Caves, Dwellings & Vibration: ӕramphore performance by Emma McCormick Goodhart & Jessika Kenney, + conversation with Ella Finer
This is an edited recording of ӕramphore(climate remix), performance by Emma McCormick Goodhart and Jessika Kenney, followed by a conversation with Ella Finer.
This performance and discussion took place during day 2 of Caves, Dwellings & Vibration, a two-day programme deepening and complexifying our relationship with caves through talks, music, film and performances.
A proto-cave, a haptic dramaturgy in darkness, aeramphore (climate remix) remixes its mother piece aeramphore’s atmospherics in realtime, morphing environment into a spatiotemporal membrane that breathes, secretes, images, and accretes in transmillennially porous feedback loops.
Guided by notions of maceration and skin-contact, connected to moonmilk biomatrix-derived scent Exuviae (exhibited in our exhibition Hollow Earth), Kenney vocalises live remotely, remixing aeramphore’s source recordings, and McCormick Goodhart performs in situ.
The live remote vocals and live remix of recorded sounds by Jessika Kenney included recordings made in Spokane, Washington, as well as in Goa Putri, "Girl's Cave", near the South Central coast of Java, Indonesia. The flute harmonics recorded there were performed by Dolly Nofer on the instrument he calls the suai. Permission to visit the cave was requested informally of the neighbours, as it is not an established destination.
Mixing, mastering, and editing by Mell Dettmer, Soli Studios, Seattle, with her dog Louie chiming in in response at one point. Further mixing and editing by Jack Colton.
Digitally projected images, save for two (of moonmilk formations by microbiologist Riley Drake, and another of a whale ear bone) are McCormick Goodhart's own. The 3D shell-ear was modeled in collaboration with To The Planetarium."
Emma McCormick-Goodhart is an artist based in New York City who experiments across media, timescales and modes of practice. Interested in fathoming deep-time developments of sensing, especially in sound, alongside technosensory futures, she has presented work at Belmacz (London), Bergen Assembly (Norway), Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin), Kunsthalle Zürich, Le Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Montez Press Radio (New York), Pioneer Works (New York), Storefront for Art & Architecture (New York), and The Merchant House (Amsterdam), among other sites. Her writing has been published by e-flux Architecture, Flash Art, frieze, Luncheon, MOLD, Open Humanities Press, PIN-UP, Sternberg Press, and Vestoj. She was recently an artist resident at Sitterwerk Foundation in St. Gallen, Switzerland, and collaborates with nose Barnabé Fillion.
Jessika Kenney is a sound and voice artist, composer, and writer living in Los Angeles. Collaborations with Emma McCormick Goodheart have ranged from the sounds of suckling to their ongoing in-depth dialogue on the cave. Kenney was able to visit and record in Goa Putri (Princess Cave) in Indonesia while performing in Melati Suryodarmo’s Ruwatan Bumi (Ceremony for the Earth) at BorobudurTemple this last August. Kenney’s recorded work includes the albums Aestuarium, Face of the Earth, and Reverse Tree all with Eyvind Kang, as well as a solo record entitled ATRIA. Upcoming events include NYC performances of Alvin Lucier’s So You and a new work by Marina Rosenfeld.
Ella Finer’s work in sound and performance spans writing, composing, and curating with a particular interest in how women’s voices take
up space; how bodies acoustically disrupt, challenge, or change the order of who is allowed to occupy—command—space. Her research continuously queries the ownership of cultural expression through sound; often through collaborative projects centring listening as a practice of deep attention, affiliation and reciprocity. She is currently finishing her first book Acoustic Commons and the Wild Life of Sound, a work considering the inherent power in/of that which falls outside of administrative control — as a way of thinking through the sonic as critical agitator: how sound resists categorisation in the archive; how sound makes and disperses knowledge beyond the bounds of the institutional building.