Minute 323_2022
Spatialized Audio Installation + Kinetic Assemblage
An assemblage of gleaned materials; riverside field recordings, and agricultural mylar, is arranged to recreate an immersive river room. Concerning the endangerment of the Colorado River (US), the work asks us to listen closely to its current state; as a river which once flowed freely, runs dry–no longer reaching the sea (MX). The titles Pulse
Flow and Minute 323 are namesakes of legal documents which are currently discussing river water negotiation between the US and Mexico, responding to the urgency of resuscitating this river, which serves as a main artery and cultural heart-beat of the region. These two works collaborate in the creation of an affective space, using sonic river textures and caustics to create the illusion of a river-room. This hybrid installation work uses choreographed objects, a kinetic assemblage and an atmospheric soundscape, to simulate the quivering flow of the river’s ghost. The work invites viewers to ponder our human influence on non-human ecological bodies; observing how colonial systems impose system/ic glitches, resulting in the disintegration of natural, atmospheric, energetic, and economic flows.
The sound loop, arranged on 26 speakers, is composed atmospherically to orchestrate field recordings from a sonic road trip along the Colorado River. Beginning with rapidly melting ice at the basin of the river, La Poudre Pass (CO), the sounds move downstream, translating personal psychogeographic abstractions into textures and expanding into the atmospheric ripple effects of dams, diversions, overallocation and commodification on this water body. The sound loop, inspired by William Basinski’s Disintegration Loops, plays for 3:23 minutes, and repeats itself with a gradual degradation as a way for visitors to witness its gradual loss and changes, exploring ecopoetics and the imagined parallels between atmospheric human and ecological conditions, using metaphors such as an artery, heart-beat, pulse, flow, and breath to discuss the death and rejuvenation of a water body.