On my first walk of the Djerassi grounds, I saw scat, tons of scat! And of course, I thought, THAT will go into the mud painting I make here.
Macrophones is one of those art+science projects that starts with a hypothesis and then requires an awful lot of labor getting the whole thing together in order to see if it adds up to anything. On some level, the thought experiment is enough for me—if we could hear low frequency sounds from around the world, would we more directly feel our connection to and through the atmosphere?
As a result of more than 50 years of publishing work on the cutting edge, Leonardo has become the leading international peer-reviewed journal on the use of contemporary science and technology in the arts and music and, increasingly, the application and influence of the arts, design and humanities on science and technology.
To be honest, I never intended to do anything with clay before this residency.
While I'm here at Djerassi, I'm working on my Macrophones project — essentially huge microphones that pick sound far below our range of hearing. I've pieced together the design from the literature on volcano sound and nuclear warhead test detection.
Everything is light and air here, we look down on the clouds over the ocean, they stretch out to cover us in mist each night and then recede again each day. Innumerable hawks hunt gophers in the grass, and I already had a bobcat encounter on the trail.
