On Turner Sump - A polymedia enviroEvent
Project Outline
Briefly (an extended essay of the motivations for the work is in preparation), the work is a response to, and a working-through of a number of feelings about what might be called the quasi-religious overtones of in the aura of the 'environment movement'– zealously rigid and treating 'the environment' as something 'out there', as independent of us. In this regard, it is typical of the principal driving force of Western ideology: the Cartesian division of mind and body, soul and spirit etc.
This work, aligned with The Atlas of Feathers, is an attempt to find a different model by which flection-re-flection resonances enfold the changes 'out there' with the changes 'in here'.
On Turner Sump is a polymedia work being created to coincide with the premiere of my new Polymedia Event Theatre (PET-3).
[NB this is self-funded work in progress, so both the concept and commentary is constantly under review.]
Site-specific material
The audio-visual components of the work are photograph and sound sequences recorded at an urban wetland built at David Street, Turner, ACT. and known to residents as the David Street Wetland. Actually the work is defined, score-like, as a series of instructions to be executed in any location; the ritual-like performance/execution process being more important than any actual site itself. In this regard, it shares some of John Gossage's work The Pond. There are other connections too - the title On Turner Sump having a pointedly mundane, or at least non-transcendental, connection to Thoreau's On Walden Pond.
The Process
With discipline as to time of day, consistency of intra-site-locations etc, to record the site in daily photographs and seasonal sound recordings. In the case of On Turner Sump, this is realised as the daily taking of some twenty still photographs from six specific locations, and the simultaneous ambisonic and binaural sound recordings of several 24 hour periods over the course of a year.
I began the daily recordings in July 2010. Here is a subset of the photographs taken on a single day.
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