitors, bare speaker cones, headphones); and other objects (chairs, lighting, paper, large piles of leaves).

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A person encounters the installation as an insular, darkened, slightly obscure environment. A wide and deep bed of leaves covers much of the ground, softly rustling – the result of sub-audible vibrations emanating from speaker cones spread throughout the room. In one part of the space, a loose collection of speaker monitors from which are heard dense, pulsating layers of environmental recordings. In another part of the space a configuration of chairs, and on each chair a pair of headphones. Each headphone is separated from its pair by severing the bind that connects them, forcing one to hold the headphone up to the ear in order to listen. In each separated headphone is a different instrumental recording of the same set of melodies. Unbeknownst to the spectator, the frequencies of these melodies have been subtracted from the environmental recordings. Sitting with the headphone recordings engages the multiple layers of the installation – physical materials, kinds of speakers, kinds of recordings, modes of listening – which weave together the dynamic configuration of the environment and coalesce its core image. The implications of this space of the negative: an absence with the potential for presence, distance with the potential for closeness, isolated individual with the potential for collectivity. We encounter things that are, even when they are not; and things are not, even when they are: the light of a star, the transparency of a leaf, the direction of a tree.

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More coming soon.