Video: https://vimeo.com/1021976169
Ephemeral performance in which a sea cave transmogrifies into a cello-like sound sculpture via wire and bow.
Sea cave, wire, brass, cello bow.
2024
Sea Cave Transmogrified represents a multi-year collaboration with sea caves located south of Los Angeles. Rigby welded sound sculptures from found brass objects and piano wire, which when bowed turned the sea caves into growling instruments. This is a story of transmogrification, wherein a sea cave transforms into a walk-in cello.
After welding a sound sculpture with found brass objects with which to tension wire throughout the length of a sea cave, Rigby bowed the wire in a series of durational performances during low and high tides. The sea cave itself became the cello body, with an immense resonant capacity, as well as a means to think about relationships among sound and deep time.
A sea cave is a site for thinking about physical and acoustical architecture, cave memory, sonic and material decay and degeneration, shifting seascapes, resonance and vibration, multispecies relationships and sensory ecology, uncertain futures, soniferous bodies, and entanglements among humans and more-than-humans. It is a place to think about local and global environmental phenomena and how they intertwine. It is a place from which to think about growth and decay, loss and renewal, kinship and wonder, climate grief and climate futurities, deep time and breathing.
If the ocean is our planet’s life support system and our greatest ally against the climate crisis, then what are ways to think about sea caves? Sea caves are sound sculptures that give voice to and are voiced by the ever-shifting seascape. What do we have to learn by taking the time to pay attention to these sites, to listen? How can learning the stories of sea caves help us better understand—and reimagine—the stories of our oceans?
Fusing instrumentation, sound sculpture and speculative worldbuilding, the project weaves multiple perspectives of sea caves’ histories, carrying us at once back into deep time and forward into an uncertain future. What does a sea cave’s memory sound like?
The resonance of the sea cave—activated by Rigby’s sound sculptures and cello bows—speaks to the ways that geologic time and tidal hydraulics shape physical space and acoustical range. When we hear the cave’s resonant signature being activated by the sound sculpture, we are listening to the cave’s acoustical anatomy as well as its history. We are hearing the resonance of millennia of climatic phenomena acting upon the site. Vibrational architecture opens our minds to geologic forces and geologic time. Reverberations, echoes, and sonic decays all speak to a cave’s material and spatial conditions, sonic histories, and potential futurities. What does it mean to find new ways to listen, to pay attention, in these uncertain times? Can paying attention manifest as a kind of consciousness, a kind of political act?
Sea caves—like cellos or cathedrals—have their own unique reverberant potential, and varying resonance signatures. Just as the architecture of human-made spaces hold memory, and the acoustical resonance of these spaces echo the history of their fabrication and roles over the years, so too does the acoustical architecture of a sea cave hold memory. The sea cave tunnels deep into a decaying cliff, its dark channels winding far beyond the eyes’ reach.
Sounding the sea cave helps us understand its spatiality, but only ambiguously. We hear the resonant growls of the cave being activated by bow and wire, played out in a cave that has been sculpted over millennia and continues to be sculpted by increasingly erratic climatic phenomena. We are hearing the physicality of the cave via resonance and echo; we are listening to cave memory. This particular complex of sea caves is many millions of years old. Thinking about sea caves brings us into relation with deep time, with a planetary pace.
Though the sea cave is made of stone, it is anything but static. It is as much in flux as the shrinking / expanding tideline, as the daily ebb and flow of water, though governed by much slower forces of change. The fragility of our coastline’s health and the fragility of this eroding cave are in daily conversation with tides bearing microplastic-suffused, acidified, and ever-warming waters. This is a composition of decomposition and re-composition. Listening to the cave enables us to experience tidal flows and movements across time and space. The project imagines a radical intimacy with the sea cave, the planet, and ourselves.
The sound sculpture, installation and performance left no trace on the sea cave or the surrounding environment.