Their Memories Also Mine was made in collaboration with author Duygu Ağal (Berlin, DE), artist/musician James Enos (GA), and musician Derya Yildirim (Berlin, DE). The work intertwines our experiences and cultural influences in an act of sharing and melding of histories.
Working through a form of abstract documentary, I collect instrumentation, field recordings, and interviews from my collaborators and transform them with an analog method akin to Alvin Lucier's I Am Sitting in a Room, recording and re-recording the sounds in spaces significant to our experiences—from the home of bluegrass legend Bill Monroe, to the factory where my mother worked while raising me, to the ice fields at the South Pole. The installation merges the resonant tones of these sonically and geographically disparate environments.
The audio and visuals are generative and never precisely repeat: custom software I wrote coordinates the play of hundreds of audio files, so the installation is continually recomposing itself. The video comprises water filmed by my collaborators and me, from Lexington, Kentucky, to Hamburg, Germany. A second projection mounted directly above reveals fragments of light that undulate as they pass through water. Each square of light correlates to a sound in the archive.
The assemblage of ephemera includes a mix of highly personal and found objects, raising questions about how and why we hold memories in particular objects, and how and when we choose to see, acknowledge, or value the things we are proximate to. The installation is changed and added to throughout the course of an exhibition, making it an active, living space where recently claimed objects are welcomed into their new histories.
The project was initiated by German conceptual artist and curator Michael Kress under the auspices of the artist collective Hyper Cultural Passengers.
Installation documentation, video. Exhibited at Veddel Space, Hamburg (2022) and the Bolivar Gallery, Lexington, KY (2021).
Their Memories Also Mine, 2021/2022. Installation: personal and found objects, projections, generative audio, bespoke audiovisual software. Sound in collaboration with James Enos, Derya Yildirim, and Duygu Ağal
Their Memories Also Mine (detail), 2021/2022
Each sound was played and re-recorded in places connected to the individual and shared histories of my collaborators and me. Rather than simply documenting these locations, the process uses their physical acoustics to transform the recordings. As a sound is played into a room or landscape and recorded again and again, it gathers the reverberation, reflections, and ambient sound of that environment, allowing the resonance of the place to become embedded in the recording itself.
Sounds contributed by one collaborator are brought into places connected to the experiences of another, creating encounters between histories that might otherwise remain separate. These exchanges allow our individual influences, relationships, and experiences to become entangled in the work.
At left, collaborators’ sounds are re-recorded inside the childhood home of bluegrass musician Bill Monroe. At right, the process takes place at the South Pole, filmed by DJ Jennings, who made the recordings there. DJ and I had worked together years earlier on an imaging project in Antarctica, giving this otherwise remote location a connection to our shared history.
Video stills, Veddel, Hamburg, the neighborhood where collaborators Derya Yildirim and Duygu Ağal grew up
This project includes creative and technical contributions from a number of people. Thank you to Michael Kress and Torsten Bruch, who organized the project and helped to make it real; DJ Jennings (who made recordings at the South Pole); Clay Christmas (who has helped me with code for many years); and Christian Divol, Seth Landman, Ariannah Lego, Will Major, Raub Roy, Salma Sbou, Paula Starkey, Dima Strakovsky, Lynn Sweet, and Taha.