Return of The Aliveness Machines

Posters produced for exhibition at RGS conference in London next week. A platform for a new development phase of The Aliveness Machines - first seen in Devon in 2012. A NOVA research project.

Water, Water-Bodies, Water-Ways

...and the poetics of vital matter

photo: a lyons

"You can't keep water down"

This comment bubbled up in discussion with Dr. Owain Jones at his PLaCE seminar talk last month (the final instalment of the long-running PLaCE Research speaker sessions).  Over the coming weeks and months, I'm aiming to write a detailed blog-post on what could be termed the 'geopoetics' of each of the materials woven in to my intermedia installation for the recent Tramontana Festival 2013. Water is the topic of the first of these.

Data Ecologies, Geopoetics and Augmented Spaces

What follows is the transcript of a presentation I gave at the Data Ecologies Lab, hosted by i-DAT, on November 10, 2012. This was the final happening of the 18-month 'Confluence Project', situated within the North Devon Biosphere Reserve.


DATA ECOLOGIES - INTRO

The Confluence Project
It would be fair to say that - for all involved, this project was a challenge - as its aims were, and are, numerous and diverse:
 - for the creative process to engage with a place - an entire watershed, 
 - to engage with the Biosphere Reserve's stewards and environmental issues, 
 - to engage with innovative technologies and eco data-logging,
 - to engage with communities and schools, 
and in our case, 
 - to engage in a creative collaboration. 

All of this in very limited time and resources allocation. By necessity then, it was a probing exercise, an experimental process, allowing space for serendipity and chance. 

'Shadows and Undercurrents'; this is the title given to the strand of the Confluence Project undertaken by sonic artist, Jon Pigott and myself. We were interested in teasing out some vital, yet somewhat 'obscured' ecological threads within this special protected landscape setting. Making the invisible, visible. 

Pictures From An Exhibition

'Shadows and Undercurrents'
at the Appledore Arts Festival, June 2012

part of the 'Confluence' project; a collaboration with Jon Pigott

www.UNmapping.net

Some images

Shadows, Mussels and Rhizomes

Confluence : As the end-of-residency exhibition approaches, my mind is focused on drawing out the core strands of this project. There are many interwoven elements: environment, technology, community, landscape, creativity - but the root, the foundation, here is the fact that this is a 'Biosphere Reserve'. This is the primary reason the project is happening in this place, in this time, in this landscape. Stripping away all the mechanisms of the project plan, and even the shiny coating of the cutting-edge technology, what is at play is an exploration of connections and harmony (or rather of 'trajectories' towards - or away from - harmony), in the context of 'biosphere' and 'ecosystem* health'. An essential part of this is making sensible some hidden tensions in a landscape. And as 'landscape' is a human construct, this is about tensions and pressures arising from human impacts, human designs. It is also about opportunities, including those affecting the local economy - much of which is founded on landscape - and waterscape -  concerns (e.g. in the case of the bats, mussels and salmon populations that we have been encountering).

Presence, resonances and shadows

Presence, residence and resonance
(aka  Anguilla meets Aguirre...)

"Nothing is really typical of my efforts . . . I'm simply casting about for better ways to crystallise and capture certain strong impressions (involving the elements of time, the unknown, cause and effect, fear, scenic and architectural beauty, and other seemingly ill-assorted things) which persist in clamouring for expression." Lovecraft, 1935

“Only the free-wheeling artist-explorer, non-academic, scientist-philosopher, mechanic, economist-poet who has never waited for patron-starting and accrediting of his co-ordinate capabilities holds the prime initiative today.” 
Richard Buckminster Fuller

The Confluence Project (Antony Lyons and Jon Pigott)
What is emerging for our 'end-of-year-of-residency' installation-works is a set of intriguing 'bio-physical instruments',  (or possibly better - if more awkwardly - described as an 'immersive bio-physical instrumental environment'! ). In a multi-sensory way, this will aim to communicate aspects of the local landscape's ecological dynamics - invisible dynamics -  together with physical - aquatic - processes. Importantly too, there is also an engagement with the materials - the visual and sonic properties of our chosen sculptural elements - to create an immersive, wondrous exhibition environment.

