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TRACE a memorial environmental sound installation designed and produced by Teri Rueb in co-production with The Banff Centre for the Arts |
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PREFACE
Imagine yourself rounding the bend of a hiking trail high in the Canadian Rockies. Far below you is a valley formed thousands of years ago by massive glaciers. A brilliant blue-green lake, nested at the base of the valley, gradually appears through the layered mist of an afternoon rain. A faint melody reaches your ears--as if someone were singing in the distance. The song is a requiem that builds to a steady, low volume as you approach a footbridge that spans a softly splashing creek. The song slowly fades as you walk further down the path until you are hiking in silence. Walking through the landscape is like wandering through a memorial sculpture garden where instead of visible monuments, you weave your way through memorial songs, poems and stories that fade in and out, like occasional clouds of sound. Time present and time past Are both perhaps present in time future, And time future contained in time past. If all time is eternally present All time is unredeemable. What might have been is an abstraction Remaining a perpetual possibility Only in a world of speculation. What might have been and what has been Point to one end, which is always present. Footfalls echo in the memory Down the passage which we did not take Towards the door we never opened Into the rose-garden. My words echo Thus, in your mind. PROJECT DESCRIPTION Trace is a memorial environmental sound installation that is site-specific to the network of hiking trails near the Burgess Shale fossil beds in Yoho National Park, British Columbia. The installation transforms the trails into a landscape of sound recordings that commemorate personal loss. Walking through the installation is like wandering through a memorial sculpture garden where, instead of visible monuments, visitors weave their way through memorial poems, songs and stories that play in response to their movement through the landscape. The project explores loss and transformation in an historical moment when concepts of memory, presence and absence are undergoing significant shifts in cultural meaning. This drift in meaning is directly related to developments in the field of information technology. For this reason, I have chosen to use the computer as a culturally inscribed tool and medium that offers clues to our contemporary understanding of time, memory and mortality. Trace explores the relationship between a culture's memory storage technologies and it's understanding of death, loss and bereavement. The conceptual roots of the project lie in a comparison of the cultural role and function of memorial art forms and digital technologies; namely, the traditional Western funerary monument and the personal computer. The computer, more than any other contemporary technology, symbolically represents our desire for the indestructible, immortal vessel that will preserve for posterity the traces of our own fleeting physical presence, if not our bodies themselves. We anticipate and construct concepts of the past, present, and future when we record or preserve information and experiences in memory or in archival form through technology. In this very process lie indications of our cultural identity, our understanding of loss and mortality, and the meaning of our responses to these experiences. While memorial artforms are often associated with aesthetic conservatism, Trace seeks to define an alternative aesthetic that resists the ocular- and phallo-centricity of traditional Western memorial artforms and digital technologies. In designing Trace I have attempted to use the very tools associated with the desire to record, hold fast, and preserve for posterity to create a contemporary memorial space that points to a different concept of temporality, memory and public monument. The landscape of the Canadian Rockies and the Burgess Shale provide an apt location for addressing these concerns. The site is at once mutable and enduring, sublime and terrible, frozen and fecund, knowable, yet elusive. The metaphoric relatedness of tombstones, fossils, cemeteries, databases, networks, computers and fossil beds is drawn out by this multi-layered landscape. Visitors traverse the physical terrain in a direct and corporeal experience of landscape as history and spatialized narrative. In "Trace" the headstone as memorial artifact is dissolved and recast as the landscape itself and it's rich fossil record. The timeless landscape is temporarily framed and transformed by an ephemeral overlay of sound recordings that dot the trail like so many cairns or trailmarkers. Trace was produced in it's first iteration in the summer of 1999. The database of memorials expands over time as interested participants continue to contribute memorial songs, poems and stories. The first launch of the installation featured works by Diana Berry, Susan Davis, Sarah Drury, Stelios Gannoulakis, Joanna Goodman, Henry Israeli, Bruce Ledbetter, Akiko Matsumoto, Lisa Moren, Tim Nohe, Mayumi Reinhard, Thomas Rodebaugh, Vivian Adelberg Rudow, Melora Zaner-Godsey, and Sirpa Vaara. III. Background Information I. The Location | Yoho National Park "Trace" is site-specific to the network of hiking trails in the vicinity of the Burgess Shale fossil beds in Yoho National Park, British Columbia. Declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the Burgess Shale is a fossil bed whose holdings evidence an explosion of the earliest forms of multi-cellular life that dates back to over 500 million years ago. Their discovery and (re)interpretation led to radical new theories about the evolution of human life which emphasize chance, contingency and non-linearity as inherent to the evolutionary processes that led to the existence of Homo sapiens. II. Historical Influences The project draws creative inspiration from Western memorial art and architecture, the Medieval arts of memory, oral tradition, peripatetic thought, and the rituals associated with Aboriginal myth, songlines, walkabouts and dreamings. The Aboriginal walkabout is a journey made by foot while singing traditional songs about the interconnected origin of people and land. The song itself is passed down