Volcano (2001)

Volcano has been exhibited in Sydney (Artspace, 2001) and Germany (The Virtual Mine, Saarbrucken). Volcano worked with the memory of landscape, that of a migrant to Australia from Stromboli (Maria's grandfather) who in the course of his long exile from home went blind but retained a very strong inner landscape - his memories. The evocation of memory was explored with multiple monitors and images that moved between pairs amongst the multiplicity -- playing with the gap of memory and the digital gap (between the discrete bits of information). The cables, spilling out of Russo's suitcase, carried the lava flow of power and information. The monitors were a making visible of what has become transparent in digital culture, the monitor. The old computer monitors were a deliberately low-end technology... noisy. In fact, to our delight, they took an active part in the work, as each day and over time they started to change colours -- their own form of eruptive behaviour.

Volcano was an exploration or mediation on uprootedness, a sort of ‘becoming volcano' – noisy, blurred/smoky, eruptive, dislocating (an ongoing motif for us), uprooted. A mountain – enormous and still – that moved and erupted. The animations, which attracted the participants to close viewing, worked volcanically as still moving images. So sound jumped or was thrown, mid sentence, mid word, mid syllable, mid phoneme between speakers in the room. To draw people in amongst the 20 odd old monitors strewn there, among the cables, with their thrown images. The room itself was an eruptive ground of sound and image.

In a number of other ways, too, the noise and blur of the volcano shaped both the images and sound. For me, Volcano involved a new way of working with sound -- not using stories but much more abstractly -- responding to the movement of the images. That movement was inspired by the mythic origins of Stromboli -- one day when the god Hephaestus was angry, he ripped up the island of Thira (Santorini) and threw it like a stone-- it became Stromboli. This throwing like a stone was the sound I wanted -- both within the sound itself and in its movement.

The sound was composed of readings of that myth in Strombolani, the local (fading/blurring) dialect and sounds from the island and the Phlegraian fields near Vesuvio. In the installation space, the sound worked differently from my previous work. Thinking about the sound in space, I wanted to explore localized sound to create a sense of intimacy as well as moving people around the space. I wanted to work with non-immersive sound, with sound that was thrown like a stone, to disrupt and move the listening subject -- just as the images were working to move the viewing subject -- with no single 'right' place to view. The sound jumped between (4) sets of stereo speakers. It was relatively soft and invited people to move close to the speakers, to hear it. It was elusive yet intimate. Sometimes quiet and delicate, sometimes noisy, the sound kept drawing people up to the speakers, around the room, and into the work.

I worked with the noise of volcano both through noisy sound and also by trying to find the noise in the sound. In Pro-Tools (which I work with) I did my own version of ‘granular synthesis,' minutely fragmenting voices as if by volcanic eruptions. I mixed these with sounds, which I treated, that came from my location recordings at volcanic sites. Though the content was specific to Volcano , my working process (with voice, sounds and location sound recordings) was one I continue to use.

Artists

• Miranda, Maria
• Miranda, Maria and Norie Neumark
• Neumark, Norie

Works by Same Artist

• Dead Centre the body with organs (1999)
• Hollow Man Rumour
• The Museum of Rumour