Location
Listening to Animalities, Soils & Shipwrecks: A large canvas piece with an interactive element (headphones) that will document an ongoing attempt by Frederick Young and Linus Lancaster to make physical (haptic), audio, and telepathic contact with the zeppelin USS Macon, which crashed in the ocean in 1935 and sank in 1500 feet of water. In this project we see a great opportunity for a productive engagement with a wide range (a constellation) of seemingly different, but inexorably connected subjectivities. In addressing the "crash of industrial technology" and conceiving of ways to think past it, we bring in an analysis of the relation between Techne and poiesis through art practice as, in part, a "bringing home" of the wreck. However, we see this reunion as opening a 'different' grounding, a new point of departure, rather than being an arrest. It is accomplished, in part, through a transfer of Soil from the Macon's home base to the ocean floor in a "splicing of locations", and also through "wiring" the debris field to other conversations pertaining to Techne and its bearings on human interrelations with the planet.
The piece will document how we have tied an underwater project on "spirit" in techne with field projects on Listening to Animalities, which also involved painting portraits of Nietzsche and Benjamin on either side of Dawn, a Horse (placing them in conversation on the questions of Animality via Animality), who was wired to a Goat who, in turn, was wired to a radio and placed the call the Macon. We then brought a Horse to the Point Sur shoreline overlooking the wreck site and attempted to send a deep sea hydrophone down so that we, and the Horse, could Listen to the debris field. In doing so we are placing Animalities, Techne, and Materialities in conversations that open on new possibilities for interpretation of their interrelations, both philosophical and performative.