Presentations

Ontario College of Art and Design. •Graduate Gallery 205 Richmond St w. Toronto. April 2016

“Chaosmosis Machines” Group Exhibition Helen-Gardiner-Phelan Theatre 79 George St. Toronto Sponsored by Leonardo/LASER September 2019

Description

The Sound That Severs Now from Now employs its large pendulum swinging in time as a visual/ sculptural means of mechanically diffusing a beam of sound around the exhibition space to allow one to experience a new way of hearing which is more akin to a passing object making sound than it is to a sound radiating from a central source.

Stemming from ideas elucidated in Bruno Latour’s Facing Gaia: Six Lectures on the Political Theology of Nature (2013,) this work proposes a critique aimed at global political inaction in the face of climate change. This sculptural and sound-based work is premised upon friction created between a ground consisting of the slow ticking of time, and a beam of sound sonically punctuating the space. This sound of the ticking pendulum–this historical anthem of rational positivism–meting out time as regular commodified packets, provides the means by which this pendulum can supply both a central visual point of focus and apt point of cultural reference, setting the stage for a symbolic juxtaposition, against which the second part of the work is balanced. This second part – in the form of a quietly destabilizing sonic figure that carries the sound of melting Greenland ice layered with whisperings of scientists on both sides of the climate argument, proposes a subversion that calls into question the objective historical pride and increasingly apparent eco-folly represented by such devices and debates as they slice, measure and render the world, serving it up to the utility-maximizing calculus of human appetite….

Credits

Garnet Willis
Conception, Design, Electronics, Programming, Fabrication, Sound Design

Rebecca van der Post
Voice Actor

Funded in part by:
Ontario Graduate Supplement
SSHRC CGS-Masters