Sea Cave Complex
Ephemeral sound installation in which a complex of decaying sea caves in California becomes a temporary sound sculpture via wire and bow.
Sea cave, wire, cello bow.
Experimental audio compositions are composed from audio recorded on site of the ephemeral sound installation interacting with the bow as well as its environment during low and high tide.
2023
Sea Cave Complex explores the idea of existing inside a sound. The project temporarily transforms a complex of decaying sea caves into a sound sculpture in which viewers / listeners are invited to explore sensory perception and relationships between humans, non-humans and non-human systems. It’s a space from which to contemplate entangled environmental relationships, multispecies cohabitation and collaboration, and ecological thinking. It’s a phenomenological experiment that asks questions like: what can speculative sculpture do for our sense of place? How can sound transform our awareness of and relationships to a site? What are different ways to perceive and understand movement and sound and space? Which elements of a particular site—in this instance a specific tidal ecosystem—are we perceiving or not perceiving? How might a sea cave transmogrify into a soniferous body? How can art sonify the non-human?
What are ways of co-creating with non-humans and natural processes? What are ways that site-specific installations can yield site-specific scores, and what those scores might say about the acoustic ecology of a place? Can sound enable us to better understand ecology? What can be learned of a site’s biosymphony--an ephemeral sound signature of organisms interacting with one another—as it relates to entangled ecological relationships and sculptural relationships? What are different ways to listen, and what can listening do for us and our relationships with our world?
A sound installation explores relationships between sound and space. These sea cave sonic explorations ask questions about the sound signature of this particular site and the relationships occurring on site between natural elements, sculptural elements and movement. How do site-specificity and sound-specificity relate? What do we know or perceive to be audible or inaudible—to be “real” to us—at a given site? Upon entering a sea cave we might not initially perceive its potential to speak. The sonic potential of the cave is not readily available to us. But sculpture makes this possible. How can we better understand sound as sculpture and sculpture as sound-production?
An intervention with wire and bow gives voice to the sea caves. The caves becomes resonating chambers for sounds previously un-hearable and unheard. We can hear the caves breathing. Caves are sites of inhalation, exhalation, decomposition, degeneration, regeneration, recomposition. The audio compositions in the video reflect these processes.
Waves, cave drips, sea winds, shore birds and other found sounds organically become part of the polyphony. The project explores cross-species acoustical pollination, moments where species interaction shape spatial dynamics —and sound signatures—within the sea cave. Entangled relationships come into focus, relationships between people, non-human actors and the spaces we occupy. The cave is an amphitheater for sonic bodies. Field recordings from within the cave lend material for experimental compositions.
Sea Cave Complex is designed to be powered by its environment. The work cohabitates with non-human actors. It improvises with the place in which it exists. The project offers viewers an ephemeral multi-sensory experience to explore perceptual environments, ephemera and ecosystem relationships. The work posits the viewer / listener as performer. It invites us to engage sonically, to challenge the ways we experience our world. Why do we perceive our world the ways we do? How could we practice new forms of perception, and how could this play into worldmaking? How can sculpture render audible the inaudible? And how might this sharpen our listening behavior, our listening ethic?
How can a temporary disruption—in the form of sculpture—make audible a site’s acoustic signature, reveal sound’s spatial and physical potential, play with time and space? What are ways that speculative sculpture and speculative soundscape composition can enter into relationship? And what can sound sculpture say about a site’s relationships between movement, space and sound? How can sound communicate and allow us to better understand a site’s spatial and temporal relationships? How do the ways we move through a space influence our perceptions of acoustical phenomena in that space? With the sea cave, viewers entering the installation become performers in that installation, via moving through time and space. When we move through the space, we enter a dynamic relationship with the audiovisual elements of that space.
Each cave has its unique acoustic architecture. Projection defines space. Like in a stone cathedral, the walls of the cave sustain reverberation and reflect sound. By projecting sound into a space, we can map its spatial dynamics. I find this particularly interesting in the context of a cave, where visual mapping abilities are diminished. These hidden interior channel configurations are data that can be visualized via sound. Depending upon their location in the cave at the time of their creation, sounds bloom, diminish, compress, erode, expand, much like the tidal surges that ebb and flow into the cave. The wire can work as an instrument to map our perception of the cave’s acoustics, to measure the sonic qualities of its spatial dynamics. Dimension dictates sound frequencies. Resonance illuminates the scale of the cave. Reverberation and echoes tell us about the physicality of the site.
The chamber’s acoustics lend sensorial insight to the sea cave’s visually-obscured inner configurations. The wire incarnates what we cannot perceive. When activated, the wire reveals to us the existence of that which we cannot see, the deep dark channels that stretch far into the sea cliff. Acoustics shed obscurity. The cave speaks to us via resonance. Transcendent, textural tones tell the story of the site. The wire become activated via bow and in turn activates the sonic signature of the cave. Sculptural intervention lends ear to geologic time. We are hearing the physical movement of paleolithic air molecules that have been circulating in this cave for millennia, in conversation with air molecules borne into the space via wind this very moment.
