Salar: Adaptation


As part of the 2022-2023 cohort of Rydell Visual Arts Fellows, I have new work on exhibit at the Museum of Art and History in Santa Cruz California, from January 18- March 24, 2024.

These works are part of a longer art research project entitled We Build Ruins that reconsiders the history and fate of the industrialized Atacama desert in northern Chile, by simultaneously understanding it as a place once covered by water, as an arid environment described by rare geologic and organic systems, and as a high-altitude mining site transformed and abused by devastating infrastructures. Robotic extra-planetary modules such as the Mars Rovers and Perseverance have been tested here as the conditions and geology serve as ready analogs for Martian environment and terrain. The mining techniques currently being developed in Atacama are also contributing to a neoliberal imaginary for eventual off-planet operations.

I seek to re-frame the common narrative of deserts as ‘wastelands’ made productive only through industrial exploitation, and to shift the goals of both earthly and extra-planetary inhabitations away from dominion and extraction, and toward listening and adaptation. This trio of works includes a multi-channel audio work, a single channel video projection created together with key project collaborator Rodrigo Ríos Zunino, and a series of photographs arranged as a dual screen slideshow, which consider the contrasts between different orientations to being a visitor, and perhaps one day a guest, of the Atacama desert. The video features glimpses of an ‘Earthsuit’, or clothing that I knit and wove by hand from materials found in the desert (undyed sheep’s wool, plastic bags, twine, cassette tape) that are intended to be both practical but adaptable, not a spacesuit that completely insulates its wearer from the elements of a place but a suit continuing life on damaged Earth using materials at hand.

My colleague Zac Zimmer, Associate Professor of Literature at University of California, Santa Cruz, wrote this short text for the exhibit:

Listening and Adapting in the Age of Extraction: Two figures, two suits, two ways of being.

We have ancestors in common, but Margie the Martian returns to Earth for the first time, and finds an all-too familiar landscape: the inhospitable desert. Contained within her spacesuit, armored against a hostile environment, Margie carries her own atmosphere with her. She has practiced for this descent her entire life. This is the terrifying inversion of terraforming: the moment that Earth becomes Mars.

The Earthsuit’s weave is a pattern of hospitality. It, too, offers some protection against the formidable beauty of the Atacama, but its mesh of Andean wool and plastic bags is permeable and open to adaptation. An Earthsuit is a tool for listening, sensing, and emplacement. It is a garment for the visitor who wishes to move through the Atacama’s grooves across all scales: the cracked earth of a desiccated ancient seafloor, the artificial valleys between tailing piles and mountains of evaporated salt, and the tire-tread patterns of heavy machinery. Embraced within the knit and the weave, whoever wears the Earthsuit will find the stillness necessary to integrate into landscape and soundscape.



Solar Radio at Wave Farm


photo by Patrick McCormack

Solar Radio, which I worked on together with Absolute Value of Noise aka Peter Courtemanche has now been installed in the Wave Farm outdoor sculpture park as a permanent addition.

We created Solar Radio/Embodied Radio Device as an album release in 2020, and this present permanent installation expands on both Peter’s Solar Radio design and the sonic world of the small artificial intelligence that Solar Radio Wave Farm enables. Here’s what this version is all about:

Some years in the future, or perhaps in a surplus version of the present, a solar-powered artificial intelligence wakes with the sun. Its body is a small radio tower with solar cells and a modest signal. With sufficient solar intensity it powers up and responds to the environment, playing with simple AI sound synthesis algorithms in an attempt to imitate and broadcast what it senses nearby, such as insects, birds, frogs, wind, falling rain, changing weather, or magnetic phenomena. It hums and sings, perhaps accompanying a chorus of crickets or a passing bear, perhaps transmitting a memory of a bird from the recent or distant past and the song it sang then. The human culture that created this small artificial intelligence may have changed radically or may no longer exist, but it continues its sonic explorations, generating and remembering sounds, and transmitting signals to the inhabitants of its immediate animate world.

In our present, the Wave Farm realization of Solar Radio is an outdoor sound installation featuring a small artificial intelligence mounted to a short radio tower which wakes with the sun and sleeps when the light grows dim. It monitors the seasons and the amount of energy available to it through its solar cells, generating an evolving composition in response to environmental conditions. Listeners may access Solar Radio at wavefarm.org/listen and will also encounter it woven into Wave Farm’s terrestrial radio transmission, WGXC 90.7-FM.

