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MINOR THEORY
monocrop plant fibers (flax, soybean, hemp, rose, banana). paper substrate
...topologies and textures are “repositories of past transformations and processes of change that have shaped their surfaces– surfaces whose qualities will orient their future possibilities for encounter and transformation” – Ada Smailbegović
diffusion. thinking heat, methane, fluid dynamics of oil + gas, topologies of sense & infrared technologies.
between airs. forms of paper. the topological. with cellulose plant fibers + animal hair, city h2o pipes.
made in Jacqueline Mallegni’s flax fiber workshop @paper_rain_studio.
“Where matter tends to propagate through all space, life is always contained in folds or pockets of locality. “
- Steven Connor Topologies: Michel Serres and the Shapes of Thought
translucence. flax fiber, steel mesh, plastic.
I made this in a class I’m teaching on Atmospheres. Following a week in which we read about milieu, folds and pleats of matter, and relational thought. We discussed “translucent methods” (Sadre-Ofrai and DeAngelo 2021) being between noise and shadow (musser 2024) and what is ordinary. I am thinking about what hums under the surface and forms of diffusion, what takes shape and whether and what it does to consider atmospheric qualities as ontological priors, across milieu. Not to flatten experience but to situate its moment, to organize, distribute or uncommon subjects.
flows, fields, folds: a compositional kite-method
“We build compositional kite-methods: we do not settle on a shape or material but rather we stick with a loose concept or image, and let it evolve. A compositional kite-method ackowledges that solutions (or methdologies) are always contingent, always already part of a context, not the correct answer but rather the surfacing or congealment of one of the many potential answers.
How far does a kite need to fly? How close to hear its sounds? What makes a kite a kite? We work with images of kites in our minds but, when building them proves difficult, we discuss what to prioritize. Our problem evolves with our methods in a “reciprocal capture” (Stengers 2010), forcing us to rethink the relationship between the two, as well as our position in relation to both.”
DIY Low-Carbon Methods Zine Conference 2024
w/ Maria Fernandez-Pello
& Claire Fitch
interference patterns
Industrial listening includes the use of geophones and dowsing rods. Geophone arrays embedded at the earth’s surface connect to thumper trucks that “listen and reflect” acoustic waves in geological strata by inducing earthquakes.
Despite the promises of accuracy, drilling companies still commission dowsers to wildcat (prospect for – sound) oil, minerals, or water underground. Mineral dowsing generally uses pendulums over topographical maps, while water dowsing uses coat hangers, witch hazel sticks or copper rods.
sound composition 30:43
Tierras Sonidas/Sonic Rodeo sound art festival, Marfa, TX 2024
VHS footage by Liv Mershon
Detanglers: Irlanda Vargas, Vic Montilva, and Karina Cantens
sounding lines
Sounding lines weighted with industrial debris from oil refinery and rig sites play with fluid dynamics— a physics that enables oil and gas extraction, its infrastructure, processes of breathing, and how sound propagates by the compressibility of its medium: air, water, earth, or flesh.
The weight of what each holds determines a figure’s internal cohesion and its fragility: artificial flowers blown up against the barbed wire at cemeteries, toys from Family Dollar, rusted things from the parking lots of Dairy Queens and underneath a billboard that says “Thou Shalt Not Make Unto Thee Any Grave,” losing lottery tickets, to-do lists and diary pages.
Wind shapes the lines in vortices and entanglements, the contact of “oilfield trash” against a wall or itself.
These aleatory sounds were recorded at various moments and mixed into the “interference patterns” composition.
more
sound/fiber installation & performance — detangling performance for ensemble wearing bells
Tierras Sonidas/Sonic Rodeo sound art festival, Marfa, TX
5/24
details in the air (2024)
detangling bells (2022, 2024)
hush, wind (2023)
touch points (2022)
silence resignation so much (2021)
aleatory sounds — compositions w/ contact mics & micro usi & zoom 4.
resonant objects include textured lampshades, ceramic mixing bowls, weaving dowels, shuttles and needles, dried grasses, tin bickets, colanders, writing stylus and wooden plate.
w/ spoken word or recorded word
CARCERAL EDGELANDS PROJECT WITH THE BUREAU FOR EXPERIMENTAL ETHNOGRAPHY & EX-SITU, IN PLAIN SIGHT, AUSTIN, TX
fragile frontiers: a speculative sound map
Percussive gestures with a geophone on a floor loom play with technorational forms of listening. And recorded household objects as divining pendulums over a fraudulent blueprint of Texas oilfields (1920s).
Fraudulent oil maps meant to deter drilling competition from landgrabbing, or to convince owners to sell, amid ongoing dispossession of Black and Indigenous lands. Divining over the map points to the dreamy indifference of wind and the uncertainties of tapping or untangling in acts of measurement.
A delicate empiricism consists of knowing the difference between vibrating, trembling, shaking. And the errancy and multiplicity of listening.
w/ OS collective
CRISAP WILD ENERGIES: LIVE MATERIALS WITH ANNEA LOCKWOOD AND HILDEGARD WESTERCAMP
4/21
air-craft #2
with Harrison Montgomery. Mixing board sounds the room and filters field recordings while we improvise using aleatory objects and voice.
2021. Phonography Austin Fourth Annual Report Release Show at Crashbox.
sound composition & performance
listening to the infra-world
Priezors. Listening with a parking garage, composing with infra, writing sound against transduction.
listen: 28:22-34:30
w/ marina peterson & harrison montgomery
echoes & edges: sonic forms for
distributed listening
#distribute2020
air mirrorworld 3
(this) writing and (that) sound perform modalities of how air comes to matter in affective registers and sensory thresholds, as toxins or political pressures. The co-mingling of scientific truths and their disturbance.