Sound speaks to a site’s socio-ecological histories. Sound sculpts our sensory experience of the site, animating and activating the space in tandem with our perceptive capabilities. Acoustics, space, perception and music enter into an ever-expansive relationship, in which the sound sculpture improvises with the environment in which it is placed. The acoustics of the space shape sounds of the wire, and the sounds of the wire reveal the spatial structure of the cave. The wire’s sounds exist only in relation to their surroundings. The sound slips from music to echolocator, transmogrifying and becoming something else entirely. In these moments we encounter co-evolution between the physical space and the intervention.
Wire slips from intervention to invention of new sounds only made possible via collaboration with the nonhuman, with the cave itself. And in witnessing this co-evolution, in our careful listening, we too are drawn into a reciprocal relationship with the site. Sound engages us in the physical properties of the spaces we occupy. When we listen, we are embodied in the site. We enter a feedback loop with the site. We change and are changed. We partake in, queer and subvert the site’s ecological histories and futurities. Through our engagement with a space or phenomena, it becomes something else entirely. What can a site become through our engagement with it?
The sonic signature of the sea cave is worked and re-worked via tidal fluctuations. As the incoming tide seeps into the cave, the shape of the cave aperture shifts, and so too the soundscape. The movements of the tides shape the movement of the sound. Sound, motion and spatial dynamics are at play. The composition is an unscripted and ephemeral collaboration with natural elements and non-humans, in which the tides have the final say.
The shifting aperture of the cave mouth is but one element in the shaping of the cello’s sounds, which begs the question: what are other actors at work here in the shaping of these sounds? And how might art enable us to perceive these sonic phenomena?
And the sea caves are decaying, storm by storm. The cliffs they tunnel are wormy and rotting, literally crumbling slowly to the sea with every storm. Rogue climatic events like hurricanes and atmospheric river events in this region of southern California are becoming less and less rogue. Waves exfoliate the sea walls and the score shifts accordingly. Thinking about growth and decay on a geologic timescale is tricky, but helpful perhaps in thinking about climate change—so what does listening to growth and decay on a geologic timescale do for our thinking about climate change?
How might other nonhumans collectively play into the score? What are ways that the sound sculpture cohabitates with non-human actors, and how does this affect the soundscape of the installation? During the installation, I noticed pigeons roosting in the corner of the cave. When a pigeon builds her nest in the cave roof, how does that action shape the cave’s spatial dynamics and acoustics? What about smaller actions? Snails scrape away at algae carpeting the walls; cave water drips from their shells onto sand. What do those actions do to the cave’s spatial dynamics?
This project could open our ears and minds to relational understandings regarding surrounding soniferous bodies, to put us in conscious relation with small and even invisible actors, from snails small as grains of sand to interstitial organisms dwelling between grains of sand. A radical noticing emerges.
Perhaps through careful—and technologically-aided—listening we could become aware of the movement of microfauna like copepods and tardigrades, or of sonic realms just outside our perception. How does the percussive wave from cave water dripping onto wet sand manifest for a tardigrade? How do imperceivable fauna experience vibratory sound? Could an attempt to understand this foster sensory kinship with non-human actors? Or do our perceptual limitations simply prohibit comprehension?
Interstial fauna clean decomposing organic matter; they scour the sands of putrescence. The are agents of decay. They go to work at disappearing the funky rot crammed deep into the cavity of the sea cave.
Tissue decays. Sounds also decay.
Sonic decay is the rate at which a sound fades into silence. What might be some relationships among physical and sonic decay (and regeneration for that matter) in the context of the interstitial microfauna coexisting with the sounds of the sea cave cello? In what ways might the decay of these cello sounds be influenced by the decay of a sea bird’s flesh in the sand, for instance? Or by the transmogfication by microfauna of sea bird flesh into fertilizer? What might fertilization of this sort sound like? How might the project bring about some poetic thinking in the context of decomposition and recomposition?
How could sonic experimentations in the cave enable data visualization when it comes to these questions? What might be some potential entangled relationships here between decay and regeneration? Between decomposition (of organic matter / cello notes) and (re)composition of a soundscape? Between physical and acoustical degeneration and regneration? Where are the sites of convergence?
What is the spatial structure of these microgeographies (the habitat range of a single copepod) and macrogeographies (the entire sea cave) of sound? How could we measure this sonic spatial structure across all axes of space and frequency, and how would variations in the way the strings are played modify this spatial structure? And vice versa?
Cycles of decay and regeneration are in constant flux. What other actors might be at work here in shaping the cave’s sonic signature? Phenological questions come to mind. Phenology refers to the study of cyclic and seasonal natural phenomena: seasons bring tidal shifts, from extreme low tides to raging winter storms. How might phenology—and the ways that climate change is reworking phenology—influence the soundscape of the project? How do ecological rhythms—and disruptions—shape a site’s acoustic ecology?
How can sensory experience shape thought and feeling, especially regarding abstract concepts like phenology and climate change? Sound is a powerful means for transformation and change. How might the emotive effects of sound influence our perception of space and phenomena? Can we hear climate change? Sound is a powerful means for transformation and change. Could an ability to hear climate change—to physically hear and feel it in our bodies—catalyze new ways of thinking about the phenomenon?
Can site-specific listening engender care?
The installation left no trace; two bars of wood were braced by the cave walls and removed.