SMOKEY SIGNALS FROM THE GREAT KAROO

Knock knock.
Who’s there?
The Land.
The Land who…?

(Deafening Silence)

How to begin to listen to a deafening silence? Endless loose threads…which to pull?

The silence deafens with a thousand voices at once. I try to understand, to decipher the codes without politics. But there are so many fences. Borders. Separations. Denials.

I walk into the veld to photograph the land from a small hill. Coming back to the road I am confronted with a red, shouting face that threatens me with bodily harm and death by shotgun for squeezing through a fence and placing my feet on the earth.

Mine. Not yours. Not theirs. Land Van Ons Vaders.

Trying to look deeper and drown out the noise, I wander the landscape attaching contact microphones to objects: bridges, trees, large rocks. One telephone pole in particular emits a magical song, vibrating loudly and with infinite tonal beauty and variation, from the hundreds of kilometres of wire attached to it, swinging with the changing wind. What the wind must have heard here in the past million years alone…

Wondering if a step away might bring me closer, I turn to Liza Grobler’s interpretations of the landscape on paper. Dissecting these images I begin a process of translation, intuitive analysis, technical but indefinite. It feels like charting a map; A technical representation of an open and interpretive process, which takes the form of a graphic score for electronics, field recordings and piano.

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From The Margin to Here 2017
Telephone pole, cables, 2 sound files, audio speakers, transducer speaker, mp3 players, grasses
Dimensions variable

A stereo recording of a telephone pole on a regional road in the vast Karoo region of South Africa, made with contact microphones. Walking in the landscape I happened on a pole that was not properly set in the ground, and so was vibrating loudly enough to be audible. Attaching the contact microphones, one can hear shifting overtones caused by fluctuations in the wind pushing kilometres of telephone wire in varying speed and direction, converging on the pole.

Mesmerising and encompassing, I felt privileged to witness and capture this secret song that was going endlessly, whether or not anyone was there to hear it. If a tree vibrates in a desert and no one is there to hear it, yes, it does make a sound.

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From Here to the Margin 2017
Digital print 220cm x 46cm
Sound file 5:44
Mp3 player, headphones

Study for From Here to the Margin

Mobirise

While on residency in the town of Richmond, set in the expansive Karoo region of South Africa, I experimented with the deconstruction of a static image - an abstract landscape drawing by visual artist Liza Grobler - into individual parts and sections with the aim of producing and performing a score based on the original image. I wanted perform the score intuitively, then retrospectively decode the process in order to reconstruct a new image representing that process. Below is the original performance - for electronics, field recordings and broken piano.

The resulting image, pictured above, became a new score and has been performed several times by different ensembles.

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LVOVe 2017
Single channel video 5:03, music stand, sheet music, surveillance cameras

Mobirise

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