Conversation with dying Starfish: ideas & references

Project design idea

It's a dialogue

Where are we going?

A dialogue with the Starfish and me through sounds

Travelling through the sand and out into the cosmos

A conversation with a dying Starfish

A multi-channel sound installation. Place the listener inside the sound spatially – speakers like that used in Susan Hiller's work 'Witness', hanging from the ceiling. Translucent speakers, delicate.

Is this a video work? Is it just sound?

I will use the voice and edited field recordings for this work. Why the voice? There is an intimacy with the voice that can be achieved better than other instruments, it comes from the person, it's sensual, it's unique to the person it comes from. Whispering, chilling.

Residency at The Burnished, Bamff Eco-tourism in Mid March with George Finlay Ramsay

I've recorded sounds whilst away on residency that will make up the sound performance. I've started editing these sounds.

Some sounds in development:

Could be one of the 'voices of a Starfish' (click to listen)

Travelling through down into the beach? Dialogue with dying starfish (click to listen)

Playing with communication - voice work (click to listen)

Writing is a part of the process of this work, it also is feeding into my audio essay about ecological intimacy and meandering. Updated writing from Fieldnotes

Read here

References for the sound performance

'Technological Phantasmagorias I, II, III' at Tramway Glasgow in 2009 (can't find the image)

Samuel Beckett 'No I' 1973 staging

Bjork's keening track 'Ancestors'

Susan Hiller's sound installation 'Witness'

Which I saw/experienced at the Tate in 2011

susanhiller.org/installations/witness_video.html

Paulina Anna Strom's track 'Marking Time'

'The tidal sense' - radio programme

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000sycw

Artist and scientists working together to understand the tides

Decaying starfish at Wardie Bay / A storm over there

FIELD NOTES

As I walk along the flies swarm from the starfish, they are decomposing, emitting a yellow residue. What sound does a decomposing starfish make?

Rising sea temperatures, deoxygenation and desalination could be the causes of these deaths. Or is it all part of a natural process? Was it a storm that washed them up and stranded them and now they are dying, exposed on the beach?

References to 'Star wasting disease' in the US, linking it to sheltered coastlines with no many waves (Wardie Bay is such a place).

Wikipedia - Wasting disease

National Geographic - Kent starfish strandings 2018

Yellowcraig beach starfish stranded 2020

A few days before seeing the starfish there was a storm...

There is a storm brewing on the other side of the bay, I can see flashes of lightning from over here, it’s currently over there. I cannot see the houses, they have been totally eclipsed by the cloud, which seems to have a solid edge at which it ends. Where does this border bleed into the sky over here? I was recently walking in a park near my house with the toddler that I look after and he said 'let's sit down and look at the view'. We sat down, he then said 'oh let's run into the view' so we ran into the view until the next view was seen and we ran into that one, and so we continued'. It reminded me that with this storm, as with the sea haar, I seem to be fascinated with where a weather phenomenon begins and ends and how we are inside it.