BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Catalogues / Reviews / Radio Broadcasts / Interviews:
2022 Jurgen Claus discusses recent exhibitions and underwater sound work in: “Starke Meeresfrauen/Strong Sea Women: Jurgen Claus on Aquatic Art, Music and Architecture”, Kunstzeitung Oct/Nov issue 2022 p.20
2019 Williams, Christopher A., and Charlie Morrow. “Marketing Sonic Thinking with Creative Visualization: Getting Decision-Makers to Listen.” Cities & Health Journal (Taylor & Francis) discusses Taking Soundings
2019 Work on underwater sound in discussed in conference panel and paper by Meredith Tromble, College Art Association Annual Conference, New York
2019 Melt Me Into The Ocean walk, film and interview by Pollination Productions directed by Beth Stephens, for online course Art and the Environment at University of California Santa Cruz
2018 The Melt Me Into The Ocean Experience: An Experimental Sound Event Will Bring Participants Under The Sea, by Georgia Johnson, Good Times Santa Cruz http://goodtimes.sc/santa-cruz-arts-entertainment/preview-melt-ocean-experience
2018 The Melt Me Into The Ocean: Experimental Event Submerges Attendees In A Sea Of Sound, by Zach Buck, Santa Cruz Sentinel, https://www.santacruzsentinel.com/2018/08/12/melt-me-into-the-ocean-experimental-event-submerges-attendees-in-a-sea-of-sound/
2016 Yolande Harris: Techno-Intuition and Sonic Consciousness, Interview with Meritxell Rosell in online art-science CLOT Magazine www.clotmag.com
2016 Experimental Music Since 1970 by Jennie Gottschalk, discusses Displaced Sound Walks, Bloomsbury Press
2015 Yolande Harris: Listening to the Distance, artist monograph catalogue of solo exhibition, Woodbury Art Museum, Utah Valley University. Includes following essays:
Robert Campbell ‘Eternity Sensuously Displayed: Yolande Harris’ Eyrie’
Brandon LaBelle ‘Yolande Harris: Aesthetics of Intensity’
Annea Lockwood ‘Integrated Circuits’
2015 Retrospective: A Decade of Intersections Art|Sci Center, University of California Los Angeles, includes Sun Run Sun and Listening to the Distance.
2015 Land Mark Catalog Center of Contemporary Art Santa Fe, Bonneville Blue Whale included in catalog of Land Mark Show
2014 ‘Peircing Fritz and Snow: An Aesthetic Field for Sonified Data’ by Michael Filimowicz, Journal of Organised Sound 19/1: 90–99 (Cambridge University Press), discusses Sun Run Sun: Satellite Sounders in relation to current theories of data sonification.
2014 TV interview about Pink Noise in Madatac 05, TVE – National Spanish Television
2013 ‘Digital Sensing: Intersections of Sonification and Visualization in Media Arts’, by Meredith Hoy, discusses Taking Soundings, in ISEA2012 Machine Wilderness: Special Media-N edition, Journal of New Media Caucus, College Art Association
2012 ‘Sensing Place: Mediatizing the Urban Landscape’ by Sabine Himmelsbach, Catalogue, discusses El Camino and Satellite Sounding, House of Electronic Arts Basel and Christoph Merian Publishers
2012 ‘Sun Run Sun: The Satellite Sounders’, by Matthias Ulrich, in Playing the City: Interviews, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt and Sternberg Press
2010 ‘Beating the Bounds’ by Kit Hammonds, Ground Level Exhibition Catalogue, discusses Taking Soundings and Navigating by Circles (Sextant), Hayward Gallery /Southbank Centre
2010 ‘On Location: The Poetics of Space: Sonic Acts XIII’ by Rahma Khazam, “Fishing for Sound brilliantly exploited sound’s capacity to conjure up a sense of place” The Wire: Adventures in Modern Music
2010 ‘Ruhrotronics: Klange der ISEA’, DeutschlandRadio Kultuur by Marcus Gammel, Sun Run Sun, Pink Noise
2010 ‘Knowing Art / Transcending Science: Perception, Consciousness, Synchronicity and Transgnosis’ by Edward Shanken, Esemplasticism : The Truth is A Compromise, (Exhibition Catalogue), discusses installation Pink Noise, TAG/CTM Berlin
2009 ‘Sun Run Sun: Satellite Sounders’ in Matthias Ulrich ed. Playing the City (Exhibition Catalogue) with video documentation on DVD, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt
2009 Art and Electronic Media, Edward A. Shanken (Phaidon Press) mention of A Collection of Circles (2005) and Sun Run Sun
2009 ‘Dolphins, Spectograms and Scorescapes: an interview with Yolande Harris’ by Morgan Currie, Masters of Media, University of Amsterdam
2009 ‘Aiming for Dead Reckoning: A conversation between Yolande Harris and Annet Dekker’, by Annet Dekker , in Brickwood, Cathy and Annet Dekker (eds.), Navigating E-Culture (Amsterdam: Virtueel Platform) with video documentation of Sun Run Sun on DVD.
