Atmospheres and Disturbances

Atmospheres and Disturbances registers the changes in high altitude ecologies caused by increasing global temperatures. The composition is based on field work undertaken at the High-Altitude Research Station at Jungfraujoch, Switzerland where for four weeks I deployed various recording devices around the station, and in the surrounding alpine environment to register natural, anthropogenic and geophysical forces. The project provides new encounters of an endangered alpine environment to enhance the way we perceive and engage with notions of place, community, and environmental dissonance.

During fieldwork I used different microphones to record a variety of acoustic, spatial, atmospheric, and vibration-based phenomena. Omnidirectional microphones registered wind, snow, and ice as well as social, material, and industrial sound emanating from the nearby train terminus and viewing platforms. Hydrophones were placed within water and ice to record geophysical sound resonating within the frozen environment of Jungfraujoch and the adjacent glacier. The recordings capture the pervasive presence of anthropogenic sound permeating throughout the landscape produced by tourists, transport operations and recreational sports. Accelerometers were attached to various surfaces and structures to record solid vibration generated by high-velocity wind, and the process of melting and freezing. The recordings produced by the accelerometers clearly express the stress and fatigue occurring within the material structure of buildings and infrastructure.

Atmospheres and Disturbances is designed to place audiences deep inside an extreme environment to afford embodied experiences of an alpine ecology under duress.

This project is supported by the Bogong Centre for Sound Culture, Creative Victoria, the High Altitude Research Station at Jungfraujoch, the Institute for Computer Music and Sound Technology at the Zurich University of the Arts, RMIT School of Art, and the Swiss National Science Foundation.

Polar Force

Polar Force is an immersive live performance by Speak Percussion combining custom built ice and wind instruments with Antarctic field recordings, set within a chilled inflatable performance space. This visceral and multi-sensorial work immerses audiences within an overwhelming sound world and performance environment. Newly designed ice-instruments are used to produce unique acoustic results, distorting as they melt and fracture to render ice into audible phenomena. High fidelity field recordings made in the Australian Antarctic Territory of katabatic winds and extreme weather events form the musical and structural foundation of the work. Philip Samartzis drew upon hundreds of hours of recordings he made during his two Australian Antarctic Arts Fellowships to underpin the work. Some of the recordings were made using an array of digital recorders placed throughout Casey Station during a 100 knot blizzard. Sounds of sea ice, icebergs and glaciers also feature in the performance. The field recordings are used to form a series of multichannel environments to provide audiences with vivid and tactile experiences of the natural, anthropogenic and geophysical forces shaping the frozen continent. Polar Force references climate change and global geopolitical tension including the exploration and exploitation of frontier territories.

Polar Force is the recipient of an Honorary Mention for the Digital Musics and Sound Art Category in the 2019 edition of the Prix Ars Electronica.

Polar Force will feature in the forthcoming Now or Never Festival (August 17 to September 2)

Polar Force is supported by the Australian Antarctic Division, Australia Council for the Arts, Creative Victoria, City of Melbourne, Benson Family Foundation, and the School of Art at RMIT University

Between Two Sites

About

The Between Two Sites exhibition and public programs respond to the impact of human activity on habitats in the Yarra Ranges and Alpine Shire. Curated by Madelynne Cornish and Sarah Lynch for the Bogong Centre for Sound Culture. It showcases the artwork of Victorian and international artists who participated in the centre's residency program. These artists have undertaken extensive fieldwork within the Yarra Ranges, Alpine National Park and Kiewa Valley. They have produced a new range of site-specific artworks that comprise a rich and diverse set of environmental references to deepen our understanding of these places. Artists have used audio-visual installation, photography and sound composition to reflect the ecology of these regions.

Artists: Anne McCallum, Madelynne Cornish, Sarah Lynch, Shannon Collis, Lesley Duxbury, Sarah Edwards &
Amias Hanley

Unclear Cloud

Notes from the field

Notes from the Field is first a portrait of a place – Bogong Village, in the Alpine region of North East Victoria. Bogong is a place of exceptional natural beauty, and a site of many intersecting concerns. Halfway between Mount Beauty and Falls Creek, it was established in its current form as a worker’s village for the Kiewa Hydroelectric scheme.

Bogong is the Dhudhuroa word for “big moth” and gives name to Mount Bogong, the Bogong High Plains and Bogong Village, as well as the well-known moth whose existence is now threatened through industrial agriculture, habitat destruction, climate change and other anthropogenic impacts. The discordant relationships between industrial technologies, human involvement and the environment is stark in the unique setting of Bogong Village. The power station is a major presence in the village, and although hydroelectric technology promises to produce green energy, the damming of the Kiewa river has forever altered the valley’s ecosystem and landscape.

It is in this environment that Madelynne Cornish and Philip Samartzis have been running the Bogong Centre for Sound Culture for the last ten years. The centre invites artists from across the globe to travel to this remote part of Australia and immerse themselves in the site. The artists mainly engage in fieldwork, a process of recording, compiling and organising information, such as sound, video, photographs, and sketches.

