Libration Song: Chris Caines brings the site-specific to every house

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Isolation brought a flood of faces to my Instagram feed. Musicians, actors, artists, curators: hundreds of them, playing me a song for the health workers, selling me a course, offering a studio visit, inviting me to a webinar, thinking with me about a new, better, fairer society. All with that quiet and yet assertive gaze, something that with time became increasingly piercing, as if they were judging who knows, my haircut, or my poor art on the walls.

Don’t get me wrong, I understood both the economic and the personal need to show themselves, to share something, and I duly followed many – way too many of their suggestions. What became quite apparent, however, was both the sheer willingness and the immense struggle to reframe their practice for the web, as if the well advertised infinite possibilities of digital communication had been reduced to a shaky mobile device, a slightly distorting wide angle, and a lot of talking. Dissemination of music per se is fine in isolation through the ‘usual channels’, but the lack of the performative aspect remains an open wound. Ok, we make more money at a gig in one night than… how many months of royalties? But there is obviously something more important, more core to it.

That’s why I got in touch with multimedia artist and musician Chris Caines, based in the Blue Mountains. His practice is heavily based on site-specific and locative projects, so who more than him should feel affected by the lockdown? And yet, with his recent Libration Song, he managed to adapt a durational sound and video piece commissioned for the surroundings of the City of Canada Bay (Sydney) to any computer with an internet connection, anywhere, in a customised site-specific experience. He did this in a rather simple and yet very effective way that gives us lots of hope. Here is what he had to say about it.

Cyclic Defrost: Hi Chris. When we talk about you as a locative media and site-specific audio and video artist and performer, we are talking about a long track record…

Chris Caines: Yeah, I originally came out of video art and experimental film making, that’s where I grew up creatively in the early days. And then, after a certain point, in the early 2000s I became very interested in locative media as a kind of writing practice, a walking narrative practice, a way of telling stories in very site-specific places. Early on I got a couple of commissions, one from ACMI, one from a museum in Japan, to make early pieces that put me on a track doing locative work. A lot of it was audio-based, some was written, such as reading things from phone apps etc. More recently I came back to using video as well, and also doing that site specifically. I started working more environmentally with senses, feeding into the work environmental and biological information, as part of the narrative. It’s about the evocative things you can do when people are in place and you provide them with a media to be listened to in that spot: that wonderful immersive full body thing you can do in those contexts…

Cyclic Defrost: Together with Gail Priest, David Haines and Joyce Hinterding you were part of last years’ Sydney Festival with the T5 Tank sound project. This was a site-based sound work inside the Georges Heights’ WWII camouflage oil tank: live performance and embodied experience of the site go hand in hand here…

Chris Caines: That was a milestone in the sense that I had never done a large-scale live surround performance; it was a 12 channel surround work inside the remediated oil tank in Middle harbour, here in Sydney put on by Mosman Gallery. We had partners in the area like NSW National Parks and Wildlife, Harbour Trust… the tank had these extraordinary sonic properties, it was 30m across and incredibly resonant… and it still smells like an oil tank, and so you have other resonances: diesel, military history, other Sydney histories that came back when we composed in situ for the public performance. It was great because it was one of the few times when a surround system was actually engineered as a site-specific tool: from a generalised sense of spatial awareness, we moved to site-specific and immersive awareness… and this was completely sound-based and performative, so it put together a lot of things that I do.

