Kate Richards, Sarah Waterman: Sub_scape

Exhibiting Artist(s):

• Kate Richards
• Sarah Waterman

INTERFACING SOUND

Within Sub_scape ISEA2004 the system’s custom algorithms transcode data sets from the Baltic Sea (bathymetry, pollutants, fish finds, sea temperature) and ‘maps’ these into audio and video data modules (Australian desert) in real time.

Sub_scape takes Baltic data and desert-as-video data and plays with the reflexive synthesis of seemingly alternative spaces – the northern sea and the southern desert. Yet the sea and desert – are isomorphs: with metaphysical, aesthetic and political connections between them. The western imagination represents the sea and the desert as -non-place- and negative space. Yet mapped with lines of force and communication, trade and theft, disease and DNA, development and exploitation, they are highly political spaces. Both the sea and desert are -deep space” (a combinative trope of physical place and social connectedness) onto which we project our deepest, most troubling collective histories and desires. Environmentally, the desert was once a seabed; both have similar geomorphologies. Sub_scape is a conjuring and evocative work aiming to transcend the interstices between metaphorical and material space. It is a playful and ironic critique on the traditional politics and power dynamics of knowledge through-mapping. By mapping one space into another, and playing on the dynamics of turbulence, balance, recursive effect and pattern formation in the environmental data, and by mixing scale, perspective, subjectivity and time frame Sub_scape creates affects more baroque than cartesian.

Concept: Sarah Waterson, Collaboration: Sarah Waterson and Kate Richards, Programmer: Jon Drummond, Fabrication: Lenny Bastiaans.