Field Recording, Gorvik, Iceland
blurb
During a residency at SÍM Samband íslenskra myndlistarmanna supported by a Creative Scotland Visual Artist and Craft Maker Award (VACMA), I experimented with under-water microphones to find ways of considering multispecies activities in Gorvik bay and how these offered narratives of time as lived by different plants, insects and animals.
Recorded in rock pools using an Aquarian hydrophone, I recorded the pops and clicks triggered by midges spawning; the bubbles of a geothermal stream entering the bay; the bubbling sound of the sea wrack as it warmed in the sun; the rumble of the sea with a storm coming in; the sea on a still day where the tide ground the stones against each other. Below is an excerpt of data collected via the hydrophone in a rapidly flowing stream into Gorvik bay (Under Stream 1).
I was interested in examining place and the materiality of the recorded sounds in relation to time once processed in a different location on a different day, back at the studio. Did the sounds act as transporters back to the Bay in October? What would happen if the chronology of the recordings was reordered? The second excerpt is from a longer piece in progress -- in this, recordings from the sea and the nearby river taken on different days of the residency were combined. Through this, I was thinking about multiple recordings coming together as palimpsests, each data signal layering and confusing the one before, finding ways of navigating but also confounding a grasp of multiple times through layering various recordings from different days within the same piece. Working with these recordings back in Scotland, I experimented with disorienting their origins further by relaying them through synthesised instruments (Under Stream Over Stream).
