A Waterfall of Falling Sounds that I Catch Dreaming / Listening to Whales at Roden Crater

13’33” video and sound, single screen, (2020, remade in 2022)

Exhibited at Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, exhibition WALK!, 2022

Video premiered at the [Alien] Star Dust 24 hour winter solstice event, streamed live from the Integratron Joshua Tree CA., 21 December 2020

Can our conscious listening effect the world around us? This dreamscape pulls together a collection of moments in sounds and images of the “super bloom” of wild flowers in California, wind in Joshua Tree National Park, a visit to James Turrell’s Roden Crater, full rapids at Grand Falls on Navajo and Hopi land in Northern Arizona, the fragile crystal crunching of a lava field near Flagstaff, and the liminal spaces of the Pacific Ocean coast of the Monterey Bay. The dream begins with sounds I recorded at the pediatric intensive care unit of Stanford Children’s Hospital, the organ being tuned in Stanford Memorial Chapel, and aeolian harp wind-blown in the desert. The image of the seaweed child was taken shortly after her brain surgeries. Other sounds include the voices inside Roden Crater and sounds recorded underwater on the Santa Cruz coast. There are times when, like the waterfall, I fall into a moment of my day and sense a tangible connection to planet earth, moments that lift me out of my everyday consciousness and into a suspended sense of awareness. The harp is my portal to this state of awareness, so here, at this moment of the global pandemic and climate crisis, I offer these sounds as a meditation on our interconnection with lives of all kinds, all of whom dream, and as a prayer for our connection to and love for our planet.

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This video goes with the writing: ‘Sound is Round: A Waterfall of Falling Sounds that I Catch Dreaming’, in Resonance Journal (UC Press) Volume 1, Issue 2. Abstract:

“Can we expand our awareness of remote environments by connecting them to our own bodily experience? Sound is Round takes a winding journey through the superimposed environments of ocean and desert, bringing sounds from the deep ocean of Monterey Bay in California, to the high desert of Northern Arizona. In doing so, it brings together experiences of material sensory space expanded by a sonic sense, an amplified listening. The intertwining of these environments and experiences comes together in a notion of roundness, through the form of the Mobius strip. By approaching land based spaces through a different orientation, thinking through a lens of fluid sounds and listening, a sense of ‘oceanic consciousness’ is explored. A simultaneous experience of relationship to others, to site and to distant place is reflected through personal stories of participants.

The writing reflects the authors own artistic practice, using the headphones and soundscape from a recent project Melt Me into the Ocean which explored connectedness to the deep ocean from land through sound walks. It also discusses the current project From a Whale’s Back that works with video, sound and data from the latest scientific research on tagged whales. Our connection to, and understanding of, the deep ocean environments is considered through these displaced remote experiences of place. Colliding sounds from these underwater environments with a research project around Roden Crater - artist James Turrell’s ongoing land art work inside an extinct volcano - it emphasizes the importance of physical material sensory experience of place.”