2008 ‘Acoustic Ecology and the Experimental Music Tradition’ by David Dunn, New Music Box, January, mentioned as one of 20 practitioners in the field.
2008 ‘Possibility of Action: The Life of the Score’, Taking Soundings in exhibition catalogue, Study and Documentation Centre, Contemporary Art Museum Barcelona / MACBA
2008 ‘Sun Run Sun and Taking Soundings’ in Atau Tanaka et al. eds. Creative Interactions – The Mobile Music Workshop 2004 – 2008, University for Applied Arts, Vienna
2008 ‘A Journey Through Sound: an interview with Yolande Harris’ by Carmen Hutting and Annet Dekker, TagMag5, <>TAG publication, The Hague
2008 ‘Het Nieuwe Media Effect’ Thijs Witty in Xi 17.1 Kwartaalblad over Film, Televisie en Nieuwe Media, University of Amsterdam. Review of performance at Re:Visie Utrecht
2008 ‘Sun Run Sun, perceiving spaces after GPS’, by Vito Campanelli, Review in Neural.it, Italy
2008 ‘Media Art in Public Space in the Netherlands’ by H. Holtappels, Eyeball Media Arts Web-zine, Korea
2007 Taking Soundings review on new media blog We Make Money Not Art by Regine Debaty
Listening to the Distance Catalogue
75 page, full color catalogue includes essays by Brandon LaBelle, Annea Lockwood, Edward Shanken and Robert Campbell. Supported by the Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation and Woodbury Art Museum, Utah Valley University. 2016.
Download pdf of full catalogue here: Listening to the Distance Catalogue
Download pdf of individual essays here:
>> Brandon LaBelle: ‘Yolande Harris: Aesthetics of Intensity’
>> Annea Lockwood: ‘Integrated Circuits’
>> Edward Shanken: ‘Listening to the Distance with Yolande Harris: Techno-Intuition, Sonic Consciousness and Alternative Ways of Knowing’
>> Robert Campbell: ‘Eternity Sensuously Displayed: Yolande Harris’ Eyrie’
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‘Yolande Harris: Techno-Intuition and Sonic Consciousness for a New Era” interview by Meritxell Rossell in Clotmag
http://www.clotmag.com/yolande-harris
Introductory words by Meritxell Rosell (Twitter @dancingmoog) :
Yolande Harris, is a composer, visual artist and academic, who aims to reinterpret from a post-humanist perspective the techno-ecological spaces we are meant to inhabit.
Post-humanism, seen as a human condition in which traditional humanistic paradigms collapse, relegates humanity back to one of many natural species and rejects the Anthropocene; human knowledge is reduced to a less controlling position, previously seen as the defining aspect of the world. Expanding from performances, improvisation, audio-video installations to field research and lectures, Harris’ work entwines a practical approach with her conceptual theories of “techno-intuition and sonic consciousness” seeking to raise awareness about our environment through technology and critical listening.
Her impressive academic qualifications – she holds degrees in Art History and Music, a M.Phil. in Architecture and Moving Image and a PhD in Sound Art – have given her a broad but also deep knowledge bringing about her distinctive perspective. For her projects she uses sonification of data, techniques of navigation, underwater bioacoustics and blends them in a sort of aquatic psychogeography exploring the possibility to widen architectural space by means of audiovisual expression.
Pieces like the video installation Pink Noise (The Pink Noise of Pleasure Yachts in Turquoise Sea) which uses sound recorded underwater at a National Marine Reserve: sounds of boat engines, anchors and sounders blended with video shootage of colourful light reflecting on the sea from the same location. Sun Run Sun:on Sonic Navigations, in which a changing musical composition is generated from signals of GPS, exploring the personal experience of location and navigation through sonification. In Eagle she uses, sound of a robotic sea-glider and images and video recordings of eagles and the sea to explore these techno-spaces and blurring the boundaries with the perceived reality. The eagle serves us a guide through this journey.
