{"id":556,"date":"2024-08-01T04:00:28","date_gmt":"2024-08-01T04:00:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.fraufraulein.com\/andy\/?page_id=556"},"modified":"2024-08-02T21:44:43","modified_gmt":"2024-08-02T21:44:43","slug":"rootless","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.fraufraulein.com\/andy\/music-2\/andymusic\/installations\/rootless","title":{"rendered":"Rootless"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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In June\/July of 2024, I was an artist-in-residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts for 6 weeks. As part of my residency I created Rootless, <\/em>a spatial audio installation in the historic military Gym, which was open to the public on July 21 for the Headlands Open House.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rootless <\/em>included 3D field recordings of the surrounding area, as well as instruments and site-specific objects recorded in the space. It touched on themes inspired by lichen biology, in particular the myriad ways in which we are symbiotes and exist in symbiotic relationships with each other and the natural world, which often fall out of balance. Additional elements that came into play were the exploration of whether or not one is \u201cgrounded\u201d or \u201crooted\u201d in the world in ways that include cultural heritage, community, body, gender, and nature. Methods of responding to these themes in the piece included embracing aleatoric or chance processes driven by nature, referencing and translating historical traces and voices outside the artist\u2019s personal range of experience, both human and animal. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In addition to the spatial loudspeaker array on the main Gym floor, loudspeakers were distributed around the disused basement bowling alley below, contributing ghostly vibrations and sounds to the piece above. Everyday architectural materials found in the Gym basement storage were hung around the main floor as well, allowing the audience to interact with the installation by creating sounds with the suspended objects that melded with the loudspeaker audio.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A portion of the audio piece consisted of a composition based on text by fellow resident Rima Rantisi, whose voice is also included. The text is reproduced below:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Inside the (Seismic) Shift<\/strong>
By Rima Rantisi<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It begins as undiscernibly as a glass cracked in a cupboard. Like when, on a sunny day on a bougainvillea-trimmed terrace, your body catches an undetectable virus. Like the hollowed-out time of a blackout after taking various substances to forget. Like magma rising in a friend who leaves the city, you know to never return. Like a text message that sets off a revolution. Like a spark dancing toward a hangar full of ammonium. Then thick discernible layers fold onto each other, through them seismic waves travel: crowded hospitals where lungs fall out of chests, bank coffers where paper money dissolves, ghost-like pink smoke filled with souls that float over the Port for eternity. You watch, unable to avert your eyes, as the city trembles and breaks open, its guts splattering everywhere, iridescent and black and a zillion hues of red. It bursts into shapes that you hadn\u2019t imagined, but you knew, somehow, were there. In corona\u2019s emptied streets, you bend over and peer into the sewers, the iron covers of which have been recently stolen, leaving gaping holes where the dirty truth is awash in hideous glory. In the quiet, the world is amplified. You cannot unhear the neighbor\u2019s daily opera practice from the Yacoubian building, nor unsee the city shudder with the newly homeless. In the grand solitude and the screeching halting of life as you knew it, you resign to the city\u2019s steady rupture even as you change irreversibly, never again to see things pass as they once were. It was then, inside the shift \u2013 when the world was the quietest and the most horrible \u2013 that we discerned what we loved the most.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The mezzanine space displayed additional interactive experiments, including:
-a table with music boxes utilizing scores created from visual translations of lichens and other natural processes. When the audience played the music boxes, the sound was processed and amplified into the drumkit nearby.
-hangings modeled after lace lichen morphology and created from recycled plastic bags (remnant of early COVID reusable bag restrictions at grocery stores). One hanging had a piezo ribbon sensor woven into the pattern, which upon audience interaction affected the color of some of the light fixtures, reminiscent of the lichens\u2019 property as a bio-indicator.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Images, audio excerpts (stereo mixdown), and videos of the installation are below:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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