Notes from the Field brings together the work of 15 artists who have been resident at Bogong Village over the last ten years, with work presented both in the gallery spaces and online. Notes from the Field celebrates the incredible initiative of this globally reaching and supportive artist residency program in North East Victoria. The artists have observed and recorded the dissonance between landscape, humans and technology and now present their findings for us to consider.

Michael Moran, Curator
Murray Art Museum Albury

The Manifesto of Rural Futurism

The Manifesto of Rural Futurism is a transnational project interrogating current discourses on rurality as authentic, utopic, anachronistic, provincial, traditional and stable, and the binaries that support such discourses: belonging vs. alienation, development vs. backwardness. A critical approach to rurality is necessary, today more than ever, to imagine other futures for rural communities, territories and places beyond the “otherness” vs. “identity” dichotomy. This exhibition attempts to understand rural areas as complex spaces actively immersed in the dynamism of encounters, flows and fluxes of contemporary geographies, and critically question modern discourses of capitalism and metropolitanism in which rural territories are marginalised and considered as doomed to oblivion.

The Manifesto of Rural Futurism is an invitation to experience rural locations and abandoned places as spaces in which to question our approach to history and landscape, our sense of living in a specific place and the relationship that we have with it. The sound of environments, spaces and landscapes reveal the challenges and territorial transformations that inform the ideology, infrastructure and biological ecosystems to which we form a part. In this sense, listening practices are deployed as a way to critically traverse the “border territories” of rural territories, challenging persisting notions about “inescapable marginality”, “residuality” and “peripherality”.

The Manifesto of Rural Futurism comprises sound and visual recordings by artists undertaking fieldwork in Southern Italy including: Daniela d’Arielli, Enrico Ascoli, Luca Buoninfante, Jo Burzynska, Enrico Coniglio, Alejandro Cornejo Montibeller, Nicola Di Croce, Fernando Godoy, Miguel Isaza, Raffaele Mariconte, Marco Messina, Mollin + Voegelin, Alyssa Moxley, Philip Samartzis, Vacuamoenia, David Vélez and Sarah Waring.

Curatorium: Daniela d’Arielli, Beatrice Ferrara, Leandro Pisano and Philip Samartzis

The Manifesto of Rural Futurism is supported by the Bogong Centre for Sound Culture, Liminaria/Interferenze new arts festival, Pollinaria, and the Contemporary Art and Social Transformation research group at the RMIT School of Art.

Boleskine

Set on the south-east shore of Loch Ness is a compressed landscape of granite and limestone hills, pine forests, and translucent rivers and falls. Concealed within the topography are two hydroelectric schemes comprising a network of underground shafts and tunnels used to pump water to and from an interconnected series of lakes. A sequence of high voltage power lines threads its way through the terrain. Charged particles saturate the air.

Scattered throughout the luminous countryside are memorial stones, burial grounds, and various ruins indicating a long and troubled history. While traversing this deeply melancholic place, I am struck by how familiar it is. Unsettled by my initial encounter, I return at dawn to investigate further. What I discover is a landscape steeped in folklore, rumour and tragedy.

Boleskine comprises an unfolding set of sound recordings made over a three-mile stretch of General Wade’s Military Road that connects the villages of Foyers and Inverfarigaig. Fieldwork evolved spontaneously in the form of improvised responses to situations I encountered along the road. By channeling acoustics, pressure and resonance, the recordings reveal a deep and complex world of natural and manufactured sound. In some respects, the fieldwork draws on psychogeography as a means of improvising with place, but is equally informed by psychoacoustics, whereby the microphone is used to register latent events embedded in the environment. Together psychogeography and psychoacoustics provide methods for conjuring a landscape rich with natural, anthropogenic and geophysical phenomena. The metaphysical pall so synonymous with the parish of Boleskine, and widely promulgated through the transgressive works of Kenneth Anger, Aleister Crowley, and Jimmy Page, is explicit.

The recordings of Boleskine House allude to something peculiar inhabiting the now-derelict site. An uncanny presence is voiced as resonance, humming and modulated beatings. The confluence of discordant sound emitted by the spatial and material structure of the decomposing building recalls the tension and reverie underscoring Page’s soundtrack Lucifer Rising (1974). The arcane recording provides a compelling testament to the uneasy relationship between this isolated hamlet and the occult. While the troika of infamous occupants all departed some time ago, the house appears to still yearn for their company. Boleskine situates the metaphysical alongside the prosaic in order to offer a carefully calibrated encounter with a place of curiosity, imbued with atmosphere and shrouded by intrigue.

A Futurist's Cookbook

This project emerges from a one-week residency I undertook at Pollinaria, a sprawling farm located at the base of Gran Sasso National Park in Abruzzo. The residency coincided with the summer harvest providing an opportunity for a variety of sound recordings of agricultural infrastructure, including complex machinery used to transform unrefined crops into processed foods. Most of the fieldwork was undertaken in the company of Daniela d’Arielli who navigated the winding and undulating topography while I searched for sounds residing in the dry pastoral landscape. During our field trips Daniela would photograph the places, objects and people we encountered. Often embedded in the landscape, hidden from view, shooting from a distance with a macro lens. The images accompanying the composition are designed to reveal the richly textured environments in which we worked.

