LEVITATION GROUNDS
by Liminal Product: Fran Dyson & Douglas Kahn
We would like to believe that we belong to the place where weather places us. No matter how people might isolate themselves among concrete, glass, metal and media, they are brought back into a communal experience once immersed in searing heat, syrupy humidity, dense fog, or bone-chilling wind. It influences what we talk about, how we dress, how we move about, whether we move about, where we go and where we are. Can not a particular clime leach into the deep character structures of an entire people, just as it permits the existence and behaviors of certain species? We would like to believe that weather permeates the condition of the air at any one moment, including the moment of each breath we breathe, enveloping it into our very being. This is the air we share with plants and other animals, thinning out or thickening with altitude, as we are enveloped in an idea of nature. If we are not immersed in air, where are we?
Too much weather, sharp and sudden changes, uproot us. No longer grounded in an identifiable place, we become susceptible to uncertainty, we don’t know what to wear, we feel tetchy and adrift. Meteorologists themselves, reassuring us with predictions of highs and lows, troughs and pressure belts, are involved in a daily ritual pitted against the uncanny, for they cannot avoid the fact that the turbulence underlying all weather patterns is still too complex to model, an ever-present excess of noise within which the unexpected can and does happen. The very word meteorology glosses over the unexpected. In the seventeenth century meteorology was defined as ‘that part of natural philosophy which entreateth of the aire, and of the things engendered therein’ and even ‘until the eighteenth century, the term meteor referred to any atmospheric phenomenon (clouds, dew, winds, lightning, rainbows, comets, and so on).
Of course, in this new millennium we think of meteors as impossibly large rocks hurtling towards us with a probability of doom somewhat less than The Big One that will slide Los Angeles into the sea, but more than an extraterrestrial encounter. The threat of meteors, like the threat of lightning strikes, sits at the back of the brain, occasionally nourished by the loony proclamations of under funded scientists (its not a matter of if, but when) we read about in tattered Time magazines while waiting for the dentist or doctor to hurry us on to the next judgment.
The old meteorology was mysterious, fickle and punitive. Comets were signals for earthly events, rainbows held treasure, winds brought illnesses and omens, so much in the aire was foreboding and fortuitous. The old meteorology was a world suffused with agency, entities of the uncanny. The new meteorology wants to absolve the world of this agency in daily reports of probability, domesticating the sublime by inventing quaint names like El Nino for the emergence of what are truly foreboding and potentially disastrous weather patterns. The recent addition of a pollution forecast and reports on ozone levels, wedged quietly between the temperature range and the tides, signals the extent and effect of this domestication.
The daily and the improbable come crashing to earth in the calm repose of The Levitation Ground, a recent installation by David Haines and Joyce Hinterding, at Artspace Sydney (23 March-15 April, 2000). At once familiar and reassuring, its simple array of visual, aural and conceptual elements work together, elementary, like snow falling in Alice. There are four large video projections; two of levitating trees, another of a cave carved out of cliffs pounded by a boisterous sea, and the fourth a muffled tapestry of scanning signals; all awash in the sound of electronic noise. We find out that all this has some relation to a residency from February to May 1999 created through CAST gallery (Contemporary Art Services Tasmania) that Haines and Hinterding undertook at the lighthouse station on Bruney Island, in the cold southern seas off Tasmania. Before the artists had even installed their computer and recording gear however, they were confronted with parallel, contradictory, over determined and distorting aspects of their environment, condensed in the figure of the lighthouse. For it was this tall, singular, barely habitable building that not only beamed the first light Europeans would see as they sailed to this New Found Land, but lit up the sea, showing sailors and passengers a way through the treacherous ‘roaring forties’. Even today, with state of the art navigational systems, the winds and weather of the region are deathly. Grappling with the symbolism of the lighthouse and the ferocity of the weather, the clean lines of artificial light and turbulent, unpredictable atmospheres, the artists felt themselves to be continuously buffeted by volatility, enveloped by eruptions of the uncanny. One thing became obvious, as Hinterding says, ‘You don’t really know why anything is happening.’
We’ve had instances where we were in the house working and Andy the lighthouse keeper would run over saying ‘shut all the doors, shut all the windows, that black cloud that you can see coming here will be here in 10 minutes and it is going to blow the house away unless you shut all the doors and windows.’ I mean you can’t say ‘why did that happen?’[laughs] And then it would be gone in fifteen minutes.
