Beginning with logs on the speculative density of fish in Lake Michigan, Meeting Points (i) uses data sonification and audio processing tools to translate, loop and layer the information it once contained. These acts render the urgent and cautionary information of its source illegible. What is left in its wake is a pacifying melody, a siren song that encourages the viewer to slow and listen. Similarly, in Meeting Points (ii), the pollutants and non-native aquatic species that wash up on shores have been distilled into an unrecognizable portrait of the lake. An attempt to capture the chemical reaction of necrosis, the smell that’s come to be associated with the water’s edge.
The works in Meeting Points are fragments, containers for acts of translation, made through small, slow processes of extraction. Extraction is displacement and from deracination there will always be loss. I ask myself, how do we disrupt the colonial logic of land as a site for the purpose of extraction and capital gain? I can answer that question through theory or through dreaming but in practice, there is an inescapable micro-scale recreation of these systems. But I keep trying, because oceans were once imagined to be bottomless and they say the power of imagining is emancipatory.
Meeting Points (i) can be listened to here.
Meeting Points (ii) Scent created with distilled hornwort, slender naiad, waterweed, seashells, sand, fur, styrofoam, nurdles and unidentifiable others.