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



On the Road with Public Studio


IMG_1478I began working with Elle Flanders and Tamira Sawatzky aka Public Studio in 2011, when I composed music and did sound design/installation for their multi-channel film work Road Movie. The piece explores the segregated road system in the West Bank, with perspectives from Israelis and Palestinians. Recently I’ve been working on the sound for Public Studio’s current long-running project What Isn’t There, documenting the Palestinian villages of 1948, from which their Arab inhabitants were displaced and exiled. This latest installment in Public Studio’s 15-year process with the villages is a multi-channel film installation featuring 14 villages.

Up until last week, I had never traveled to Israel/Palestine, and so had been learning about the area through various books, news and editorial media and through immersion in the sound recordings from Public Studio’s location shoots so far. Last week I finally went there myself, to take the Public Studio deluxe tour of the West Bank, record sound at some village sites, and to try to parse the long history of conquests that is writ large on the landscape, from Roman ruins to Marmaluke fortresses to Palestinian olive groves to Bedouin encampments to Israeli army bases, checkpoints, and walled-in settlements.

Suba 3Suba, a Palestinian village built on the ruins of a Crusader fort
AF+TS eat almondsTamira and I take a beak to sample some tart green almonds off the tree…

The current situation is quite literally inscribed on the land, revealing that this is now a battle that is largely being fought by pervasive, insidious construction and control of infrastructure, where the one with the biggest walls, the fastest roads, and control of the checkpoints wins. On the hilltops in Palestine, the radio communications towers are the one of first indications that an illegal Israeli settlement is coming, bringing walls and soldiers and strangely Santa Fe style-suburban homes with them.

walls

Meanwhile, time seems to stand still, in a way, in the hazy hills around Nablus or Ramallah, where lemon trees and olive groves flourish in the terraced hills, drivers are fearless, people are kind and hostly, and the dust blows forward and the dust blows back.

DSCN3487



Road Movie


© Tom Blanchard 2011, Road Movie installation at O’Born Contemporary @ 51 Wolseley

I’ve been working like mad composing and designing the sound for Road Movie, a new multi-film installation by Elle Flanders and Tamira Sawatzky, aka Public Studio, which opens today in Toronto as part of the official selection for the Toronto International Film Festival. Three large double-sided screens show 12 short films about the segregated road system in the West Bank, to the accompanying soundscape which I’ve composed from field recordings, and my odd little stack of instruments, including some nice little mbira beats and harmonica drones. Near the door a small mobile of horn loudspeakers emits the various perspectives of Palestinians and Jewish settlers with whom Elle and Tamira drove the different roads. Watch the trailer here.

Public Studio explains what it’s all about:

In 2009, we went to live in Palestine for a year in order to get a better understanding of the situation on the ground. Flanders, who was raised in Jerusalem, felt that in order to really connect with people and daily life, she needed to live inside Palestine, not just visit. Sawatzky had become interested in the architectural aspects of life under Occupation and together they decided to make a film that looked from the inside out. While much work exists about all aspects of this particular conflict, we approached this from another dimension– we take you, the viewer, into the landscape, into the land in meticulous detail, and allow you to move around in an installation, to give you an immersive and contemplative experience. We shot our films in stop-motion animation, a technique that allowed us to capture, frame by frame, the minutia of this often over-exposed place. Like surveyors, we track the land step by step, taking you with us into each frame.

The piece is produced by the National Film Board of Canada, and O’born Contemporary Gallery, Toronto. Those of you in Toronto can experience it for yourselves at 51 Wolseley Street, 5th floor (across the street from Theatre Passe-Maraille, near Bathurst and Queen W), September 8-18, 2011. Hours: Sun-Thurs, 12-6PM, Fri-Sat, 12-9PM.

© Tom Blanchard 2011, Road Movie installation at O’Born Contemporary @ 51 Wolseley