Nada Bumi (Earth Tones)- Revisited
Invisible Flock X Digital Nativ
In November 2017 we set out to make a new piece of work with Digital Nativ, a Jakarta based studio who we have collaborated with on a few projects. The first in 2016 saw us floating a buoy off the coast of Jakarta and they were a big part of Aurora that we made in the summer of 2018.
But this was the first long project together, a journey through Indonesia, or at least a small part of it. It was an open ended process built around the idea of collection, of looking deeply at landscapes, of trying to find new ways to capture and talk about landscapes.
Our journey took us through Java, touching Bali briefly and onto Flores. We were looking for unique landscapes, volcanoes, reefs, lakes and caves. Places that were unique to these islands, distinctive ecologies. As is the way when you try and travel anywhere in Indonesia there were long intervals of time and space between locations. Thousands of miles of road and sea. In those gaps we talked and wrote. In that process was a moment of crystalisation. Our work has always been concerned with landscapes but starting with Nada Bumi our work explicitly shifted to focus almost entirely on ecology. With a few major works under our belt since that time it’s interesting to return to this earlier piece.
We rarely get to revisit old pieces. It’s interesting to return to the work both thematically and technically. To listen to recordings done 2 years ago and see where we have grown and progressed from a purely technical standpoint, but it’s also interesting to re-examine the tone and structure of the work and find a greater articulacy and purpose in the installations.
Nada Bumi itself takes the form of a series of ecosystems represented as large acrylic tubes, themselves divided into layers. Each layer holds the various samples collected on the journey; sand, rocks, water, earth. Audiences interact with the tubes in the space by touching or approaching them, bringing each landscape to life through their contact to it. When they touch the volcanic rock at the top of the tube that represents the volcano of Bromo the sound of the volcano begins to fill the space and a speaker excites a layer of volcanic sand reproducing a version of the landscape that stretched out beneath us when we stood on the rim of the volcano. On the tube that stands in for the lakes of Kelimutu, three craters filled with water that has changed colour from deep red to sky blue over the years through a mysterious chemical process. The audience can move back and forwards through time by touching the water, the lights that colour it cycling through 30 years of colour data. These abstractions of natural processes are intended to bring people into contact with these gigantic timeless events, almost a distillation of nature.
The project began during a residency Digital Nativ undertook with us in Leeds. There we experimented with controlling synthesisers with sensor readings from plants and as we travelled across Indonesia we took readings from the plants we found along the way. The data they generated underpins the generative score of the installation. This process is one that Digital Nativ have taken much further and developed into a far superior all in one plant reader and will be used to generate a live score from plantlife in the work. But this desire to sonify the invisible in nature, to create new aesthetics for how we engage with nature is the driving force behind Nada Bumi as an ongoing process.
Recently we have been having conversations around our work in Sumatra in the jungles and on the frontline of human/elephant conflict and the duty of representation that this entails. Talking with a highly experienced sound recordist we are working with he feels strongly that nature should not be sugar coated. Not drowned under an avalanche of Hanz Zimmer orchestra but allowed to stand on its own. I totally agree with this sentiment. How we position ourselves and our gaze of nature is one of the crucial issues that is facing us. The over postcarding of our fragile planet that reduces it to a space designed to perform its function of beautific platitudes towards us as humans is in some ways no different to those who look at a forest and see only lumber. Rather nature as a series of deep processes. There is an image taken at the top of a famous view point in New Zealand where tourists like to pose for selfies. The reverse shot shows a queue of people waiting patiently for their moment of omni-directional nature. Art and the kind of installations us, our colleagues and friends make present an opportunity to propose other aesthetic considerations beyond the traditional media we already bring to bear on nature. These aesthetics are not necessarily more effective, sometimes a photograph and iconic imagery is still the best tool for telling a story, but in the ongoing journey and battle to fix our fundamentally broken relationship with nature the more ways we create to see and understand nature the greater chance we have of moving into what Glenn Albrecht calls the Symbioscience.
Nada Bumi (Earth Tones) booklet: https://issuu.com/invisibleflock/docs/fa-nadabumi-booklet-digital
Link to video created by Klavs our Studio Manager for the recent install: https://www.instagram.com/p/B5kfeUcHqvZ/
