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4. Sally Ann McIntyre + Campbell Walker
a shelter for the moment, but outlasting it. / Going through the motions (on foot)
radio art, poetry, video, performance
Daily video projections / radiophonic transmissions, 6-9pm
Sally Ann McIntyre and Campbell Walker’s collaboration focuses on cartographic concepts, the location of perception, and the possibility of movement within restraint. They detail a set of non-concentric, yet shared circles of transmission, composition, and recording as material and spatial frameworks, and in doing so elaborate the desire for understanding shared perceptive experiences, while acknowledging the location of bodies and perceptions.
Together our collaboration explores the idea of shelter and constraint, the monumentality of grief and the smallness of the worlds between the walls. We haven’t left the house for a year. What have we been doing? Using up our own resources, working from home, failing to process the now. The claustrophobia of living with someone else in close proximity is also the facing of one’s own limits, the working out of common strategies. Whereas last year’s project for State of Disaster was about walking out from a central point, this one is about the seasickness of losing the horizon, of not being able to escape the moment. In our collaboration, we reflect on what it’s like to interpret this from the perspective of shared proximity. We both take the same information but we interpret it differently. Number of cases, number of deaths, radio broadcasts from the bunker. forts built from books. The cave of algorithms that decides a movement forward. Arbitrary but unavoidable statistics. the echo that returns from such emissions. weathering a moment and trying and failing to keep something safe, walking through the frustrations of entrapment.
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Sally Ann McIntyre
a shelter for the moment, but outlasting it. (2021)
a shelter for the moment, but outlasting it is a poetic and radiophonic work that extends the scale of a shared listening (Kensington variations) for State of Disaster’s 2021 iteration. Unlike the prior work, it looks inward to the house, and considers the material life of collections, following Walter Benjamin’s view that the role of the collector is an archivist, who carefully locks away whole worlds from the past for a future revival, just as the child stores up imaginary landscapes for some unknown future. As the frailty of life becomes overwhelming and the idea of private and public grief combine in an overarching moment of global disorientation, solace is found in small rituals that reflect what it means to be here with human and nonhuman others. In a moment both precarious and uncertain, a daily transmission becomes a poem, the house of cards becomes a shelter.
The work will be transmitted during the two hours of exercise daily to be picked up within a small radius on the local frequency 104.5FM, in accompaniment with Campbell Walker’s video/performance piece, Going through the motions (on foot).
a shelter for the moment, but outlasting it. / Going through the motions (on foot)
radio art, poetry, video, performance
Daily video projections / radiophonic transmissions, 6-9pm
Sally Ann McIntyre and Campbell Walker’s collaboration focuses on cartographic concepts, the location of perception, and the possibility of movement within restraint. They detail a set of non-concentric, yet shared circles of transmission, composition, and recording as material and spatial frameworks, and in doing so elaborate the desire for understanding shared perceptive experiences, while acknowledging the location of bodies and perceptions.
Together our collaboration explores the idea of shelter and constraint, the monumentality of grief and the smallness of the worlds between the walls. We haven’t left the house for a year. What have we been doing? Using up our own resources, working from home, failing to process the now. The claustrophobia of living with someone else in close proximity is also the facing of one’s own limits, the working out of common strategies. Whereas last year’s project for State of Disaster was about walking out from a central point, this one is about the seasickness of losing the horizon, of not being able to escape the moment. In our collaboration, we reflect on what it’s like to interpret this from the perspective of shared proximity. We both take the same information but we interpret it differently. Number of cases, number of deaths, radio broadcasts from the bunker. forts built from books. The cave of algorithms that decides a movement forward. Arbitrary but unavoidable statistics. the echo that returns from such emissions. weathering a moment and trying and failing to keep something safe, walking through the frustrations of entrapment.
Sally Ann McIntyre
a shelter for the moment, but outlasting it. (2021)
a shelter for the moment, but outlasting it is a poetic and radiophonic work that extends the scale of a shared listening (Kensington variations) for State of Disaster’s 2021 iteration. Unlike the prior work, it looks inward to the house, and considers the material life of collections, following Walter Benjamin’s view that the role of the collector is an archivist, who carefully locks away whole worlds from the past for a future revival, just as the child stores up imaginary landscapes for some unknown future. As the frailty of life becomes overwhelming and the idea of private and public grief combine in an overarching moment of global disorientation, solace is found in small rituals that reflect what it means to be here with human and nonhuman others. In a moment both precarious and uncertain, a daily transmission becomes a poem, the house of cards becomes a shelter.
The work will be transmitted during the two hours of exercise daily to be picked up within a small radius on the local frequency 104.5FM, in accompaniment with Campbell Walker’s video/performance piece, Going through the motions (on foot).
Campbell Walker
Going through the motions (on foot) (2021)
This is explicitly conceived as a sequel to An arc is just a line you can bend (clockwise), the work I did for the last year’s State of Disaster. Where that work travelled out to explore the arc at the limit of the lockdown world, this follow-up is about how it feels to have lost those radial paths out to the edge. Where then there was pleasure and play at stretching and testing those boundaries, now there’s dismay and disorientation at even contemplating the edges of the world.
Last year we noticed the projected work made it look like I was climbing the walls. This year I think I might actually be. The radial lines I followed to the edge have dissolved now. Instead, I can just perform rituals that aspire to the memory of resonance, but crumble into visceral mechanics of movement, a doomscrolling of the feet: how many people got sick today? how many people died? Why? What can happen from here? When? Restless frustration without resolution that only leads to cycles of repetition, and crowding up the domestic space that is now also the workspace.
Once again, this will be video projected onto the wall, as I walk the numbers of new cases every day back and forth across the living room, and then project the film every night in the same place as last year.
Going through the motions (on foot) (2021)
This is explicitly conceived as a sequel to An arc is just a line you can bend (clockwise), the work I did for the last year’s State of Disaster. Where that work travelled out to explore the arc at the limit of the lockdown world, this follow-up is about how it feels to have lost those radial paths out to the edge. Where then there was pleasure and play at stretching and testing those boundaries, now there’s dismay and disorientation at even contemplating the edges of the world.
Last year we noticed the projected work made it look like I was climbing the walls. This year I think I might actually be. The radial lines I followed to the edge have dissolved now. Instead, I can just perform rituals that aspire to the memory of resonance, but crumble into visceral mechanics of movement, a doomscrolling of the feet: how many people got sick today? how many people died? Why? What can happen from here? When? Restless frustration without resolution that only leads to cycles of repetition, and crowding up the domestic space that is now also the workspace.
Once again, this will be video projected onto the wall, as I walk the numbers of new cases every day back and forth across the living room, and then project the film every night in the same place as last year.