Ecologies of Transduction by Charlotte Parallel

The Auricle Sonic Arts Gallery
Showing: 6th-27th October, 2016
Opening: 6th October, 6-8pm
Facebook event
Interactive sound installation

 

On ecologies of transduction

Looking back, you could say it all started from growing up in the middle of nowhere listening to power poles. Putting my ear up to the wooden pole I was compelled by its voices and the accompanying hum. Thirty years later I am still engaged in the practice of listening as a form of attunement to any given place.

The process of mapping, sensing, detection and transformation are a kind of aural forensics. My ongoing interest in participatory sound works is a means of directing attention to the active forces of a place; in particular, the ways in which we exist in a continuum of and specific concentration within the electromagnetic field through our capacity as a transducer.

Transduction is defined as the transformation of one energy state to another. As a process transduction occurs in everything from our human ear to plants to viruses to our cellphone, articulating a field of relations between one thing and another. Adrian Mackenzie describes this field of relations as a “knotting together of commodities, signs, diagrams, stories, practices, concepts, human and non-human bodies, images and places.”[1]

The activation of sound, linked to a cartographic object has the potential to relay the intersecting and often unseen operations of geo-political, economic, ecological and social infrastructures. The corresponding implications are considered ecologies of transduction.

[1] Adrian Mackenzie, “Theory, Event, Transduction,” 2015. www.lancaster.ac.uk/staff/mackenza/papers/transduction.pdf

Charlotte Parallel is a recent MFA graduate at Otago School of Art and a practicing artist in the fields of sculpture, sound installation, collaboration and performance. Often choosing to respond to site in a temporal way. She has been exhibiting within New Zealand consistently over the last 13 years and internationally since 2010.

Since 2003 Dunedin has been the home base for Charlotte Parallel’s artistic activity which includes a range of curatorial and community initiated collaborative art projects. From 2010 specifically with The Anteroom, a project art space based in Port Chalmers. The Anteroom is an artist run space committed to representing experimental projects with a national and international network of exhibiting artists.

Image courtesy Gilbert May