The AI is keenly aware of the state of its energy source – the electronics know when the solar panel is in full sun or in the shade, or blocked by clouds. It can change its behavior, and switches its circuitry to draw out the power in different ways. The resulting generative sound reflects the mood of the AI and its perception of the outside world that changes with the cycle of seasons. Low energy waking-up audio consists of tones or tone-poems made of combinations of simple waveforms. As more energy becomes available, the AI can also better observe its fluctuations and add more complicated computed sounds into the mix when the energy levels are high enough and stable; it may also develop an earworm, or fixate on a remembered sound for a time.

Solar Radio proposes a different way of thinking about and relating to electrical power and small-scale computational systems. It moves away from the idea of power being instant and ubiquitous. Technologically, it embraces its limitations rather than combating them within the rhythms of the environment and the sun. It also speculates on relationships between artificial intelligence and the world that could take place beyond human intention or control.

This project is made possible, in part, by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Additional travel support for Anna from the Rydell Visual Arts Fellowship.

photo by Patrick McCormack



Salar: Evaporation


Premiering a new installation work created together with Rodrigo Ríos Zunino: Salar: Evaporation is a multi-channel video and sound work based on recent fieldwork in the Atacama desert.

On view this weekend during the opening festivities of the Graz Kulturjahr, at esc medien kunst labor here in Graz, Austria; the installation continues from February 4-21, 2020 Tues-Fri 14h-19h.

esc medien kunst labor, Bürgergasse 5, 8010 Graz Austria

A significant portion of the world’s lithium is mined in the Salar de Atacama, the salt flats of the high altitude desert in northern Chile. This desert was once the bottom of a sea and still consists of rare geologic and organic systems, though now it is aggressively mined for the ingredients for batteries used in smart phones and electric cars. Salar: Evaporation seeks to de-totalize industrial extractivism in favour of manifesting many worlds from the perspective of temporality, land, and space. This multi-channel video and sound installation takes an experimental rather than purely documentary approach, challenging the deadly hubris of human exploitation in the desert by working with the forces characteristic of the desert itself, such as mirage, perceptual distortion, and the long duration of the geologic present.

The work reflects on landscape, infrastructure, and environmental change, exploring the micro and macro scales of human intervention and activity in relatively remote areas which occupy the space between urban sprawl and wilderness, and investigates the role of people (and artists) as agents in the myth-making and storytelling process which bring critique and create counter-narratives to those of progress and growth that propel unsustainable extractivist corporate and state-sponsored industries. Particularly at this contemporary moment, where the people of Chile are engaged in widespread national resistance and protest to business as usual by the state and corporate forces that have ravaged the country and environment while propagating gross economic and social inequities, such areas of resource extraction like the Atacama desert can hardly be understood as peripheral or as neutral sites of industry. Instead, they are centers of power, exploited to feed the forces of global capital to the benefit of a global elite. The future technological ‘smart’ cities will actually function as the peripheral expressions of this power which is being pillaged from the desert. Instead, we consider how the desert produces power in the form of unique and fragile ecosystems and geological expressions of time, from which we may learn and imagine alternative worlds.

This project is part of a larger series of works based on my research and fieldwork in the Atacama desert in Chile entitled We Build Ruins, and was made possible with funding from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Hellman Fellowship, the Arts Research Institute of the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the Committee on Research at the University of California, Santa Cruz.



Embodied Radio Device


Art’s Birthday” is an annual event first proposed in 1963 by French artist Robert Filliou. One million years ago on January 17, someone dropped a dry sponge into a bucket of water. And so, art was born. Filliou proposed a public holiday to celebrate the presence of art in our lives. In recent years, the idea has been taken up by a loose network of artists and friends around the world who exchange audiovisual parties, first via the post, telephone, fax, and later internet streams and public radio satellite. Each year the Eternal Network evolves to include new partners – working with the ideas of exchange and telecommunications art.

