EARTHWORKS

An audio installation, recorded for release on Sono Luminus in 7.1 surround, binaural, and stereo formats in May 2024.

Originally created for the exhibition “Planetary Home Improvement: From Just-in-time to Geological Time”

VI PER Gallery, Prague, December 2021-February 2022

The home improvement store is a geological site on demand. Rockwool, Sheetrock, Quikrete Stucco. Materials are processed into products, packaged, stockpiled, stacked, and sold across global DIY supply-chains, from Home Depot to Bauhaus and OBI. Basalt, gypsum, limestone. Material economies are severed from mineral entanglements with millennia of rock, fossil, plant, and stone. It takes 1 day to install drywall; it takes 299 million years to form gypsum.

What planetary urgencies, temporalities and extractions undergird products of just-in-time geology? Rewriting shelf life and collapsing the ancient and the instant, this research project takes stock of the terrestrial home via the big-box DIY store, as the home improvement industry continues to boom and propagate rocks in anthropo-convenient forms. The store is the modern quarry. This exhibition examines the geological life of product accumulation, installation, and instruction through both physical and digital gallery artifacts. If the Eames’s Powers of Ten organized the universe by relative scale, Planetary Home Improvement redesignates its earthly substrates by relative temporality—from the planet to the point of sale.

Geo Acoustics

Manipulating field recordings of the raw materials, in situ and extracted, Nathan Davis created a multi-channel sound environment that uses these consumer building materials as speakers and resonators.

Occasional earth rumbling emanates from a pile of gravel. A five-piece ensemble of plywood, foam insulation, polycarbonate, acoustic tile, and galvanized steel, fitted with transducers, fills the gallery with low humming and crackling. This geological soundscape is created from recordings of these same materials as found: in nature, during the violence of their extraction, and as fashioned into instruments. Visitors are encouraged to listen to a material up close, as each panel becomes a speaker that colors the sound with its own characteristics.

Team: Christine Giorgio, Amelyn Ng, Gabriel Vergara, with Nathan Davis

Recordings for the soundscape were gathered in situ by the composer. Narration voiced by Sylvia Milo on text adapted by Christine Giorgio. Additional samples performed by Katinka Kleijn, Levy Lorenzo, Josh Modney, and Joshua Rubin of the International Contemporary Ensemble. Extraction samples were sourced from https://www.soundsofchanges.eu/ and used in compliance with Creative Commons license 4.0.