Portals, 2023
Augmented Reality Narrative Soundwalk

When we listen intimately, we can be transported. Storytelling’s power is in its ability to not only deliver us to the world of the speaker, but to old and new worlds within ourselves. Narrating makes familiar, it weaves relations.

Portals is an exercise in the storytelling potential of Augmented Reality and serves to encourage resonant connections within ourselves and with others. The artwork was inspired by the performances and community fabric works of Women Connected (WOCO), a performance collective in Rotterdam, and explores potentials for connectivity through embodied practices as well as the generative possibilities of the art of storytelling and the radical act of listening.

In Portals, visitors are guided through a series of poems and reflections in an altered reality populated by abstracted silhouettes of WOCO members and textile objects composed of iridescent and reflective materials. Shimmering digital threads flow from and within the figures, weaving mappings of relations. A meditative binaural soundscape transports the visitor to a space shared between the real and virtual environment.

The work considers the many manifestations of portals - from object, to tradition, movement, to memory. As the story progresses, the position of the narrator is subverted and the visitor is invited to imagine their own portal and to reflect on its power to stitch the past to the present, to creatively envisage futures, and to reveal intimate interlacings.

Developed during the Digital Flying Carpet Residency in cooperation with V2 Lab for the Unstable Media and Women Connected, Rotterdam, the Netherlands.

Electric Fields, 2023
Collaborative VR Community Composition

Electric Fields is a participatory community composition that takes place in a web browser or VR format. Upon entering the space, visitors are surrounded by 3D renderings of spring flowers that rose between the cracks of Berlin’s city sidewalk. Nature's refusal to be reduced to binary codes has left their figures gnarled, knotted, and incomplete. Each bloom holds an electromagnetic recording taken from nearby. Visitors are encouraged to “pick” a flower and adjust its corresponding volume to determine its space in the arrangement. What results is a collaborative playfulness which encourages listening and engagement as integral contributors to our attunement to one another and our environment.

This work was produced as part of the Social VR Art Camp Residency.

Stonesong, 2022
VR Poem and Soundscape Installation

Stonesong is a binaural VR environment implementing experimental storytelling and poetics as the foundations for a feminist methodological approach to world-building. When journeying through this ethereal realm, the visitor encounters multiple 3D rendered statues of the artist and other stone structures forged from transcendent matter. Sonic elements of voice and stone compose a soundscape interwoven with four poems further illuminating themes of materiality, imaginative potential, reflection, resonance, and time. Stonesong contemplates the complex, layered, and shared constitutive conditions of metamorphic stones and trans* and genderqueer bodies, specifically stone butches.

Toward Another, 2019
Audio Piece with Photograph
2 minutes 52 seconds

Toward Another invites listeners to an unlikely realm. Using a feminist methodology of vulnerable affective writing as a framework for dreamscape fiction, it shares an intimate soundscape known only to the narrator. Like a dream, the voice tells a story which dances along the line of what is fiction and what is real. Toward Another is an ephemeral soundwalk and a ghost story about longing and reacquaintance. It navigates the narrator’s inner sonic world, recounting the first time they were visited by their “dead” voice in a dream.

The 5x5” accompanying photograph is a blurred horizon made with a defective camera jammed for multiple exposures to create an ethereal landscape, heavily evoking the feeling of being stuck in one’s own head, unable to see beyond itself, yet still there’s a horizon.

splitting at the seams, 2019
Video
3 minutes 59 seconds

riding the newness of this voice
the training wheels screeching as I round each bend
once an angel, now an anchor
dragging
stirring up muck
what I am saying
is not what you’re hearing
a bellowing crescendo
I feel my sides split open

splitting at the seams is an examination of tension. It is an exploration of the physiology of my voice, as it visibly stretches and strains, and the histories held in its folds. Trans bodies are often objectified and sexualized in media. Here, attention is placed on a desexualized and androgynous focal point, the throat, as two voices of the same body explore less familiar themes of trans corporeal vulnerability and exposure.

Can’t Shut This Body Up, 2019
Transparent Paper and Natural Body Oil

Through corporeal sound work, Can’t Shut This Body Up examines the relationship of my transgendered/transsexed body with the politics of erasure, access, and existence. In the constant wake of trans* targeted violence in the US, enacted through policies, infrastructure, and culture, I chose to let my body speak through the oil it produced in excess as I began the hormone therapy treatment of my gender journey. Over time, the impressions of my surgically altered chest, my enlarged clitoris, and face continue to diffuse and expand on the paper, further refusing borders and containment. The piece concludes that even if trans* voices are made faint or disregarded, our bodies cannot be silenced and will sound ferociously and unrepentantly of their existence.

Erasure, 2018
Graphite Drawings

Original vocal lines from 3 different albums are represented as musical scores before starting hormonal transition. At 6 months on HRT, the artist recorded themself singing the parts again, erasing notes that could no longer be reached. The erased notes are now spectral; they will never be able to fill them in again and more are erased by the day/week/month. 

These drawings hold sounds, but they are not sounding. They examine the relationship of a transgendered/transsexed body within the politics and corporeal engagement of erasure and existence. They contain the infinite reach and limitations of trans (re)embodiment.

Bends, 2014
Poem, Sculpture, Sound
Length: 1:29
Published in Wild Application Publication

Bends is a composition specifically written for Jim Draper and Staci Bu Shea’s inaugural Wild Application publication, an interdisciplinary, single themed art book. The concept word was “knees” and I immediately thought of a field recording in which I captured my grandmother praying on the night of her 90th birthday. When I was younger, we would kneel beside the bed together to deliver our nightly prayers. Now, in her fragile physical state, she foregoes this ritual and lies in bed when praying.

To compose my audio piece for Bends I built a delay pedal and a small, crude amplifier. I manipulated the audio path of a recording of my grandmother’s nightly prayer, providing a (circuit) bend for her when she could no longer kneel due to her frail physical state. A poem and a visual of a twisted, tarnished flute, represent the decomposition of both her physical state and of the captured sound.

For audio, please request via the contact page.