Scorescapes is her thesis research project and an ambitious work piece that brings together all her creative and intellectual universe. It includes some of her works like Tropical Storm, Pink Noise, Fishing for Sound, Swim, S.W.A.M.P… A study that goes beyond performances, installations and graphic images with walks and writings and analysis of texts, scientific papers and personal experiences. An attempt to understand sound’s role in environmental changes from a kaleidoscopic myriad of angles.
Having studied with pioneers of sound art of the likes of Alvin Lucier, Pauline Oliveros and Peter Sculthorpe, she proposes a radical musical view and uses technology in her work as the means through which to understand the electronically extended spaces we are confined to live in.
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Your work involves sound, technology and the natural world. When and how did the fascination with
them come about?
As a child I connected to the natural world easily and deeply. We lived in a remote house on the cliff-land in Devon (UK) and it was there that I developed a profound affinity with the local environment. My family is deeply connected to the sea and my childhood was filled with boats, ocean swimming, and sailing with my three brothers. I also enjoyed going on site-visits with my architect parents to dilapidated historic buildings and helping with architectural plans at their drawing board. Such experiences helped me cultivate sensitivity to a sense of place, specific sites and an analytical, technical way of thinking about them.
Sound entered my life through music when I began classical flute and piano as a child. It came easily to me, so I progressed rapidly and got lost in the complexities of the sounds in ways that would take over my being.
At times, technology and the natural world seem like the antithesis of each other, opposite poles that cannot meet. But my experiences growing up helped me to intuitively draw them together, through my practical understanding of boats, navigation, musical instruments and architectural spaces. I came to understand through sailing for example, how to read the weather, the water and motion of the boat in my body. I developed both an intellectual and corporeal awareness and sensitivity to the subtle changes of the environment, wind, temperature, sounds, and other living beings. Learning to control and perform with a boat – an instrument if you like – demanded that I commit to practice this constant interchange between my body and the environment, much as I did by learning musical instruments. As an adult I wanted to understand the potential of digital technology to be played, respond and work with this kind of attuned physicality in the environment, and so enhance rather than bury our intuitive physicality – what I now call techno-intuition.
What are your aims as a sound artist working in between technology and art?
My aim is to re-awaken and enliven our senses through a critical use of sound, image and technology, to create a space to intensely experience our natural environments. The practice of looking and listening, while often extended and meditated by technology, is rooted in our individual bodies and our mental attention. And sound can only really affect us in combination with the other senses. In my work I explore this everyday synesthetic space, where we understand the world around us by allowing our senses to work together to influence our perception. I create environments where the audio and the visual play off each other, often contrasting to suggest unexpected meanings, such as the video of eagles combined with the sound of a robotic sea-glider in the installation Eagle (2015).
So my work really responds to what I see as a necessity – to re-enliven our relationship to our local environments and to re-kindle a felt sense of ecological interconnectedness. I offer experiences of environmental conditions, displaced into art settings, that aim to enrich a sense of bodily consciousness and connectedness. My work encourages people to become sensitive to our environment by learning and listening, embedding ourselves within it. Although technology can dis-locate us, it can bring something from distant places into our experience, into our hearing range and so into our consciousness. My hope is that this can expand awareness and empathy and start the healing process towards the earth.
In Listening to the Distance, you use high tech methods to bring awareness of natural and “distant”
sounds, which seem to be shut out by contemporary urban spaces. What were the biggest challenges
you faced for its development?
How do we project ourselves into vast distant spaces? How do we bring such spaces closer in order to understand them, through our technologies and through our minds? My solo exhibition, Listening to the Distance, joined multiple works in the same large space and explored their interconnections. Video, prints, sound and drawings combine throughout the spaces, sounds draw you from one end to another, while lighting leads your eyes to move through distant rooms. Hanging headphones act like spatial anchors in this drifting environment, opening up private sound worlds that encourage a different kind of imaginative drift.
One challenge I faced was trusting my own senses and intuitions! It was hard, first to recognize, and then to deeply understand, the possibility of becoming and absorbing a quality of ‘eagleness’, and honoring that knowledge through my work. In Listening to the Distance, the eagle, the whale, and the underwater robot drone, are all brought closer to us, up against our ears and our eyes. They imaginatively launch us into the distance, into flight, into the deep ocean. In my work I tap into the well of knowledge about human relationships to animals, birds and the non-human world. I celebrate this more than the technology itself, which I treat as just one way to access these other worlds.