The recording device mishears the event, or fails to verify what was experienced in phenomenal time, revealing what Michel Serres describes as “...the fragile condition of regularities” of the sensory — a physics of mutable laws. It also fails to make certain sounds renderable as sound: its beginning is a swell toward audibility and a feeling that deepens in your chest.
Repetitions and refrains of noise, flickers and loops or shadow, describe the logics of progress and the intensity at which it is felt, absorbed and processed. Infrasound — frequency that exceeds human audition, but which some animals hear, and some humans experience in other senses — organizes this theory through the sonic.
sound composition 24:00
ethnographic writing
Venti: a Journal of Air, Art and Aesthetics - “Senses”
2021
air mirrorworld 2
This piece shifts among ways of sense-making of monarch butterfly conservation efforts in Texas, which prompt citizen scientists and ranchers to plant pollinator gardens and tally monarch deaths on their windshields.
ethnographic writing
Society for Cultural Anthropology: Fieldsights 2021
air mirrorworld 1
Wind noise obscures human voices. I forage for plants with dyers and weavers in Chinchero, Peru. We chat about how to breathe at high altitudes with medicinal plants, and an airport that may destroy them. But it is only partially about what we are saying.
Looping and glitching images of a cotton field blowing from Texas evokes a plant becoming something – industry, labor, export, a charged history in an ongoing present.
Moments of laughter, chopping at roots.
sound film: 16min
9/19
Transmissions/Transitions group installation AAA 2024
AAA Anthro of the Image 2020
Rural residents of West Texas and elsewhere endure the subtle effects of infrasound and shadow-flicker emitted by wind turbines, noting vertigo, nausea, nightmares, depression, tinnitus, insomnia and suicideation.
A gap is created by the collective vulnerabilities of the subject and the doubt of its phenomenal referent— “it’s all in your head,” and “it’s just the wind” become refrains for a process of getting used to and getting over it.
sound film: 6 min
9/20
UPenn: EnviroLab 2021
NEW MATERIALISMS IN MUSIC AND SOUND CONFERENCE 2021
OS: FIELD RECORDINGS AS MULTIMODAL EXPERIMENT
w/ Michelle Helene Mackenzie, Jay Hammond, Cade Bourne, Joella Bitter and Harrison Montgomery4-channel installation; field recording composition
2021 CAMRA (COLLECTIVE FOR ADVANCING MULTIMODAL RESEARCH ARTS) MEDIA FESTIVAL 2021
2021 MULTIMODAL ENCOUNTERS: KNOWLEDGE OTHERWISE: EXPERIMENTAL ENCOUNTERS WITH ETHNOGRAPHIC RESEARCH.
2020 “AFFORDANCES OF SCHIZOPHONIA” DUKE ETHNOGRAPHY STUDIO
AAA Vancouver 2019
Dynamo Arts Association 2019
FIELD NOTES FOR AUDIO RECORDINGS: OS COLLECTIVE PROCESS.
“IN WHOSE NAME? SHARED WORLDS AND DOCUMENTARY MEDIA” SERIES FOR ETHNOGRAPHIC COLLECTIVES CURATED BY SANDER HOLDGENS. SCA FIELDSIGHTS.
HAPPENING, or retractability (undo, un-say)
Undoing completes the doing.
— Cecilia Vicuña
Their connection is an event that matters in diverging ways for the wasp and for the orchid. Its achievement is not to lead the wasp and the orchid to accept a common aim or definition, but having the wasp and the orchid presuppose the existence of each other in order to produce themselves.
— Isabelle Stengers
writing
minor literatures
9/20
auto-da-fé: confession & camoflague
Black Warrior Review
Flash Prose Winner
BAX: Best American Experimental Writing 2020
“This author has confected a compelling new uncanny life form under the sign of the slime mold. With phrases of lyric flight, garlands of theory, camouflaged confession, diagrams and screenshots, this piece is something like an essay, something like a collage, something like a thaumatrope where one sees a bird flying, something like a breakdown on the dancefloor of a space-cruiser abandoning the planet for good. If a slime mold could burn, it would burn with this unwholesome green light.”
— judge Joyelle McSweeney
— judge Joyelle McSweeney
TOWARD A TECHNOLOGY OF SPIT
“The present writing, by artist-scéantist Megan Jeanne Gette, is nonbinary to its core. It is both and neither essay and poem, both and neither process notes and manifesto. Its pulse and method are equal parts human and nonhuman. Its very porousness reflects its subject: the violent and sometimes unbearable task of creating meaning — a home for the body and its soundings — through the ever-slippery, ever-leaking, ever-manipulable medium of language/spit.”
[2018 series editor: Adrian Silbernagel]
OS: ARTISTS ON PROCESS: operating system & liminal lab 2018
Intuitum: reprint 2020
(hiding): secrets of nature
Speculating the aural worlds of insects and fish using collage from dozens of archived public domain nature documentaries, and field recordings with contact mics.
The refrain “and mimicry is a common kind of protection,” comments on the artificiality of nature and desire to represent it.
Mark Peter Wright writes in Listening After Nature about the potential of foley as a field recording practice, that “deliberately faking nature can draw listening into territories of productive doubt. It promotes suspicious audition above romantic immersion” (2022:78).
I do so here to open to the indefiniteness of aurality beyond human audition, not toward sonifying or extracting it, but uncertainty and fabulation.
Prague Microfestival international art, writing, film, music & performance 2021
sound film/sonic fiction: 20:48
MAJORITY REEF
“drowned octaherdon of ekphrastic lyric essays”
book -
ecopoetics
INSIDE THE CASTLE PRESS 2020