Dowsing / Collóireacht, 2025
Two-channel video projection, four-channel audio
Ten repetitive sonic interventions within the eroded landscapes of the Burren, County Clare, Ireland.
These occur at sites of local “anti-monuments:” a kilometers-long, natural limestone pavement high above Galway Bay; stone farm walls and remnants of circular structures on hillsides; cairns near a shoreline; a field of glacial boulders interrupted by a road smashed from the surrounding stone formations, in forced public work by the starving during the Great Hunger of 1845 to 1852. These structures speak to both the passage of geologic time, and the care and efforts of human survival beginning in the Neolithic period and tended through the present, though local history at each site may be lost, or unrecorded.
These are introduced in title cards in English, italicized as would be a term in a language foreign to the observer, and in Irish in plain font, as would be in an observer’s native language.
From one perspective, a sonic divining or physical research into the properties of land, space, light, and time in these locations; from another, an attempt as an “Irish-American” to reckon with language, archaeology, and colonial history felt as formative but inarticulable without lived context.
Complete installation information here.
First light, 2024-25
Single-channel video, stereo sound
Two views of sunrise, Cape Spear, Newfoundland, July 2024.
Ligne de feu / Firelines, 2025
Twelve speakers placed on windowsill
Original for Festival Grenache and Carillon, Saint-Damien, QC, August 2025. Speakers loaded with sounds recorded from a barbed wire fence near high-tension power lines, and from the windstorm that began the historic wildfires in Los Angeles in January 2025. These arranged in a circle around a communal fire pit, and along paths leading to it, corresponding to the directions of Santa Ana winds, which blow hot and dry air downhill from the Mojave Desert over Southern California.
The intensity of sound increases from single entrances in the first quarter of each hour to a maelstrom in the last, in proportion to statistics measuring the acceleration of heat, precipitation, and fire caused by climate change in Quebec over the last seventy years.
Potentiel sismique / Seismic potential, prototype
Sixteen audio transducers, wooden shelf, pea gravel
Each transducer driven by one of sixteen channels of low-frequency noise, which rattles the particles above.
The frequency, length, and intensity of shaking at each speaker increases and accelerates over the course of twenty minutes, in proportion to statistics tracking temperature, drought, and wildfire frequency in southern California.
Field recording of anti-ICE protests, Los Angeles, June 2025
The Trump Administration sent the National Guard and Marines to Los Angeles over the ensuing few days.