Julia Edith Rigby

Image:

Still from Fever Dream

2024

Multi-channel video, multi-speaker audio, duration 28 minutes, 44 seconds, continuous loop. Video Still.

OPENING RECEPTION:

Saturday, June 1 2024, 7-10pm

Location: Grand Central Art Center

LIVE PERFORMANCE:

Saturday, June 1 2024, 8 pm

Location: Grand Central Art Center

ARTIST LECTURE:

EXHIBTION:

June 1—August 11, 2024

Fever Dream invites us to think about resonance, metamorphosis, multispecies relationships, and entanglements among people, oceanscapes, animals and sound.

Sourcing field recordings from sea caves, atmospheric river events, decomposing trees, aquaria, animals and climatic phenomena, the project expands our human-centered understanding of perception / world-making to consider the sensory worlds of more-than-humans. Wild bats and beetles, sea lions and tortoises, coyotes and hagfish, cicadas and cormorants, marine isopods and bees are among the many animals voicing the score.

Frog calls were recorded in Californian vernal pools, Midwest ponds, and a Costa Rican cloud forest undergoing climate change-exacerbated amphibian decline. Woodpecker / squirrel / ash recorded in a wildfire burn site in Oregon six months after a firestorm event. Iceberg soundscapes were collected in eastern Greenland. A tortoise breathing and eating wild guava was recorded on Santa Cruz Island, Galapagos. Church bells were recorded in Berlin and Oaxaca.

Bugling tule elks—which sound like A string harmonics—in northern California guided the compositions with viola harmonics.

Sounds recorded at the UC Davis Coastal and Marine Sciences Institute's Bodega Marine Laboratory in Bodega, California include the radula of a predacious snail drilling through a mussel shell, a sea urchin walking on glass, and hagfish feeding on decomposing fish. Hungry starfish were recorded inching across glass bowls, hunting mussels.

Metamorphoses abound. Tree frogs transmogrify into brass bugles, squid into lily flowers, puffins into carrion, pupae into pipe organ pistons. Sea caves and juniper trees transform into cellos.

The project experiments with expanding our senses of perception to consider different understandings of time, sounding and sensing. When we hear the glassy bells of starfish tube feet, we are hearing those feet walking, tasting and smelling all at once. Recordings of echolocating bats open our ears to means of sensing via pulse and echo. Buzzing cicadas reveal a world of sounding reliant on tympanal vibration and abdominal resonance.

Field recordings of animal vocalizations are arranged with recordings of local sea caves. Bowing wires stretched across cave mouths allows us to hear a cave’s range of resonance, its unique acoustical architecture. The activations render audible the inaudible, bringing us into relation with sounds previously un-hearable and unheard. This recording project, called Sea Cave Complex, spans three years’ worth of experimentation with sonic and material decay as influenced by shifts in tides, cave apertures, and storm events. Sea Cave Complex features local sea caves located roughly twenty miles away from the Grand Central Art Center. By bringing local cave sounds into conversation with sounds from places like Greenland, the Galapagos, Los Angeles, and Berlin, the project aims to cultivate relational thinking about socioenvironmental phenomena on local and global scales. The installation was temporary and left no trace on the sea caves or the surrounding environment.

An ancient juniper tree also plays into the score. Copper wires stretched across a fire-carved scar in a 1200+ year old juniper tree are activated with a cello bow, with the tree itself acting as the resonant body for the wires’ vibrations. When we hear the vibrations of these fibers, we are hearing the acoustical anatomy of a tree, the resonance of centuries of climatic phenomena acting upon an organism. The installation was temporary and left no trace on the tree or the environment.

What are new ways of thinking about growth and decay, decomposition and re-composition—of a musical note, of a juniper tree, of a sea cave—on larger-than-human and even geological timescales? How might listening to growth and decay on larger-than-human timescales influence our thinking about phenomena?

Ocean soundscapes were recorded via hydrophone during an atmospheric river storm event in California. A bulk of the oceanic video and audio featured in the project was collected during various atmospheric river storm events—in real time underwater as well as afterwards in the form of washed up detritus and decay.

The kangaroo rat sequence contemplates rat vocalizations, viola harmonics, and the concept of more-than-human communication and worldmaking. Rats communicate in ultrasonic frequencies beyond our human range of hearing. Few studies however have been performed on ultrasonic kangaroo rat vocalizations. The viola elements of this sequence experiment with harmonic tone vibrations and variations to image myriad potential manifestations of these vocalizations if brought down into the realm of audible frequencies.

Many of the sounds and visuals in Fever Dream were created with the sound sculpture Brass Tide, which can be viewed in the main gallery space. Sourcing material from traumatized instruments and brass objects salvaged from waste streams and flea markets, Rigby welded the piece in the Okada Sculpture and Ceramic Facility at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha, Nebraska. Rigby performed live with the sound sculpture along with Zosha Warpeha and Chris Williams at LOW END in the fall in Omaha, Nebraska.

Pipe organ soundscapes and video footage from the performance Gill Valves are also present in this piece. Gill Valves was a community-activated performance in which audience members were invited to sit back-to-back with a pipe organ and experience sound on a seismic scale.

Gill Valves experiments with more-than-human means of listening, moving beyond the realm of cochlear vibration into the realm of bone conduction. Taking cues from elephants—who communicate via low-frequency rumbles heard through their fatty, sensitive feet—and baleen whales—who communicate long distance via low-frequency calls and amplify infrasonic sounds via their unique skull morphologies—the project aims to cultivate new ways of listening via flesh contact with the organ body.

People were invited to engage with the pipe organ, to contribute to the soundscape via their movements and interactions, to contemplate pipe organ as proto-subwoofer, to move freely and observe the ways our spatial movements shaped not just our perception of the soundscape but also the very nature and creation of that soundscape.

The project catalyzed transformations by which the viewers / listeners became the performers, creating a space for collective listening and collective improvisation. How might these kinds of actions with a pipe organ—this megafaunal, multi-esophageal screamer—create space for imagining collective grief processes and political actions?

Rigby played the parts for pipe organ, piano and viola. Kafele Williams played the trumpet elements, and The Wrinkles in Time Brass Band played horns and percussion. Many of the viola elements were recorded during a performance this fall at The Church / Art House in Omaha, Nebraska and hybridize live free improvisational instrumentation with amplified edited sound.

Fever Dream opens June 1 with a live performance at 8 pm. The performance hybridizes live free improvisational instrumentation—leading with viola and the sound sculpture Brass Tide—live vocals, and amplified edited sound (featuring the field recordings described in this essay).

Many thanks to Grand Central Art Center and Cal State University, Fullerton for supporting this project.