The title A Futurist’s Cookbook is a reference to the provocative manifesto The Futurist Cookbook written by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, circa 1932 – a treatise that drew on food as a raw material for art and cultural commentary. Marinetti’s clever use of the cookbook format to advance collective artistic consciousness appeals to my sense of the absurd. In spite of the misogynist sentiments, perverse speculations and nationalist impulses, Marinetti’s musings provide shrewd observations of contemporary life. While the Futurists often privileged the urban as the bastion of technology, disruption and noise, the rural offers an equally complex soundscape of natural, geophysical and industrial sound. A Futurist’s Cookbook is an expression of the exuberant noise and dynamism permeating throughout the countryside. One as thrilling and sensual as anything the discordant city can utter. It is also an affectionate tribute to the regional traditions of Abruzzo, and the futurist farmers working to preserve them. After all only a futurist meal can lift spirits.

Floe

Transporting audiences visually and aurally to Antarctica, Floe 2018, draws on the atmospheric effects of the Antarctic landscape to create a speculative architectural installation designed in response to a sound work by Philip Samartzis. The architecture is a part of a larger body of work developed by Roland Snooks, director of the RMIT Architectural Robotics Lab, that explores the architectural implications of algorithmic design through robotic 3D fabrication. The translucent skin of the tower comprises seventy unique overlapping semi-clear polymer panels printed by robot.

The sound work was recorded by Samartzis in Antarctica. By recording and representing the many sounds of Antarctica’s constantly shifting ice shelves, glaciers, icebergs and sea ice, Samartzis challenges the perception of Antarctica as an unchanging landscape, suspended in time and place.

• Design Partner: Installation supported by RMIT University.
• Sound work supported by the Australian Antarctic Division, the Australia Council for the Arts, the Bogong Centre for Sound Culture, Creative Victoria and RMIT University School of Art.

Super Field

Super Field is an immersive sonic and visual exhibition that highlights the work of Australian and international artists engaging with remote regions and their communities. In these places reside marginalised or displaced communities, extreme climate, endangered wilderness, and the corrosive effects of industrialisation. The works respond to a complex set of social, economic, political and environmental issues to deepen understanding of these places and their communities.

High Country:
The Australian Alps
8–22 Dec. 2017

1. Benoit Bories [FR]
2. Jay-Dea Lopez [AU]
3. Philip Samartzis [AU]
4. Michael Vorfeld [DE]
5. Matthew Berka [AU]
6. Madelynne Cornish [AU]
7. Matthew Quomi [AU]

A Surrender to Nature:
The Kimberley
16–20 Jan. 2018

1. Philip Samartzis [AU]
2. Madelynne Cornish [AU]

Glacial Erratic:
Antarctica and the Arctic
23 Jan. – 3 Feb. 2018

1. Natasha Barrett [UK]
2. Lawrence English [AU]
3. Douglas Quin [US]
4. Philip Samartzis [AU]
5. Jana Winderen [NO]
6. Anne Colomes [FR]
7. Madelynne Cornish [AU]
8. Polly Stanton [AU]

Unheard Spaces:
International Wilderness Areas
6–17 Feb. 2018

1. Yannick Dauby [TW]
2. Hughes Germain [FR]
3. Martin Kay [AU]
4. Slavek Kwi (Artificial Memory Trace) [IE]
5. Douglas Quin [US]
6. Philip Samartzis [AU]
7. Chris Watson [UK]
8. David Burrows [AU]
9. Madelynne Cornish [AU]

Super Field provides audiences with an immersive encounter of a wide selection of environments using 40 loudspeakers and an array of projected images dispersed throughout the gallery. Audiences will be encouraged to wander through the field of loudspeakers and projected images as they would a forest, navigating densities of space and discrete zones of aural and visual experience.

Super Field provides a platform to enable artists, researchers, scholars and curators to engage with contemporary global concerns to enhance understanding of remote ecologies. By provoking new ways of hearing and of seeing these spaces, such artworks can encourage a deeper sense of appreciation and advocacy for the places captured within them, and prompt us to hear and see other places – both foreign and familiar – anew.

Writers

1. Dr Ben Byrne
2. Dr Carolyn Philpott
3. Dr Leandro Pisano
4. Dr Kristen Sharp

A Surrender to Wind in 9 Parts

What is wind and how does it shape the way we listen? This program commissioned by France Culture examines the nature and impact of wind upon some of the most remote parts of the world. It reveals the intensity of an Antarctic blizzard, the sound of drought in the South Australian wilderness, and the effects of wildfire in the Kimberley. It explores the transformative quality of wind to convey new knowledge and experience of the natural and built environment and their attendant communities. Through these recordings a hidden, dystopian history is revealed that connects the present to the future.

Bogong ELECTRIC