This exhibit is open 8:00 am-5:00 pm, March 22-29.
World-Wide-Walks / between earth, water &sky / DESERTS
Peter D'Agostino
World-Wide-Walks have been performed on six continents over the past four decades. Initiated in 1973 as The Walk Series, these video "documentation/performances" evolved into video-web projects during the 1990s and mobile-locative media installations in the 2000s. World-Wide-Walks explore elements of natural, cultural and virtual identities: mixed realities of walking through physical environments and virtually surfing the web. Current projects focus on climate change and the effects of global warming to address concerns for a sustainable future related to ‘glocal’ - global / local – ecologies.
It is conceived as a trilogy of walk projects in the Chihuahuan, Mojave, and Sonoran deserts. The installation proposed for Balance-Unbalance 2015 is based on walks performed in the Chihuahuan Desert at White Sands, Los Alamos and Alamogordo. The mix of ‘natural-cultural-virtual’ concepts is most striking for me at these sites as boundaries for the convergence of nature and culture, spirituality and science. Here, at this crossroads in the desert where the ancient Native American stories of emergence from Mother Earth are told, it is also the site of the first Atomic Bomb detonation. ( The “Fat Boy” bomb on July 16, 1945 preceded “Little Boy”, August 6, Hiroshima; and “Fat Man,” August 9, Nagasaki.) One walk is around a “Fat Man,” a bomb casing on display at the White Sands Missile Range Museum. Walks around Soaptree Yucca plants are testaments to natural survival in the desert ecosystem; while another walk through a field of petroglyphs is about a time dating from the Ancestral Pueblo period of c. 1300 to 1600 AD. (Petroglyph National Monument on New Mexico's West Mesa near Albuquerque.)
Pink Noise
Yolande Harris
Pink Noise challenges preconceptions about underwater sound by juxtaposing an idyllic video of the ocean surface with the overwhelming, yet often strangely beautiful, anthropogenic noise underneath. By involving the audience in an otherwise alien, inaccessible environment, the installation aims to establish a more empathetic relationship to the underwater world through the immersive experience of the artwork.
The installation consists of a video projection on the floor and a sound recording listened to on headphones. The headphones hang from the ceiling, centered over the video, about 18 inches from the floor (like a fishing line). At first, the audience only sees the video of colorful turquoise and pink light reflecting on the surface of the sea. In order to experience what is beneath the surface, the audience member must step into the video and put on the headphones, at which point s/he is immersed in the piece. The hydrophone recording, made at a Spanish National Marine Reserve at peak tourist season, reveals a surprising range of industrial sounds beneath the surface – loud thumps, grinds, and tones from boat engines, anchors and depth sounders. The underwater sonic environment sharply contrasts with the idyllic video of the surface at the same location, revealing the extent of noise pollution even in a protected marine habitat.
Pink Noise was previously exhibited at: Transmediale, Berlin, 2010; Issue Project Room, New York 2011 (screened version); WRO Media Art Biennale, Wroclaw, Poland 2011; MADATAC Festival, Madrid 2013.
Undercurrent
Teresa Connors & Shannon Harris
Undercurrent is one of a series of ongoing generative audiovisual installations which explores the notion of ecological performativity. Here, the term "ecological" refers to the philosophical school of thought which believes the world to be a network of interconnected and interdependent phenomena. Constructed in Max 6, this generative installation layers a network of visual and aural content that affect each other simultaneously to produce an ever-evolving work. The assets of this installation include oceanic audiovisual field recordings from the west coast of Canada, algorithmic data collected from an Acoustic Doppler Current Profiler (ADCP), and real-time convolution of audio field recordings with samples acoustic instruments. The intention of this practice is to contribute in an artistic, experiential, and dynamical means to current thinking around material agency. I purpose that by doing so, creative practice can contribute towards the development of an ontological consideration of ecological performativity. By viewing the world as a network of phenomena that are fundamentally interconnected and interdependent, the result is a performative openness to the world that suggests a means by which to empathically engage, from a non-human exceptionalism perspective, with the complexities of being in, and of the world in the 21st century. Undercurrent is an attempt to foster a greater recognition of the ongoing and entangled ebb and flow of agency between humans and the environment.
