Core Sample

Core Sample

Core Sample é um projeto que une locative media (GPS e PDA) e headphones para derivas pelo presetnte e passado de uma ilha perto de Boston, a “Spectacle Island”. O projeto, criando um espaço-tempo híbrido a partir das mídias locativas é da artista Teri Rueb. Vejam detalhes no post do Networked Performance, Outside In: A Review of “Core Sample”.

Trechos:

“(…) Outfitted with a GPS enabled PDA and a set of Seinnheiser headphones, I stepped into the bright sunlight and waited – as per instructions – for the signal to activate the device. After about 4 or 5 minutes, the headphones came to life, and I began my walk. My body was immediately infused with a gorgeous soundscape, at times musical, soon a collage of field recordings, some processed, others not. A stone’s throw away, Logan International Airport catapulted planes into the sky every two minutes; an occasional recorded plane caused me to scan the skyline, unsure whether what I was hearing was live. (…)

Part “fact”, part “fiction”, Core Sample masterfully brings history and memory into the present through the voices of former inhabitants. Their brief stories are supplemented by signs posted along the paths; one learns that Spectacle Island was a horse and cow rendering plant, a city trash incinerator, and home to as many as thirteen families until the 1950s. When the Big Dig project began in 1992, some of the excavated dirt and clay was used to resurface it; 28,000 trees and shrubs were planted, and the island opened to the public in 2006. Trash dump turned ecological experiment, humans now use waterless toilets and carry their trash back to the city.(…)

Rueb collected the data for Core Sample herself, and created a piece that is densely layered and historically rich, with ample room for the imagination to roam.

“The island’s path system follows elevation contours that are loosely mapped to the vertical layers of a metaphoric core sample. Sounds correspond to the island’s layered history from recent reclamation to industrial, archaeological and geological pasts. Layers blur to suggest the permeable boundaries of past, present, and future.” From Art on the Harbor Islands, ICA brochure.(…)

In Core Sample, Rueb has utilized locative media to choreograph an immersive experience in nature though, in some respects, Spectacle Island is as natural as the city of Boston itself (apparently, it only ceased to be a trash dump because the bulldozer that was used to move the trash around itself became buried). By immersing us in sound, it is not Rueb’s intent that we forget where we are; rather, the opposite. Despite the constant drone of motor boats and planes, Core Sample brings nature more sharply into focus; it asks us to listen to the sounds that most of us don’t ordinarily hear, and incorporates the sounds we’d rather not.(…)

Core Sample asks the body to be its instrument; it is our individual choices – where to walk, how long to pause, whether to retrace ones steps rather than select a new path – that determines how we perform it. Each performance is unique. (…)”