On the move
Shawn Serfas. Salin des Pesquiers
The Pesquiers salt marshes / Catherine Parayre
Not the lines – the colours surprised us. We were expecting white; we were offered flowers, iridescences, a thin red trim to subdue the earth and its substance. We saw a blue that was only a thought ebbing away. Here are wild boars too; they come out of the night – out of the soil. Who knows if they come down from the bèstia in the Vaccarès marshes, out of a swirl and its legends. We like the idea of wild boars, bèstias, aurochs – an idea among the salt flowers, its violence and their brittle twigs of scintillating white. We feel the unreal and let the horizon appease our minds, annihilate our strength. We like the birds, their flight, the cicadas, the whiteness of the salt, the force of water pumped back into the sea.
Troy D. Ouellette
E-Air, 2024 16:9 digital video, 2:54
E-Air consists of a series of videos that reference place and time, foregrounding the sonic possibilities of each space in Hyères, France and St. Catharines, Canada. Each chosen site resonated differently as the surroundings changed within the video, yet one common theme remains via a tuning fork, which marks the space's sonic resonance. As an object of obsolescence in music, the tuning fork has taken on a contemporary function as a tool for healing through sound. It references the therapeutic nature of resort towns with littoral space as places of convalescence and respite. It also becomes a rudimentary instrument like a bell to transport the listener psychoacoustically and ecoacoustically from scene to scene. In each case, the video transitions from one site to another reference changes in time, creating the synergy needed to follow the video as it moves through various environments. Using the tuning fork throughout, I attempt to merge science, sound art and music into one work. The tuning fork was first developed to standardize pitch, and this work bridges concepts in music with the works of Canadian soundscape artists, who have explored the diverse aspects of acoustic space, acoustic ecology, and ambience. This connection is exemplified historically with the innovative work of Jules Antoine Lissajous, who, in 1858, developed the French national standard for musical pitch. Lissajous' innovative method of sound visualization, using a tuning fork with a small mirror, was instrumental in calibrating and creating a technique for precise tuning, further emphasizing the importance of the tuning fork (as a cultural object) that combined light and sound.
Plage du Niel
Bathers
Derek Knight
Port du Niel