Under air Over water – sound {space} + image

under air, over water

"Who has known the ocean? Neither you nor I, with our earth-bound senses, know the foam and surge of the tide that beats over the crab hiding under the seaweed of his tide-pool home; or the lilt of the long, slow swells of mid-ocean, where shoals of wandering fish prey and are preyed upon, and the dolphin breaks the waves to breathe the upper atmosphere. "
'Undersea' Rachel Carson

Rachel Carson is the inspiration against which my first spatial sound-image work is set.

I tend not to write about my works, preferring them to speak directly for themselves.

Context is, however, fine. I make no secret of the fact that marine acoustic pollution is a research theme to which I’m drawn. Being sound-sensitive (and not just because I work with sound, although no doubt this closely correlates) I can only imagine how painfully intolerable current forms and levels of acoustic pollution is, to marine life. Seismic surveys, sonar, shipping noise… these have very real, and often devastating affects. This is a growing area of research, and having spoken to NTNU academics, I am (as I often am) both encouraged and confused.

The very separation from, and dominion over the living world which causes these problems, is also – through techno-scientific approaches – trying to address them.

At a human level, I am generally heartened, though I still find a soft disquiet in my heart when people act in incongruous ways towards the living world. I include myself in that number. I try to live in way to minimise my impact on it. At times I fail.

This work reflects these themes, alongside the inevitable ambiguity with which the ethical, inter-subjective path unfolds.

Be wary of simple narratives, and fevered storytellers.

Take refuge in acts of gentleness, the kind you are too wealthy to buy, the kind that are not only cheap, but easy too.

Feel the full range of your experience; nothing is worth the price of denial. Your pain, your pleasure too. Turbulent waters or shallow currents, the difference is one of scale, not nature.

"Nor can we know the vicissitudes of life on the ocean floor, where sunlight, filtering through a hundred feet of water, makes but a fleeting, bluish twilight, in which dwell sponge and mollusk and starfish and coral, where swarms of diminutive fish twinkle through the dusk like a silver rain of meteors, and eels lie in wait among the rocks. Even less is it given to man to descend those six incomprehensible miles into the recesses of the abyss, where reign utter silence and unvarying cold and eternal night."

"To sense this world of waters known to the creatures of the sea we must shed our human perceptions of length and breadth and time and place, and enter vicariously into a universe of all-pervading water. For to the sea’s children nothing is so important as the fluidity of their world. It is water that they breathe; water that brings them food; water through which they see, by filtered sunshine from which first the red rays, then the greens, and finally the purples have been strained; water through which they sense vibrations equivalent to sound."