REEDS

Program Notes

A weed, so easily crushed underfoot, can push its way up through a tarmac path, creating a sizeable fracture in what appears to us to be an impervious surface.

One might postulate that if the weed could see the bigger picture, it might have decided to grow two feet to the left in the flowerbed or the grass. There is clearly an analogy here to our own birth, in which we appear to have little or no say (depending on one's religious beliefs).

It is exactly this chaotic behaviour of the natural world that informs the Reeds project. Whilst human kind tries to harness or tame the chaotic forces of nature, or to explain it in terms of quantum theory and fractals, humanity cannot perceive a truly chaotic state. The forces of nature that dictate the growth of plant life fall into this category. It is not possible for us to predict with certainty the meteorological conditions from day to day, let alone year to year, and certainly not on the micro scale of the weed in the footpath. It is precisely these chaotic variations that are used in Reeds to conduct the sound score - to control and dictate the output of the real time synthesis process.

The software design process predetermines the general structure and aesthetic of the sound, but the momentary output is unique. It is unlikely that the combination of wind speed, wind direction, solar radiation, and temperature that occur in this instance will be precisely replicated in any other moment. This chaotic variation is the very source of diversity, which I propose is the structure that creates such beauty in nature.

Reeds uses the relatively static external facade of the sculptural form as a way of representing the paradox observed in organic plant life, where the apparently static external face of the plant contrasts the hidden, dynamic activity of photosynthesis and nutrient gathering that keeps the plant alive, and drives it's growth.

The reed pod sculptures, appearing as lifelike presence's on the Ornamental lake at the Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne, support two remote weather stations, gathering wind speed, wind direction, temperature, and solar radiation data. The meteorological conditions, vital to the plants' life processes, are transmitted back to a land-base where the data is transformed into eight channels of musical sounds that is broadcast back out to the reed pods. These sounds give a voice to the secret inner life processes of the plant.

The viscous and fluid aesthetic of the sound material is an attempt to capture something of both the dynamism of the processes that maintain life and the ever-changing, silken thread that is the presence of life, the life force itself. The fact that the sound material is generated on the basis of meteorological conditions is a way of drawing, as tightly as possible, the bond between the processes of nature and the processors of the Reeds installation. The sound material cannot then be avoided, being the voice of the processes of nature.

Sound and music is in many ways a unique media, for it is not an external artefact. Sound literally penetrates the body. It is also impossible to concretely tie composed sound or music to a representation of anything beyond a communication of emotional states and journeys.

As an artist my interest lies in exploring ways of contextualising digital art processes within the natural organic environment. I have little interest in the purely synthetic, that is the synthesis of sound or images from purely academic or theoretical viewpoint; but prefer, as is illustrated in the Reeds project, to take a fundamentally organic source as the basis for the synthesis process. In so doing, I hope that some quality of that organic material will permeate the work, thereby bringing the synthetic output at least a small way towards the organic world, and therefore within the human context.

By Garth Paine