This year, I’ve joined Absolute Value of Noise to realize the Embodied Radio Device, a generative radio stream which supposes an Artificial Intelligence that is trying to recreate the sounds of life in its immediate environment – imitating the sounds of insects, birds, frogs, magnetic phenomena, the wind moving through the trees, rain falling, and waves on the ocean. The humans play along with various forms of synthesis. Listen online until January 18, 2019. AI constructed by Absolute Value of Noise, using his Solar Radio outdoor installation which responds to sun exposure and environmental factors, and I’ve provided some accompanying ‘human synthesizer’ and assorted radiophonic/acoustic grit.

Tune in– best accompanied with cake. Happy Art’s Birthday! Remember: the End is just pretend!



Echophone


Echophone

Installation consisting of four parts (2017)

Commissioned by the mighty Radius for the Museum of Arts and Design, for the exhibition Sonic Arcade: Shaping Space with Sound
September 14, 2017 – February 25, 2018
2 Columbus Circle, New York, NY, 10019

Echophone is the first of a new Radius series entitled BEACON. BEACON invites commissioned artists to investigate the idea of radio as a signal from afar.

Two women rent a room in the Pabst Grand Circle Hotel in New York City in late 1947. Their belongings seem to be comprised entirely of a large number of aluminum postal boxes of the sort used to mail laundry; three bellhops are needed to transport it all up to their room. The women stay for one week, pay in advance, and are not seen during their stay. Over several nights the neighboring rooms complain of strange hums and sounds heard through the walls, disturbing their sleep. Three hotel guests complain of the sudden onset of severe migraine headaches, and request a doctor. The dumbwaiter in the hotel breaks down and is stuck between two floors.

After one week, the hotel staff find the room unlocked and empty. The women are gone, as are their boxes, and the maids discover wires and electronic components on the table and the floor of the room. The dumbwaiter is never repaired.

Four aluminum boxes re-appear at MAD this year. Careful inspection reveals that they are radiophonic, each transmitting a single signal to either AM or FM bands. Perhaps they were sent out as probes, recording what they encounter, and then transmitting their findings. The probes have returned as beacons, measuring distance and indicating time passed or times parallel. Four presents from the past.

Responding to the idea that radio measures and allows for relationships over distance and time, Echophone is a radio based installation that reveals itself to visitors as they explore the Museum of Arts and Design, searching for and tuning into transmissions from beacons which are placed throughout its interior. Radios and headphones can be checked out from the admissions desk to experience this piece. Each individual beacon can only be heard in close proximity to its physical location, and are tuned variably to 107.9FM, 1600AM, or 1620AM.

The installation consists of four beacons and two vintage radios with headsets.

Custom electronics for the project by Ryan Page.

Echophone was developed with support from the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Arts Research Institute of the University of California, Santa Cruz.



Radio Revolten


rr_logo_etcOpening this weekend: the largest radio art festival in the world!! I am one of the five curators for the Radio Revolten International Radio Art Festival in Halle (Saale) Germany, running for the month of October 2016. Together with artistic director Knut Aufermann, and co-curators Sarah Washington, Ralf Wendt, and Elisabeth Zimmermann, we have the pleasure of welcoming more than 70 artists from 17 countries to Halle (Saale) to present 30 days of contemporary radio art at 15 locations around the city in the form of performances, installations, concerts and live radio broadcasts. Daily events take place in the Radio Revolten Club, located close to the city market square. Next door at Radio Revolten Central, visitors will experience art installations dealing with transmission in all its guises.

I have been particularly consumed by the curation and installation of the contemporary art exhibit Das Grosse Rauschen: The Metamorphosis of Radio Art, which features Steve Bates (ca/qc), DinahBird and Jean-Philippe Renoult (fr), Golo Föllmer and friends (de), Fernando Godoy M and Rodrigo Ríos Zunino (cl), Jeff Kolar (us), Emmanuel Madan (ca/qc), Sally Ann McIntyre (nz), Kristen Roos (ca), with Maia Urstad (no) installed in the Stadtmuseum Halle as part of the “Unsichtbar Welle” historical installation. These artists are working across the electro-magnetic spectrum with ultra-high frequency transmissions, with baby monitors, with radio silences or repurposing razor wire as antenna, creating in kinetic sculpture, exploded radio art, and site-specific interventions.