Every time I lower a hydrophone into the water and listen through headphones I am astonished by the otherworldliness of what I hear. As if the membrane of the surface, and the different substance of these two media – air and water – contain entirely different and separate worlds. The unfamiliar sounds I hear often come from a source I cannot see, making it harder to understand the relationship between the sound and the life in the water environment. And yet sometimes that sense of otherness is transformed as one sound leaks across from the air to the water: I see a boat passing by and hear the vibration of its engines through the water, transformed but distinct. In my installation Pink Noise (2010), I worked with this ambiguous area between seeing and hearing above and below water. As you stand in a pool of pink and turquoise water reflecting surface light, you hear through headphones the otherworldly sounds of loud boat engines, depth sounders and anchors dropping – the juxtaposition and synthesis of these two simultaneous perceptions is what I’m interested in – waking up the awareness of visitors to this otherness in our everyday environments and our human effect on these environments that we cannot otherwise perceive.
So the most challenging part of this kind of work is to open our perceptions to environments that are radically different from ours; to encourage others to listen and bring these other worlds into our more common everyday experience. Sound and listening fundamentally relate us to another being or object by perceiving their vibrations. It is this level of relationship that is stirred in me when I have the opportunity to listen to sounds that are otherwise inaudible (bats, whales, satellites). This experience attunes me to a more heightened awareness of my position within larger systems and ecologies, what I refer to as sonic consciousness. Ultimately it offers a chance to heal our relationship to environments that are already damaged through pollution and a lack of knowledge.
Solitude or loneliness, how do you spend your time alone?
I am very good at daydreaming …
What is your chief enemy of creativity?
Too much work…
Being indoors too much…
You couldn’t live without…
A view into a distance, space to see the stars.
Fresh air, clean water.
Love and kindness.
A flute of some kind.
My ‘Cricket’ camper (although a small boat could possibly substitute).
Website: www.yolandeharris.net
Further reading: Listening to the Distance catalogue publication with essays by Edward Shanken, Brandon LaBelle, Robert Campbell, and Annea Lockwood.
(Photos courtesy of the artist)
27 Aug 2016
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Read Good Times preview and Santa Cruz Sentinel review of ‘Melt Me Into The Ocean’, August 2018.
“The sun had dipped above the horizon, but local artist Yolande Harris wouldn’t have seen it amidst the chilly July haze encircling the end of the Santa Cruz Wharf. She lowered her hydroscope into the water and watched as a shoal of anchovies swirled around it. She listened to and recorded the happenings of another world just beneath the surface, and amidst the white noise of hissing and snapping, she could hear sea lions bark and perhaps a dolphin click.
“It’s a very magical sound,” she says of her recordings. “Watching the surface and motions and swirling, I get totally taken away. It’s hypnotizing.”
Harris is a woman of the sea. She has always been, in retrospect, having grown up sailing and swimming with her family in the Atlantic before eventually moving to Santa Cruz a couple of years ago.
The same is true for her art, a collection of marine sounds aimed at deepening our understanding of the ocean. Harris’s latest work is part of a larger series presented by local chamber and experimental music group Indexical. The performance, titled “Melt Me Into the Ocean,” is a one-time evening event that uses sound to connect participants to this sense of place and community.” Read the full article in Good Times
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“On a perfect beach day Saturday, Santa Cruz experimental and chamber music group Indexical invited beachgoers to dive deeper into the sea through the daylong event “Melt Me Into The Ocean.” Participants strolled between sound art sites along Seabright Beach, the West Jetty walkway and Ocean View Park. ….
In the evening, about 100 people gathered for the second part of Harris’ “Melt Me Into The Ocean,” a sound and image performance at Ocean View. When the oceanic sounds began to play for the speakers everyone moved closer. To the west, the sunset sky was a violet and orange before fading into night. The video projection became clearer. There was the moving surface of the sea, a whale and a sea lion. In the distance, a sailboat seemed to pass through the rollercoaster lights
Children ran from the nearby playground. “What is it?” one of them asked. “Come on let’s sit down,” another responded. The crowd was silent. The whales’ calls suddenly became more distinct. One of the children cried out, “Hey, look it! I see whales! And the ocean!” Read the full article in Santa Cruz Sentinel