Intimacy vs. greed/ speed/ disconnection

Intimacy vs. greed/speed/disconnection

(here, one could possibly add 'ecology' on the side of intimacy - to help balance an unequal struggle)

The fusion of projects continues. The theme of relationships to the land - and what the land holds - emerges for me in widely different geographical spaces. So too ideas around 'eco-symbolic landscapes' (as first encountered in the hills of Donegal), 'exploring the shadows'; and many more inter-woven threads (intimacy, speed, greed, disconnection, harmony, resonance, flow, presence…)

At the trans-disciplinary 'Catchment' workshop last year I was lucky enough to meet Mona Smith (a Sisseton-Wahpeton Dakota), who - through offering a strong statement on 'relationship', helped crystallise - for me - a great deal of discussion around water, environment and society. In conversation, Mona also introduced me to the Dakota term 'bdote', meaning 'where two waters meet', 'confluence' or even 'where a stream meets a lake'. (A project called The Bdote Memory Map' is the hub of a constellation of resources providing stories about some of the traditional Dakota sites in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area).

Water is very much to the fore in my involvement now with a different Confluence Project, in Devon. A recent kayak journey on the River Torridge served as a cogent reminder of the essence of 'slow residency' encounters. But more on this trip in a future journal entry...

Tales of the Unexpected

These are a feature of any fieldwork, of any deep exploration of a territory - the real and the metaphorical 'turning over stones' and fossicking for hidden, yet vital, threads in the webs of meaning, along with the ecosystem-webs (or rhizomes). The landscape of the Confluence project is a 'watershed' or catchment. ('Watershed' was originally considered as the project title). It is a territory of relationships, not least of which are the human-nature involvements. Landscapes and inhabitants (human and non-human) have their individual rhythms and pace. Some of these are perhaps more obvious (day/night, tides, traffic flows…); others can be revealed through data-flows and monitoring. In a way, many of these rhythms form part of the 'hidden realms' which we've set out to explore in this project. We are examining patterns of bat activity, the ever changing clarity of the river-water and tidal 'muddiness' (turbidity). 

The Dark Side

Fields and the River Torridge, Torrington, November 1983: James Ravilious © Beaford Arts

On the subject of 'shadows', and delving into hidden landscape realms, there is - in an eco-symbolic sense - perhaps also a parallel in the human unconscious? Jung credited Gustav Carus (1789-1869) with pointing to the unconscious as the essential basis of the dark side of the psyche. A contemporary of Goethe, Carus was a physiologist, writer, geologist, naturalist…and a landscape painter. A true polymath, he urged artists to study the 'physiognomy' of landscape and 'learn to speak the language of nature.' There is a darkness (a crepuscularity?) to many of Carus' paintings...

Shadows and Undercurrents

Immersed now on the Confluence Project with Jon Pigott, i-DAT and others. We're delving into some of the hidden or shadow realms of the Biosphere Reserve of North Devon. With the aid of innovative technologies, we're venturing beyond the range of our human senses, and fusing art and environmental thinking.

The investigations are taking place in and around the Torridge River and Estuary, so the theme of 'undercurrents' seems appropriate. As well as the literal meaning, there is the metaphorical sense of 'an underlying feeling or influence...not expressed openly'. One take on this, in the context of the River Torridge, is perhaps the idea of a mismatch between 'appearance' and 'reality' - as far as the eco-health of this Biosphere Reserve is concerned.

Slowly Encountering Place

For the inaugural journal posting on this new platform, I am pasting in a draft version of an essay to be included in a forthcoming publication.

Slowly Encountering Place

The process of assembling this volume has brought into focus an awareness of an evolving ‘meta-project’ - emerging over the space of five years, via a sequence of extended landscape-based residency projects. For me, the journey began in earnest in 2008 in England's ‘West Country’ with Quantock Dreaming, followed by the Lovely Weather project in Donegal in 2010, a residency at the Grand Canyon in 2011, and returning to the West Country for the art+environment residency, ‘Confluence’ Project in the North Devon Biosphere Reserve. Early indications of a composite approach - encompassing sculpture, ecology, memory - can be seen within the strands of the 2006 urban trail installations in Bristol, called ‘Eleven Minutes’.

Whilst sifting through the vast amount of moving-image and sound recordings assembled during the Grand Canyon project, I found myself re-considering the themes and ideas underpinning this journey, especially in dialogue with the wider fields of Deep Mapping and Land-Art. The ongoing support of the PLaCE Research Centre has been important in this respect. Iain Biggs (Director of PLaCE) has long pursued the aim of trans-disciplinary creative land-based work. Possessing a hybrid environmental science and art background - I have sought to carve out a personal approach, grounded in fieldwork, ecological knowledge, dialogues with archival material, geopoetic imagination and the co-creation of future-visions - all within landscapes that contain tensions and polarised perspectives.

“Pasts and futures, even if they are no longer; even if they are not yet, still haunt the present, and are, in a supplemental relationship to it, always coming back.” John Wylie, 2007

With the Colorado River now featuring strongly in my delvings, I have found myself attracted to the idea (and the ideal?) of ‘unmapping’.