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.
