WORK: INFO
2021
Title: a shelter for the moment, but outlasting it. / Going through the motions (on foot)
Medium: radio art, poetry, video, performance
Duration/dimensions: Daily video projections / radiophonic transmissions, 6-9pm
Location/exhibition: 34a Rankins Rd, Kensington (to be visible by the tree on the northeast cnr. Rankins + Parsons)
Description: Together our collaboration explores the idea of shelter and constraint, the monumentality of grief and the smallness of the worlds between the walls. We haven’t left the house for a year. What have we been doing? Using up our own resources, working from home, failing to process the now. The claustrophobia of living with someone else in close proximity is also the facing of one’s own limits, the working out of common strategies. Whereas last year’s project for State of Disaster was about walking out from a central point, this one is about the seasickness of losing the horizon, of not being able to escape the moment. In our collaboration, we reflect on what it’s like to interpret this from the perspective of shared proximity. We both take the same information but we interpret it differently. Number of cases, number of deaths, radio broadcasts from the bunker. forts built from books. The cave of algorithms that decides a movement forward. Arbitrary but unavoidable statistics. the echo that returns from such emissions. weathering a moment and trying and failing to keep something safe, walking through the frustrations of entrapment.
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sally ann mcintyre
a shelter for the moment, but outlasting it.
(2021)
a shelter for the moment, but outlasting it is a poetic and radiophonic work that extends the scale of a shared listening (Kensington variations) for State of Disaster’s 2021 iteration. Unlike the prior work, it looks inward to the house, and considers the material life of collections, following Walter Benjamin’s view that the role of the collector is an archivist, who carefully locks away whole worlds from the past for a future revival, just as the child stores up imaginary landscapes for some unknown future. As the frailty of life becomes overwhelming and the idea of private and public grief combine in an overarching moment of global disorientation, solace is found in small rituals that reflect what it means to be here with human and nonhuman others. In a moment both precarious and uncertain, a daily transmission becomes a poem, the house of cards becomes a shelter.
The work will be transmitted from 6-9pm to be picked up within a small radius on the local frequency 104.5FM, in accompaniment with Campbell Walker’s video/performance piece, Going through the motions (on foot).
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Campbell Walker
Going through the motions (on foot)
(2021)
This work is explicitly conceived as a sequel to An arc is just a line you can bend (clockwise), the work I did for the last year’s State of Disaster. Where that work travelled out to explore the arc at the limit of the lockdown world, this follow-up is about how it feels to have lost those radial paths out to the edge. Where then there was pleasure and play at stretching and testing those boundaries, now there’s dismay and disorientation at even contemplating the edges of the world.
Last year we noticed the projected work made it look like I was climbing the walls. This year I think I might actually be. The radial lines I followed to the edge have dissolved now. Instead, I can just perform rituals that aspire to the memory of resonance, but crumble into visceral mechanics of movement, a doomscrolling of the feet: how many people got sick today? how many people died? Why? What can happen from here? When? Restless frustration without resolution that only leads to cycles of repetition, and crowding up the domestic space that is now also the workspace.
Once again, this will be video projected onto the wall, as I walk the numbers of new cases every day back and forth across the living room, and then project the film every night in the same place as last year.
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2020
title: A LESS FORMAL BORDER, WHICH MAY ONLY APPEAR WITHIN THE SEARCH FOR IT.
description: our collaboration focuses on cartographic concepts, the location of perception, and the possibility of movement within restraint. We detail a set of non-concentric, yet shared circles of transmission, composition, and recording as material and spatial frameworks, and in doing so elaborate the desire for understanding shared perceptive experiences, while acknowledging the location of bodies and perceptions - the impossibility of either sharing a single experience, or locating a stable centre for experience through time, but also the concurrent possibility of providing frameworks of activity as collectively temporal holding-places.
An arc is just a line you can bend (clockwise):
Campbell enacts a psychogeographic project where he takes his camera on a series of walks, to traverse the boundaries of the 5km perimeter within which we are currently allowed to travel, and re-locates this mobile and embodied visual material as a series of projections, which will be visible out of the windows of our second storey house. He's been interested in treating the limits of how far the body can be permitted to go from one point (in this case our house) to another under lockdown, in a creative manner which also softly subverts a constraint, in the way that Michel de Certeau imagines our movements as political - our travels through the city are themselves considered subversions of established routes. He will spend time taking notes from the perimeter / exploring the arbitrary edgelands, and bringing them back to a (also somewhat arbitrary) centre in Kensington.
The scale of a shared listening (Kensington variations):
Sally's work will focus on place and the localised scale of listening. Using the location, a composition will be generated as a set of ongoing scores and related transmission works, which consider the radio signal as both remote and close, a form of mail art which borders on a poetics of detail. It will explore radio as a bounded and "minor" form - a.k.a. 'small radius' or 'narrowcast' forms of listening and its temporary presence in local environmental feedback systems. This is formally seen to relate productively to the constraints of lockdown in intriguing ways, it is also a "nomadic" project which has a relationship to the radius of permitted wandering, while considering the possibility of remote, yet shared listening to local sounds. For the duration of the project a series of daily listening/text instructional scores will be generated, which will be placed in public (a typed sheet on our front door). These will provide experiences of located listening within the neighbourhood, suggesting the (im)possibility of repeating a listening experience in a place, while also softening the idea of the instruction; from a hard line of restriction to an open space of potential. Each score, while functioning as a stand-alone work, can be repeated by another listener, (enacted as an instructional map by taking a photo or otherwise contactless copying), which the listener can then use to find the place the score was written, and themselves engage in the relationship of listening to that place. Each listener will find something different to listen to at the location, which is equally interesting. The initial scores will also have an instruction to return the listening, in the form of a note about a local sound found at the location. Sally will then progressively gather these returned-listenings and transmit a response to them, at a designated time (i.e. a set of "programs") for people to tune in to. People will be able to listen to these on radios or radio-enabled phones, within the small radius of transmission at roughly the same time and place Campbell's film works are visible. The number of listeners to these transmissions does not matter.
Our collaborative work will place these projects as non-analogous radii - not a film and a soundtrack, but two concurrent circles (as in a scaled diagram, or the territory of a bird) over our house, and the neighbourhood of Kensington. These circles will shift and change over the duration of the project, as though engaged in a process of crossfading, in a way which also reflects the privacy of our concentrated circle of influence within our domestic space, and makes our seeing and our listening fleetingly visible and audible to others. The gaps between our two mediums, and the localised/small scale of our media will comprise these (moving) circles.