Under these circumstances it is not so surprising that The Levitation Ground ‘opens’, one might say, with levitating trees. This is the old meteorology. Just as the dark cloud does not belong to a ‘front caused by a high pressure area….’ and so on, but rather is an entity that intercedes upon the weather – the trees in the installation are meteorological. We know trees to be mostly vertical. Except for the stray cataclysmic moment when they fall to the ground, if they move then it is the wind moving them. Mostly, they are there. They don’t do, they be. In two of the projections in The Levitation Ground trees are floating, driftwood logs actually, drifting wood, floating above a meadow in front of a dense dark forest backdrop. They move ever so slightly, imitating, as Haines says, ‘the movements of astronauts’ in their weightless space walks. Stripped down, bare, the trees look bleached. Their white, clean, smooth and very dead surfaces suggest an order, a history, the pastness and certainty of a life that has been recorded and then re-animated like a dead film star, squinting anew in the harsh lights. Yet this new life for the trees has nothing to do with growing leaves or bearing fruit, the trees will not re-root to the ground, no umbilical cord, they float, supported, as Haines says, like they’re ‘pushing through treacle, like the air has this density to it.’ Their movement is due to the density of their medium or to their own energies or to some unseen suspension, since no breeze could so gently shift their mass.
Levitation is defined as the act or phenomenon of bodies heavier than air being rendered buoyant in the atmosphere by spiritual means. Some viewers of the installations thought that the trees were actually hung and swung slowly from wires, apparently in their minds, from a crane. In fact, all was artifice, the floating trees were animated, the background was composited, the forest itself was digitally transplanted. The slow drift of the trees, the relative stillness of the scenes, meets the requirements of an installation that, as the creators say, is about long duration and quietness. At the same time, it goes against the grain of animation as an art form, where high speed holds the day and ephemerality is quickly associated with futurity. Just as this repose sets in, however, the trees seem to line up like aircraft in formation about to depart. Not an accident; as Haines says, ‘it’s as if there’s a kind of energy force at play that releases those objects. When youíre walking around in that environment you can’t help but ask the question what would happen if things all of a sudden got up? So what kind of being are they? And that’s the root question.’
At one point during their residency Haines and Hinterding passed through a cave by boat in the most horrendous weather. It was an experience which both artists found spectacular, awesome, and literally impossible to capture, and became the inspiration behind the cave projection in The Levitation Grounds. Like the rest of the piece, the cave – with its dolomite cliffs and soft, lapping water, is in fact a composite, designed to both refer to and simultaneously erase certain aspects its physical correlate in Tasmania. ‘Actually working that environment you’re faced with the reverence, the awe of the landscape, and its romantic possibilities. It is quite a dilemma to be located within that and not simply bow down to it.’ This is particularly true of the cave; receptacle of so many myths, signifier of interminable interiority, the dark heart of the place where artists in the landscape, and landscape artists, are supposed to go with their passion and genius. The artists felt the best way to render the landscape they encountered was to come up with another one, not one sprung from the depths of their psyches but one which could stand in for the epiphenomena of the uncanny as they experienced it. ‘The cave is very easy to read in terms of the cinematic sublime, or the sublime in landscape art,’ comments Haines ‘because it is a highly amplified aesthetic space, but its our disruption, because although its quite true to the landscape, it doesnít exist at all’. At one stage the artists experimented with animating the caves fractal noise to make it ‘jitter’. But this would have dislodged the cave into pure artifice, when their experience was at least rooted in mimesis, so they settled instead for a subtle skew: the texture ís not quite right, everything ís shifted, everything ís been moved around … its like turning around in the opposite direction to what youíre looking at and being able to conjure that up…. we were trying to take ourselves out of that world but still be within that world .
If the cave was not to be found spelunking among some platonic interiors, in psychic or metaphysical recesses, in the mysteries of nature, or the rolled-and-tucked depths of the psychoanalytic couch, then where did it exist within the landscape, their experience of the landscape? Sea caves can be seen as resulting from a negotiation of forces: massive amounts of water and the waves which batter the cliffs; the dolomite cliffs, a phalanx of columns butted up against one another, forceful in their obstruction. Force upon force, something gives, a cave happens. Both symbolically and physically the cave is created from support structures that have no space in between them, that are barricaded and barricading. But in The Levitation Ground hardness, inscrutability and the darkness of the sublime is shaped, moulded, re-lit and given a theatrical intensity that situates it in another space entirely. The cave couldn’t be the depths of anything if it never belonged to a surface, and there is no one surface in The Levitation Ground, rather there is an amalgam, a sheen that gathers up and composites the physical and the fictional.
The fourth wall of the installation distributes the cave and all its mythic contents within a dimension neither real nor symbolic. The audio recordings of VLF transmissions that engulf the room and the large screen projection of transmission signals work against, or through, the smooth surfaces, subtle animation and apparent magic of the floating trees, through the awesome backdrops of forests, oceans and caves. Here is the real density in the piece, the stuff that keeps the trees afloat and pushes them along. Like everything else in The Levitation Ground, the VLF (very low frequency) image and audio are composites. Much of the sound was recorded in Tasmania, where the artists hooked up some of the guy lines and antennas belonging to the lighthouse to record transmissions from that area. Other sounds came from recordings collected from the daily pass over of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric satellites.
