CAMP1
Irish Sea, 2009
(North Sea – ISEA2009: Belfast – AND Festival: Whitehaven, Burrow-in-Furness, Liverpool)
M.A.R.I.N. organized a 3-month expedition, which took place on a catamaran sail boat and several harbors, participating to ISEA2009 in Belfast as well as to the AND Festival hosted by FACT Liverpool. Participatin artists examined littoral lives, the interconnection of marine culture and life at land and produced installations as well as workshops.
The journey started near Hamburg, with Nigel Helyer and Michael Lake from Australia, Tapio Mäkelä from Finland and Lars Dahl as the Danish skipper. The four of us sailed a 12,5 meter catamaran across the North Sea to the Caledonian Canal in Scotland, to travel through the Highlands, and Loch Ness, to reach the Irish Sea.
Even though sailing experience there was in heaps, Tapio was the only one not to become intensely sea sick. Until the canal, there was no way to write code or work on audio during the journey, let alone look at the screen. So rough was the North Sea, yet also rewarding in many ways. Read more of the journey from older blog posts.
In Belfast, we were joined by Andreas Siagian from House of Natural Fibre, Indonesia and Daniel Woo from Sydney, who alongside with Michael Lake works on Audio Nomad with Nigel. Ecolocated – Littoral lives was the main project, a locative sound installation with visualizations that dealt with Belfast Loch, and the ways in which perception of the sea had changed over the decades culturally and ecologically. The extensive material consisted of interviews, sound samples, water quality measurements and its data sonified and visualized, stories and snap shots. In the installation was setup at Catalyst Arts Gallery. Andreas Siagian produced an iteration of his work in progress, Naralexa, analogue water installation with sound generation, as well as helped out with the Ecolocated setup. We got lots of generous participation from local Marine scientists as well as the artist community, and historians. During ISEA2009, we also threw the best party, of course, at Catalyst arts, and presented in two panels.
Marko Peljhan (SL), with whom Tapio gave shape to the initial concept of the project, was also supposed to take part to the residency, as well as Matthew Biedermann (CA/US). They arrived for the festival only, visited the boat, and presented CDPDU unit, a mobile environmental data visualization unit, as part of the exhibition. Matthew contributed to sensor development for the project extensively. Both Matthew and Marko focused on the API project from there on (great initiative).
During the AND Festival, we gave three separate workshops and presented the project via a locative, web based interface. To get there, we sailed from Belfast to Isle of Man, and from there to Whitehaven reaching speeds of 19 knots.
As part of the collaboration with the AND Festival, M.A.R.I.N. artists in residence did a 2-day workshop with sound artists from SoundWave, a music and sound art organization from Workington. This was followed by a workshop with Dropzone, a youth organization from Barrow-in-Furness, and a workshop with Tate Liverpool. These experiences were all rich, yet so different. From sound artists in dialogue to a rap song developed by drop-out kids to stories from local maritime and family histories. While in Liverpool we were docked outside of the Tate and got a fair bit of attention just being there.
The sail boat gained a lot of symbolic attention, yet it was never the point of the project, to sail. We in fact learned that while it was physically and experience wise an amazing component, it took away attention from our primary research on marine ecologies and cultures. And at the same time did work in favor of the project. This ambivalence though led to a rethinking of how the project would be run in the future, plus, we did not have at the end enough cash to keep the boat running for the following years, thanks to the credit crunch deleting one private funder.
Dialogue with marine scientists was highly encouraging; our interest in developing a different way of discussing and designing around marine ecology with publics got lots of good feedback and future potential for collaboration going.