Artist:        Richard Garet
Title:          Huskies Camp  | ©
Date:         2005-09
Duration:   7′51

photo by: Richard Garet

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THE SOUND

In August of 2005 while visiting Juneau, Alaska, I ventured on a helicopter ride to the top of one of the local glaciers, Mendenhall Glacier, where there was known to be a sled camp of Alaskan Huskies. The moment the helicopter landed, over 270 dogs began barking overwhelming everything with their sounds. Inside of that habitat there was no other life besides the huskies and their trainers. The glacier, dogs, people, helicopters, and sleds created the only sound in this area. It was really fascinating and saddening at the same time to witness such an environment of sublime beauty being used for artificiality and confinement. There was beauty in the sounds generated by these several hundred dogs creating a perfect orchestration in contrast to the pure white area that offered an arena without distractions for it. The reality behind the beauty was that the animals barked out of excitement knowing that from one moment to the next they would be untied and attached to a sled to push tourists around the glacier. While I was there I recorded sound and image. Although I was unprepared equipment wise I managed to collect several great moments of raw data. This piece was comprised from sounds collected during this excursion, processed and unprocessed, somewhat constructing by memory, an interpretation of the location, sensations, and experiences from that day at the Huskies camp.

THE ARTIST

Richard Garet (born in 1972, Montevideo, Uruguay) is a sound and visual artist that currently lives and works in New York, USA. He is interested in the phenomena found and produced in aural and visual time-based media, in nature’s processes, and human beings’ relationship with both artificial and natural environments. Garet explores the it-referential, communicational, and sensory characteristics of the various media he utilizes. Additionally, he focuses on the investigation of aural and visual spatial-contexts, relational structures, process, materiality, function, and form. Even though Garet’s work suits the standard gallery setting, many of his other activities as an artist explore the various practices of experimental sound and video performance. All of these modes are additional ways in which Garet’s work exposes the audience to visual and physical-acoustic sensory perception.  His interdisciplinary media work has been showed in the USA and internationally and his sound work has been released by the sound-art labels And-Oar, Non Visual Objects, Winds Measure Recordings, Unframed Recordings, Con-V, Leerraum, White_Line Editions, and Contour Editions.

links: www.richardgaret.com | www.contoureditions.com

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Artist:         Nick Sowers
Title:           the audio cemetery of Omaha Beach  | ©
Date:          2009
Duration:    8′40

photo by: Nick Sowers

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THE SOUND

This is an audio cemetery.  Audio cemeteries exist where marked graves are prohibited.  Audio cemeteries are the opposite of tombstone cemeteries.  They are composed of fleeting trajectories, dissipating before an image of a memorial can be formed.  They seek to redefine the memorial of the dead by their infinite reproducibility and economy of reproduction.  At the top of Omaha Beach, St. Laurent-sur-Mer, Normandy, sits the American cemetery of white tombstones shaped as crosses and shaped as Stars of David.  9,387 dead lay beneath the grass.  You must pass through a metal detector and security check before entering, as though at an airport, or an embassy checkpoint.  The American cemetery is fortified.  By contrast,  on the slopes leading up to the cemetery from the beach, are the remains of German-built concrete bunkers, their concrete exoskeletons broken by bombs, feeble and eroding in the wind.  While a stile sits atop one of the bunkers honoring the American 5th Engineer Special Brigade, nothing remains to honor the Germans who lived in these husks of concrete for endless months.  They died defending this beach.  They were human, too.  This is a guided tour through the German audio-cemetery at Omaha Beach: invisible to the eye, visceral to the ear.

THE ARCHITECT

Nick Sowers is practicing the construction of space, using sound and 2×4s alike, in the San Francisco Bay area.  As a Master of Architecture student from UC Berkeley he has been traveling around the world on a fellowship studying militarized spaces and their potential for re-use.

links: www.soundscrapers.com | www.archinect.com

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