4Most Gallery / Gainesville, FL / 2021
We Live Inside is a series of works loosely informed by the beliefs of a 19th century utopian community based in Southwest Florida. Proselytizing from their heart pine constructed compound, the Koreshan Unity’s “Cellular Cosmogony” posited the Earth to be a hollow sphere in which humanity occupied the territories lining its interior shell.
80 years after the Koreshans arrived in Florida, the first image to ever depict our planet in a fully spherical form was prominently featured on the back cover of “The Last Whole Earth Catalog”. Photographed against the heart pine floors of a Gainesville apartment and framed in the same material, the 1971 compendium on alternative living additionally shows an alternative Earth via this surviving copy. Transformed by 50 years of humidity, the tears in its newsprint pages reveal a permeable planet and the conceptual possibilities offered by a cavernous body. Concave like the Koreshan’s but emptied of the universe within, a sound made from one side of the interior would take approximately 74.3 seconds to return to its source as an echo.
Installed on the windows and walls of the gallery are audio surface exciters which massage these static building supports into fluid and functioning loudspeakers. At the center of the space sits two reclining stools from which field recordings of natural phenomena are mixed and amplified (a seat for both a sound and its echo, again hewn in old growth pine). Before these audio files escape the hard drive where they are stored, each passes through a delay effect that mimics the aforementioned and invented echo time. The windows turned PA system amplify live sound as it is produced, and the now kinetic walls continually collect and expel the cacophony of field recordings as they layer on top of their past repetitions.
As a pseudo model of a Koreshan planet, We Live Inside has one important distinction — windows turned speakers that broadcast in two directions. Sound simultaneously moves within the building while seeping through this bodily puncture into the expanse outside. The familiar yet removed field recordings bleed into the everyday of 4th Avenue. The present reality is altered by the possibility of another.
additional info – 4Most Gallery
exhibition statement – JPG
performance – archived livestream
included on – Field Recordings Infinite Mixtape, NTS Radio
80 years after the Koreshans arrived in Florida, the first image to ever depict our planet in a fully spherical form was prominently featured on the back cover of “The Last Whole Earth Catalog”. Photographed against the heart pine floors of a Gainesville apartment and framed in the same material, the 1971 compendium on alternative living additionally shows an alternative Earth via this surviving copy. Transformed by 50 years of humidity, the tears in its newsprint pages reveal a permeable planet and the conceptual possibilities offered by a cavernous body. Concave like the Koreshan’s but emptied of the universe within, a sound made from one side of the interior would take approximately 74.3 seconds to return to its source as an echo.
Installed on the windows and walls of the gallery are audio surface exciters which massage these static building supports into fluid and functioning loudspeakers. At the center of the space sits two reclining stools from which field recordings of natural phenomena are mixed and amplified (a seat for both a sound and its echo, again hewn in old growth pine). Before these audio files escape the hard drive where they are stored, each passes through a delay effect that mimics the aforementioned and invented echo time. The windows turned PA system amplify live sound as it is produced, and the now kinetic walls continually collect and expel the cacophony of field recordings as they layer on top of their past repetitions.
As a pseudo model of a Koreshan planet, We Live Inside has one important distinction — windows turned speakers that broadcast in two directions. Sound simultaneously moves within the building while seeping through this bodily puncture into the expanse outside. The familiar yet removed field recordings bleed into the everyday of 4th Avenue. The present reality is altered by the possibility of another.
additional info – 4Most Gallery
exhibition statement – JPG
performance – archived livestream
included on – Field Recordings Infinite Mixtape, NTS Radio
