eventually there’s nowhere is an immersive soundscape installation that evokes possible and imagined soundscapes of New Orleans and the Gulf South. Field recordings that I made during my time in New Orleans play through a dozen windows via audio exciters, turning the glass panes into speakers.
Life-making in New Orleans and the Gulf South takes place under a series overlapping social, political, environmental, and infrastructural forces that are deeply entangled in one another and impossible to parse. Living is constantly happening at the edges of emerging conditions: life is relationally emergent. Likewise, sounds in every day life (let alone recordings) are never just indexes of reality, but sites for the negotiation and establishment of listening cultures. The way that we engage sound is also always an emergent relationality.
I constructed 17 scenes from my archive of recordings that move between “unified” depictions of a single space and “speculative” scenes that generate impossible overlaps of sounding bodies. These recordings were made in many types of places and depict many types of things: places around New Orleans, including recordings of my neighborhood and my apartment; recordings of people, particularly crowds at events or in public gathering spaces; sounds from outside the city, often in less populated environments like certain bayous, waterways, some specific land in Mississippi and specific reserves in North Louisiana; more abstract sounds, using specialty microphones like contact microphones; recordings of rain and water. Listeners are thus constantly negotiating not just what they hear, but what they hear elsewhere.
The windows themselves are old double-hung windows that I salvaged from an apartment in my New Orleans neighborhood in 2023, arranged at right angles and varying heights, mounted in wooden scaffolding across a roughly 20’x30′ area. The total structure invites different types of relational space within the installation. Parallel windows create passages; corners create moments of pause; ”perimeter” windows create a total outside/inside. This sense of outside/inside is, of course, greatly accentuated by the windows themselves; these windows bring what Bernhard Siegert might call a “cultural technique” of simultaneous connection and separation, a dialectic relationship that then continually doubles on itself as you look and listen through this series of windows.
The scene design, spatialization, and sequencing are managed in a Max/MSP patch using IRCAM’s spat5 package.