We are also transmitting 24 hours a day on Radio Revolten Radio, on the FM frequency 99.3 MHz in Halle, reaching further afield on the AM (middlewave) frequency 1575 kHz, and serving a worldwide audience via the festival livestream. 35 radio stations around the world will integrate parts of Radio Revolten Radio into their own programming, including Resonance FM, Radio Zero, members of the Radia network, and Wave Farm/WGXC Hudson Valley NY. Remarkable events will surprise Halle throughout the month of October 2016: from towers to castles to gardens, radio will blossom into art.

Finally, I am presenting a new piece of my own entitled The Envelope of the Hour in the Roter Turm. This location is a jewel of the a site, being a 600-year-old clock tower in the market square here in Halle, which is the crossroads of farmer’s market, Oktoberfest, and the streetcar exchange. At night it feels like being inside of a microphone, and during the day the wind and city rushes through the windows. The piece is from my atomic clock series, and is a multi-channel sound installation made from audio manipulations of the radio broadcast of the atomic clock and sounds of the bells, exploring the sonic resonance, suspension, drift and decay of atomic and mechanical clock time. The work was supported by the Arts Research Institute of the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Radio Revolten would be nothing without the incredible rock-solid base of organizing, blood, sweat, and glee embodied by Radio Corax, a free-radio station and the pride of Halle.

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Clock Tower, Radio Towers, Signal Structures


Friz_Halle_RT_bwThe clock tower in the Rote Turm, Halle (Saale), Germany.
Site of my upcoming installation “The Envelope of the Hour”, Radio Revolten, October 2016.

The summer solstice has just passed here in the northern hemisphere, so pale evenings abound. This year I’ll be sticking close to the west coast, and preparing for autumn transmissions.

First up, I’m finishing a little piece for the Radio Studies conference Transnational Radio Encounters, in Utrecht, Netherlands from July 5-7, 2016. I’m not able to attend in person, so I’ve sent a little Nocturne in my stead, a short podcost for the late night listening comfort (or dis-ease) of conference attendees, about signal infrastructures and experiencing distance. Featuring distant listening outpost XRRB.

Together with Toronto-based collective Public Studio we are finishing up our commissioned public art work 120 Mirrors, to be unveiled this summer in the new Lee-Lifeson Arts Park in North York, Greater Toronto Area. The piece involves 3 different sculptural parts including submarine-inspired speaking tubes, and a collection of horns modeled on hearing trumpets and megaphones which can be manipulated to acoustically amplify the surrounding sound space or amplify one’s own voice.

I’m also working on a commission entitled How to Pack a Whale for the second edition of Radiophrenia, a temporary radio art festival and station broadcasting on-air, online, and on-site from August 29- September 11, 2016 from the Glasgow Center for Contemporary Arts. Subject matter still under great secrecy–but I can reveal that it involves dreams about packing.

Most of all, I’m preparing for the sprawling Radio Revolten International Festival of Radio Art which will take place in Halle (Saale) Germany from October 1-30, 2016. I’m one of five co-curators, together with Knut Aufermann and Sarah Washington of Mobile Radio, Ralf Wendt of Radio Corax, and Elisabeth Zimmermann of Kunstradio Austria. My area of concern is the contemporary transmission art exhibition entitled Das Grosse Rauschen: The Metamorphosis of Radio, which will feature artists from all over the world considering transmission ecologies, and re-framing radio and other forms of wireless communication. We are also hosting more than 60 artists to perform, install, engage in public actions and radio activity as well as hosting a symposium entitled Radio Space is the Place (with nods to both Sun Ra and Robert Adrian X), and running a round-the-clock city-wide radio art station.

In addition to curating at Radio Revolten, I’ll be presenting a new work there funded by the Arts Research Institute at the University of California, Santa Cruz, entitled The Envelope of the Hour. This piece reflects on time obedience and standardization, as measured by the public clock tower and the broadcast atomic clock on shortwave radio channels internationally. Towers of power, recuperated into instruments.

Signing off for now… until next time, stay detuned….

