We're back at it, after a long time away... [Tawney Cave Trip, July 30th, 2021]
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Future Cave is a creative project, co-designed by Hiromi Okumura, Phat Nguyen, and Millie Salisbury. It began in July of 2018 in ‘Tawney,’ a local cave, in Giles County, VA, and continues to evolve at present. Collaborators include friends and artists who are introduced throughout our posts.
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Updated: Aug 1, 2021
Two days after the 50th anniversary of the Moon Landing, today we went to Tawney; it’s about a year from our first trip there. We didn't realize when we began this brainstorm in July of 2018 that our processes would still be unfurling and expanding, but here we are: today our intention was to re-capture (with our new 360 degrees GoPro) light bands in the Tunnel Room as they swivel in organic shifts: narrow and speed-up, open-widen-and slow down, braiding themselves in response to the singing bowls, and to experiment with 3D scanning. The cave was dry and the water was low, which made the shallow mote easy to access with less slipping around and sinking in mud than usual. We spent a lot of time on the little river's edge though, and still exited with boots sloshing full of water, in mud casts and masks; everyone except for Wallace who climbed out crystal clean. Wallace joined us today!
It was a delight to be underground together again, after an early summer pause, and after much piecing together and falling apart of ideas, old and new. We returned with some nice footage of the light bands and singing bowls-- but only made it to the Bridge of Terabithia (the little river's first access point) when the GoPro disk space cramped our style a bit. We collected some crisp 360 captures of the bands, especially those closest to the water, but missed opportunities to preserve the almost psychedelic fields of light singing and rippling across the cave's walls and ceiling. We learn more every time though, and ignoring our imperfectly met, or unmet, objective to capture and distill the performances of light and sound: the experience was no less magical. Imagine being inside a subterranean cocoon, woven from the light of prisms, the quiet of planetariums, the dust particles inside dew drops, the humidity of aquariums, and the dark spaces between roots, and stones, and movementless wind... and basically you will be there with us in that space.
We had great success with the 3D scanner, as Phat led us about the dark interior, creating a point cloud of geometric samples on the surface of the cave's internal space (see some experimental reconstructions from the Moon Room and Formations Room below).
It was the kind of cave trip, that you climb out wanting to go back again. We were below ground for only a few hours, one county away from our daily lives, but it often feels like time and space broaden below ground; you come up feeling like you've been someplace very far away, for a long time, on a distant island or remote planet, welcomed back to the sun's almost digital vibrancy, bombarded with zings—and dings—and texts—from satellites and internets, as you climb over colorful millipedes—seemingly hand-painted by tiny brushes, and pass backpacks up above ground through an iron gate. There is the initial cool and balmy moss carpeted-rocks, a re-combobulating space, and then climbing out of that, the warmth of late summer, and nearby storms today.
Updated: Dec 23, 2018
We have a lot of catch-up and backward-writing to do... but here's a Sneak Peek of our first short Documentation Reel! This footage is from Trip Nine, October 26th. We utilize the Go-Pro Fusion here for the first time and capture a trial-run of our vision for the Bowl Room, a little geologic amphitheater, which attenuates into a narrow tunnel, where Tawney's stream meanders quietly out of view into darkness. The reel music is collaged from a play-based sound session. Miles Washington, a sound artist and collaborator, wrapped his speakers in cloth, and moved them back and forth underwater as they projected one of his audio-pieces in Crescent Dune Pond, in the Other Side of the Moon Room, on Trip 10. (We're trying stuff out!) This reel is the first process document; it pieces together patches of footage from a muddy afternoon in the Bowl Room and tunnel and experiments with potential relationships evolving between our tools, ideas, media, and vision.
One of the most exhilerating facets of our visits to Tawney is the ever constant sense of discovery, or uncovering through accident, which pertains not only to exploring new spaces, but also to synchronous relationships between the cave's inherent languages and our conceptual curiosities.
Our original proposal included gestures of light and sound:
In the cave’s strangely severe atmosphere, minimal gestures of light and sound heighten and transform our perception of the cave’s expansive formal and conceivably spiritual topographies. These gestures are in juxtaposition to the cave’s native state, yet, their admission exposes a livingness, a pulsating animation projecting over an artifact of geologic time. Reflections bouncing off subterranean streams, project brilliant buzzing patterns similar to vibrating screens woven with static and glitch. These reflections illuminate and transpose the idiosyncratic textures and exceptional surfaces of the cave’s architecture and ceilings...
The cave also imposes a novel sense of self-awareness on the individual; it amplifies the body’s internal sounds, and dismisses conventions of familiarity that bodies assume within their surroundings (i.e., balance, relative position and proportion, scale and relevance in time and space). Through deprivation of familiar stimuli, the tranquil atmosphere enhances the shape of even the most minute discernments. Through alteration of perspective and horizon—a zooming deep-below and inside-out—a tiny splash produced by a small drop of falling condensation is an event of monumental significance. Here we think of John Cage’s iconic quote: “There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear...”
But we hadn't yet discovered when writing our proposal the radiant dialog between our sounds and the reflective bands weaving with the cave's interior as our flashlights skimmed the stream's surface. On an early trip, while admiring these hypnotic reflections, an incidental exclamation caused the bands to race, swivel, and ravel themselves in tighter, faster, murmurations like synchronized flights shift in schools and flocks of birds and fish. At first we thought we imagined it, and re-tested the phenomena, waiting for the bands to travel in regular formations, then interrupting the silence with a deep song of the singing bowl. Of course sound is composed of vibrations that travel through the air and other mediums, so we shouldn't have been exactly surprised that the water's surface would respond in shape and motion to it, and that as it shifted so too would the character of its reflections. The surprise then was in a sense of connectedness: our voices and instruments were joined to the stream, and its subtly transforming surface, as well as to projections of light, and were themselves also altered in formation by Tawney.
In the Images below (Trip 9, October 26th & Trip 10, October 28th):
Millie goes cross-eyed from the mud and experiments with placement of the Go-Pro and LED lights. Hiromi and Phat don't look nearly as muddy as they actually were in our ritual road shot; leaves have only just begun to turn and fall. A bit blurry, but echoing the play and trial-and-error of Trip 10, friend and artist, Andrew Warren and Claire Constantikes, inhabit the edges of Crescent Dune Pond while Miles plays music, moving his speakers below the surface (more footage from this trip coming soon!). And, finally, a ritual road shot, with Claire, Miles, Hiromi, and Andrew.
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