The sound piece that we’ve pulled out of all that material is to do with radio space more than anything else and its the VLF from Tasmania, so that’s the crackling sound in there. There’s probably background sound of the milky way in there, and the aurora, and atmospherics from the sun unfortunately there are no whistlers which is a shame.
There is a certain notion of ‘truth’ that would normally be associated with something as raw as the sounds of solar flares or transmissions from the aurora borealis. For a start, these are recordings of transmissions that few of us would have access to. Its also the kind of sound that resists any kind of decoding – there’s little in the way of traditional musical elements (pitch, rhythm, tone etc.) present, and although some amongst us might be tempted to listen for hours in the hope of unearthing some SETI like messages, language and communication is not what these signals are about. These sounds seem as far from signification as a primordialist might hope for, their rawness promising an uncharted territory not yet sullied by the refinements of civilization. But this is not what The Levitation Ground is trying to do. Rather, these transmissions act as both glue and agent of dissolution of the work; immersing the viewer in a sea of signal, signifying the underlying and continuous presence of an electromagnetic force, whilst fragmenting the romantic possibilities that attend the sight of caves, oceans, trees and forests, and interfering with the notion of the image itself. While the idea of trees suddenly assembling themselves into flight formation sounds like a late night animation hallucination – the product of too many hours spent in the fantasy land of screen effects – in fact their anti-gravity suspension aligns them with other phenomena that are both ‘real’ and incredible: Purely technically what’s so interesting to me is that radio space interfaces directly into the computer and produces images – that somehow this out here, this radio space gets inside and makes pictures. Its that translation from one state to another that’s the fascination.
Because the spectrum is impenetrable to representation, because it sits on the edge of meaning, it is both inside and outside the work, occupying a place that the artists themselves try to go. As Hinterding explains: ‘they’re interesting and difficult because they are what they are… They’re very noisy, they’re hard to get, its not like a telephone call and you’re receiving it, its just being blasted out.’ She describes the process of gathering these signals as ‘fishing for pictures out of the sky’, an analogy that recalls the artists experience of being both inside and outside the landscape, but opens up that environment to electromagnetic influence. The transmissions can be seen as a force in the work, aerating the hard surface of both cave and image alike.
The ability to perceive, let alone differentiate, various levels of the spectrum, demands an attentiveness and a familiarity that translates into hours tending the satellite transmissions, or waiting for an atmospheric phenomenon to occur. It has also led the artists into an underworld of signal transmission that has meaning, but is not strictly media. Hinterding points to the fact the satellites are all equipped with automatic picture transmitters and are constantly ‘throwing back’ images that can be received by any home computer system. ‘But’ she emphasizes, ‘we never see these pictures in the media, ever – because they are designed for people who are working on weather systems.’ The systems that create meaning from such images are laden with strangeness, with notions of environment and existence that escape or exceed most of the intellectual and representational structures we have placed upon the world. The nightly weather report, the all ordinaries index, the network ratings, the price of a painting – all become unstuck when subject to phenomena like the weather.
Artists are also likely to become unstuck. The swirling mass of influences that surround us but that we take to be inert, the strange entity-like nature of the atmosphere, are all part of old meteorology -itself the product of a cosmology that sees the individual subject to, but also sustained by, invisible, mysterious forces. Hinterding describes their experience and approach as one of being ‘wrapped’ in the world, where ‘its not about being in command, its about being inside something and being pushed along by it, and being very attentive to it.’
Attentiveness also wraps the installation. Returning to the cave, in some respects it functions as the artists ‘black cloud’; an entity among forces that disrupts the consistency of normal patterns, forcing one indoors, in retreat, and into a place of interiority that can get very claustrophobic. For the artists the solution was to push things round a little bit – which is about creating your own sublime. If anything we’ve broken a hole in that rock wall. We were barricaded in by those dolomite cliffs so all of a sudden it became interesting to bore our way in there.
The Levitation Ground leaves it up to the viewer to activate the hallucinatory spaces it creates. But given time, and an attentiveness to the conditions, its possible to see that, for instance, the water hypnotically lapping against the cave’s entry is actually flowing in and out in a loop that ‘repeats itself endlessly without variation’ and with ‘movements that don’t make sense’. Whatever interiority the cave might hold is evacuated in this barely perceptible mediation – a technical graft that works only because of the fractal nature of water, because, on a more general level, the unpredictability, patternlessness, noise and sheer excess of the weather – of the atmosphere in general – creates such a loop. At the same time, the viewer might notice their own point of view, which is somewhere hovering above the ocean waters. Not drowning, we realise that tide has suddenly turned and we are inside a structure that jitters, floats and takes us off the ground, rendering us‘buoyant in the atmosphere’.
1. See Daniel Tiffany, Toy Medium: Materialism and Modern Lyric (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), especially chapter four, Meteoric Bodies.
© 2000 by Liminal Product