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The end is just pretend


PublicStudio_ZeroHour_2015When my long-time Toronto collaborators Public Studio (Elle Flanders and Tamira Sawatzky) approached me to compose sound for their latest video installation entitled Zero Hour, I was completely prepared for the task, having worked on several audio and radio art pieces around the atomic clock with several working titles including The Zero Hour. I also had a recording of the atomic clock (as broadcast internationally on shortwave frequencies) intoning the so-called zero hour, or 0:00:00 – 0:59:59 Coordinated Universal Time. So it’s a pleasure to be taking this sound work into new audiovisual territories!

The new work was commissioned for Scotiabank Nuit Blanche in Toronto, coming up this weekend from sundown on October 3 to sunrise on October 4, 2015. The installation will be set up at 90 Queen’s Park in front of the Planetarium, and features a 360 degree dome projection with surround sound. Here’s what it’s all about:

ZERO HOUR: Public Studio with Etel Adnan, Carol Weinbaum, Josh Schonblum, Han Yang, Anna Friz, Lili Huston-Herterich

Apocalyptic prophecies reflect a coming to an end but are also revelatory, disclosing a kind of truth. While modernity gave rise to a new cluster of apocalyptic narratives, our post 9/11 world faces anxieties that have generated new utopian and dystopian accounts looking for answers.

While tales of the apocalypse clutter and disorder all histories from the Americas through the Arab world, each have their distinct voice – all of them can be reconnected to struggles against an outside force – a state terror that has had disastrous effects on lands and lives – from economic ruin to climactic devastation.

Zero Hour gathers the cosmos and reflects not the stars of the northern hemisphere, but rather the weather it has disrupted and the words that come back in protest.

In Zero Hour, Public Studio invites renowned artist Etel Adnan – Lebanese essayist, painter, poet and philosopher, whose works include The Arab Apocalypse, Premonition and Sea and Fog – to work in collaboration creating a newly commissioned poem set to a video projection on a dome, of current weather patterns and climactic disturbances taking place in the southern hemisphere.



Ascend into air, fall into water


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Last spring I made a radio art piece for Radio Arts UK entitled Two Sleeps, which was an oneiric journey through imagined landscapes, and the tendency in my dreams of ascending and descending through air and water. This time around it was much more basic: the plane takes off from the fog and murk of East Iceland, soars over the pack ice around Labrador and descends into another fog bank near Santa Cruz, California.  From air to earth, but actually to water–though there’s drought here, the ocean is the nearest and most impressive body around.

My new appointment here at UC Santa Cruz is keeping me busy, but some additional shows are coming up fast: even as we speak I’m madly finishing the audio for Public Studio‘s new 360 degree video installation entitled Zero Hour, to be presented at Toronto’s Nuit Blanche on October 3-4, 2015; and a brand new audio-visual performance Fjarðarheiði created with Konrad Korabiewski and presented by Skálar | Sound Art | Experimental Music at the Festival de nouveau cinéma in Montréal, October 10, 2015.

Look out for misc. colloquia in the central California area to be announced shortly as well… and when not teaching students about the glories of listening and making noise, I’ll be out and about, loitering about the waterfront…

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Drone Wedding


PROJECT NO.20 POSTCARD

Drone Wedding is up for the next 3 months, a new work by Public Studio, commissioned for the Ryerson University Image Centre Media Wall in Toronto, Canada. Public Studio is an artist collective founded by film director Elle Flanders and architect Tamira Sawatzky, and includes other collaborators as the projects require. I have been the composer/sound designer for 3 multi-channel film installation works with Public Studio so far: Road Movie (2011), What Isn’t There (2014), and now Drone Wedding.

Drone Wedding is a multi-channel video installation which reflects on pervasive contemporary surveillance society against the frame of drone reconnaissance and targeted strikes. Cameras collect a tremendous amount of data in all aspects of daily public and private life; Drone Wedding considers the more ominous element in this flow of images– who’s watching, who is being watched, and how comfortable or knowledgeable is Canadian society with this growing surveillance infrastructure and how it is being used, who is being targeted, at home and abroad?

I crafted the sound from a number of radiophonic sources–encrypted radio communications (including numbers stations), military ground-air talk, ambient radiation from electronic devices via induction coils and VLF antennas, video documents made public by various watchdog organizations, misfiring AM radio transmitters, etc. It’s in the air all around us–devices and people, recording everything.

Watch the composite version of the video here

Short review by the Globe and Mail here