- jojomatthewsart
Updated: Apr 6
Project design notes
Dialogue
Where are we going?
Dialogue from 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 in the sound spatially – speakers like that used by the likes of Susan Hiller's work 'Witness', hanging from the ceiling
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.
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 this work, it also is feeding into my audio essay about ecological intimacy and meandering.
Updated writing (A handmade book with poetic fieldwork notes)
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'
- jojomatthewsart
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.
- jojomatthewsart
Updated: Mar 30
I invited some musicians/composers to interpret to the Singing to the Seaweed score. Passing the score on to someone else, its a reinterpretation of a place and an experience. Feelings and sensations re-imagines. What does that open up? Do I invite more people to interpret the score? How does this fit into my wider work? Where does it fit conceptually? I am not sure where to go with this thread next.
Singing to the seaweed by Nicholas Escobar
He used shells, synthesizers, distorted soundscapes amongst other sounds to make the piece.
Cuppa by Joe Coghill
My original sound peice