Cyclic Defrost: Libration Song, the piece we are talking about today, is performative as well, but the agent here is not you as a live musician, but rather nature itself. It looks like a beautiful, morphing, abstract video-painting accompanied by a morphing, durational sound piece, but the connections are in fact complex and manifold…

Chris Caines: Libration Song is a piece based around the movement of the moon. Libration is an optical illusion in the context of the lunar cycle, the wavering of the moon due to the change in the observers’ perspective. The ‘Learning Space’ in Canada Bay is a digital library right next to the Western Harbour, and there is a tidal body of water just 15 meters away from where the installation is. So, it seemed like a good opportunity to do something that was linked to that water… and I was also really conscious of the audience in that community space, quite high density, with a lot of visitors from the area who come regularly… so the idea became to do something meant to run for a month that changed during that time, so that people would experience that change even without paying too much attention. The piece is based around the tide cycle, from high tide to low tide, and the abstract waves of the video are actually morphing to follow the cycle, radiating from the centre towards the edges of the screens, and going increasingly out of phase, to then come back in phase on the last day of the installation, when the lunar cycle begins again… it connects with the audience in a subtle way and makes you think about the water and the tidal cycle, something that people who live in the city are most often paying attention to, compared to people in more natural settings, so to speak: I brought a sign of the natural world into a highly digital learning environment… there is also a big Chinese community, and we were exhibiting at the time of lunar new year…

Cyclic Defrost: And other aural connections can be made…

Chris Caines: Yes, for a lot of people the cultural memory of the moon is still linked to the first landing and the ‘Apollo experience’… that snowy black and white, the way human voices from the mission were distorted through the radio waves… all that kind of noise is part of our cultural memory. So, the video alludes to 60s broadcasts, and I built all of the audio out of retuned samples from the Apollo mission sounds: noises, magnetic fields, interferences, etc.

Cyclic Defrost: And now the sound piece and the video are distributed digitally on many platforms; this seems an attempt at sharing the experience world-wide: how is this replicating the aim to create attunement?

Chris Caines: Yeah, I released the audio across all digital platforms but also the two-channel video on YouTube as a kind of ‘at home COVID project’ for people, if they want to participate. Technically the ways in which it syncs with the tide is very simple; you can look at the tide timetable, which is publicly available information, and then you can start the file right on high or low tide, and then just let the loop get in and out of sync. So, with the YouTube video we did the same as we did for the original installation: you could look up your local timetable, whatever body of water you are next to or you feel connected to in some way, and then you can open the file and let it loop, and it will stay with the tide and the lunar cycle…

T5-Sound-Project

T5 Sound Performance

Cyclic Defrost: Is this a way to rethink site-specific in the post-COVID world? It is a general project that becomes customised to each individual experience… a way to turn a home into a personal gallery space?

Chris Caines: There is a lot in what people are trying to present of cultural experiences online that is really unsatisfying, especially in exceptional situations like the present times. Obviously my piece is a bit onerous in terms of commitment if you want to set it up in your house… you need to work for it, which conceptually it is part of the attraction for me, because it doesn’t make it easy…

Cyclic Defrost: So you are not only a consumer of the product…

Chris Caines: No, you are doing an installation in your house, or in your browser at least… for me it is a way to connect the virtuality of what everybody is doing to a real space and a physical cycle, and give this to people… to be connected to some real space. You can bring the outside world into your house…

Cyclic Defrost: …at a moment when potentially you are restricted to your home and cannot leave it.

Chris Caines: It is a very long video file, two 6.5 hours long files… when I was producing it I had to run it in my home studio for days, and just the checking in with it, checking the audio and the video etc… that sense of slowness was actually very nice to live with domestically…

Cyclic Defrost: I did it too, and it was in fact quite soothing… I linked it with Mediterranean tides, for a touch of exoticism…

Chris Caines: Yeah… I guess that with the COVID lockdowns moving in waves across the globe, we could potentially have a similar wave of downloads and hits from different places… it would be interesting if that happened, and to map that…

Here are the links for you to give it a try:
Libration on Youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACkSMVaaV50&autoplay=1&mute=0
Libration on Bandcamp https://chriscaines.bandcamp.com/album/libration-song-soundtrack
Libration on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/album/2u9bT1Sr4ehNyvAEuyMmRj?si=fU8MfP6pRwekmnqdkaiLNQ
Wiley Tide Timetables https://tides.willyweather.com.au/

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