through oral tradition and serves not only as a recitation of history and the images of the gods/ancestors in the landscape, but is also believed to literally conjure the land as one walks, therefore acting as a sort of map or trail guide. With each recitation of the song, the ancestors are thought to be brought to life---if the people lose the stories, they lose the ancestors, and therefore cease to exist themselves. In developing "Trace" I was significantly influenced by this non-Western elegiac form that combines oral history, myth, song, movement and landscape from a radically different cultural perspective on history and temporality. III. Technical Design The project consists of a database of digital sound recordings made as memorials to people who have died or as compositions that explore themes of death, loss and transformation. Contributors may submit a recorded memorial (prepared in advance) to the collection and choose a point along one of the trails for it to be heard by visitors to the installation. The project evolves with the addition of sound recordings to an expanding archive. Visitors to the installation are given knapsacks to carry with them as they hike. Each knapsack contains a global positioning satellite receiver (GPS) interfaced with a Macintosh G3 laptop computer. As the visitor hikes the trail, the GPS detects his or her longitude and latitude. When the hiker passes through an area that has been chosen for the playback of a memorial, the GPS senses the location and activates playback of the corresponding memorial from the computer's hard drive. The software interface that manages serial communication and sound playback is a max patch created with Opcode Max software, version 3.5.9. "Trace" was originally prototyped in 1997 and was launched for it's first season in the Summer of 1999. Future technical implementation will replace the laptop/GPS unit with a custom interface that links palm pilot technologies with global positioning satellite receivers and MP3 playback. Bibliography Aries, Philippe, trans. by Patricia M. Ranum. Western Attitudes Toward Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore. 1974 Augaitis, Diana and Dan Lander, ed. Radio Re-Think: Art, Sound and Transmission. Banff, Alberta, Walter Phillips Gallery. 1994 Bowlby, John. Attachment and Loss. Basic Books, New York. 1969 Briggs, Derek E.G. and Douglas H. Erwin, Frederick J. Collier. Photographs by Chip Clark. The Fossils of the Burgess Shale. Smithsonian Institution, Washington and London. 1994 Canetti, Elias. Crowds and Power. Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, New York. 1984 Carruthers, Mary. The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. 1990 Chatwin, Bruce. The Songlines. Viking, New York. 1987 Dietrich, David R. and Peter C. Shabad, ed. The Problem of Loss and Mourning: Psychoanalytic Perspectives. International Universities Press, Inc., Madison, Connecticut. 1989 Eliot, T.S. Four Quartets. New York and London, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 1943 Fuchs, R.H. Richard Long. Thames and Hudson Ltd., London. 1986 Freud, Sigmund. Mourning and Melancholia. The Hogarth Press Ltd. and The Institute of Psycho-Analysis, London, 1917 Gould, Steven Jay. Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History. W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 1989 Harrison, Helen Mayer and Newton. The Lagoon Cycle. Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University. 1985 Jackson, Kenneth T. and Camilo Jose Vergara. Silent Cities: The Evolution of the American Cemetery. Princeton Architectural Press, New York. 1989 Jackson, Stanley W. Melancholia and Depression: From Hippocratic Times to Modern Times. Yale University Press, New Haven. 1986 Kristeva, Julia, trans. Leon Rudiez. Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia. Columbia University Press, New York. 1989 Kubler-Ross, Elizabeth. On Death and Dying. MacMillan Publishing, New York. 1969 Lander, Dan and Micah Lexier, ed. Sound by Artists. Art Metropole and Walter Phillips Gallery, Toronto/Banff. 1990 McConkey, James. The Anatomy of Memory: An Anthology. Oxford University Press, New York. 1996 Moser, Ann and Douglas MacLeod, ed. Immersed in Technology: Art and Virtual Environments. The Banff Centre for the Arts and MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. 1996 Percy, Walker. The Loss of the Creature. Published in łThe Message in the Bottle˛. 1975 Proust, Marcel, trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin. Remembrance of Things Past. New York, Vintage Books. 1982 _____. Trans. and ed. by Mina Curtiss, intro. Harry Levin. Letters of Marcel Proust. New York, Random House. 1949 Rosenblatt, Paul C. Bitter, Bitter Tears: Nineteenth Century Diarists and Twentieth-Century Grief Theories. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis. 1983 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, trans. with preface, notes and interpretative essay by Charles Butterworth. The Reveries of the Solitary Walker. New York, New York University Press. 1979 Sonfist, Alan, ed. Art in the Land: A Critical Anthology of Environmental Art. New York, Dutton. 1983 Sorabji, Richard. Aristotle on Memory. Brown University Press, Providence. 1972 Vermeule, Emily. Aspects of Death in Early Greek Art and Poetry. University of California Press, Berkeley. 1979 Winnicot D.W. Playing and Reality. Basic Books, New York. 1971 _____. The Piggle: An Account of the Psychological Treatment of a Little Girl. International University Press, New York. 1977 Yates, Frances A. The Art of Memory. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago. 1966 Monographs and Exhibition Catalogues Micah Lexier: Micah Lexier at Southern Alberta Art Gallery. Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Lethbridge, Alberta. 1991 Micah Lexier: Book Sculptures Oakville Galleries, Oakville, Ontario. 1993 Micah Lexier: A Portrait of David Winnepeg Art Gallery, Winnepeg, Manitoba. 1994 Richard Long: Mountains and Waters. George Braziller, New York. 1993 Richard Long: Walking in Circles. George Braziller, New York. 1991 Film/Video Truffault, Francoise. The Green Room Sound Recordings Brahms, Johannes. Requiem Mahler, Gustave. Kindertotenleider Mevlevi Ensemble, The. Returning: A Ceremony of the Whirling Dervishes |
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