GALLERY GUIDE FAULT BOUND BODIES CAROLINE DOOLIN PROJECT ARTS CENTRE 10 FEBRUARY – 8 APRIL 2017
Caroline Doolin Fault Bound Bodies, 2017# HD video, 18' 30" 5.1 surround sound wood, carpet, bench
Voiceover | Eddie Kay 3D Animation | Andrew Carass & James O’Toole Foldout Diagram Animation | Richard Forrest Text Animation | Petar Cale Sound Mastering | Ian Dunphy Script Consultant | Kate Heffernan Filming access courtesy of: Hellisheidi Geothermal Power Plant, Hengill, Iceland O-I Glass, Clackmannanshire, Scotland
Floorplan
Introduction
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A segment of the flesh of the earth rises in the gallery for Caroline Doolin’s Fault Bound Bodies. This large construction, surroundsound and video installation questions whether energy – physical or emotional – can be sustained over the long term. Fault Bound Bodies was sparked by a residency in Portrane, Dublin, which is overlooked by the extinct volcano of Lambay Island. Doolin’s research led her to focus on the energy manifested by the earth’s internal heat and Lambay’s formation through huge tectonic plate shifts during the formation and break up of Pangea that shaped the continents as we know them today. Doolin constructs a love story between two volcanic sites, separated by vast continental shifts, in order to question what role the interaction between energy, material and body might play beyond its perceived human use-value. The Icelandic site pines for its lost love, in sounds gathered from the site itself, struggling with its new status as a functional object. It is pierced by geothermal pipelines that mine its heat for energy, and it worries about what its faraway love may think of its utilitarian looks and base functionality. The fractious and at times hysterical passion continues to burn for an extinguished lover, despite the Icelandic sites constant struggle to:
Make things work bigger. Make things work better. Make things work matter. The molten origins of this earth are revealed in a dense mosaic of thick, rich and luscious visual imagery from the Hellisheidi Geothermal plant and the molten birth of glass in a bottle factory, all mixed with immersive, 3D modelled imagery. The viewer swoops and flys over the imagined passion of these vast, geological masses. The steam and hiss of volcanic existence was captured onsite in Iceland and is mixed with: a digitised, disembodied voice; with fragments of popular song forming the volcano voice in the surround sound of the installation. The story of unexpected lives that thrive on the fresh crust that have been churned out by these ‘mutants of heat’ further questions the interaction between energy, material and body. The ‘ground dwellers’ of Fault Bound Bodies are the maleo birds who lay their eggs in the dense heat of live volcanos, then completely abandon their unhatched young, only to pair up for life. Elsewhere a pair of sharks eke out a life several degrees too hot for their species in an oceanic volcano, unable, or perhaps too listless to move out of their hostile environment. Finishing with Roy Orbison’s In Dreams, Doolin questions whether this love between the two sites – or indeed any physical or emotional energy – can continue relentless, across such an enormous space and time, or whether this is just a fiction, an impossible dream: “It’s too bad that all these things, Can only happen in my dreams Only in dreams In beautiful dreams.”1
Acting Curator Deborah Madden 1 Roy Orbison, In Dreams, Monument Records, 1963.
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Dreams of Plastic Love Rebecca O’Dwyer
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All bodies, the firmament, the stars, the earth and its kingdoms, are not equal to the lowest mind; for mind knows all these and itself; and these bodies nothing. All bodies together, and all minds together, and all their products, are not equal to the least feeling of love. This is of an order infinitely more exalted. From all bodies together, we cannot obtain one little thought; this is impossible, and of another order. From all bodies and minds, we cannot produce a feeling of true love; this is impossible, and of another and supernatural order.1 In 2015, a team of explorers visited the crater of the volcano Kavachi, off the coast just south of the island Vangunu in the Solomon Islands. The water above its crater is hot and acidic, and the volcano itself is mostly erupting. But, as the explorers dragged their cameras from this most bellicose Pacific, they discovered that something, somehow, was living there: both hammerhead and silky sharks, along with some stingray. Seemingly unaffected by the crater’s inhospitable conditions — likely even benefiting from them — they clearly also had some means of anticipating an eruption: some primitive means of touching it, foreseeing its heat. Similarly, there is a bird called the maleo that lives in Sulawesi, a remote corner of the Indonesian archipelago. The maleo’s breeding ground is confined to little more than a small scrap of sand; and — since its prodigious eggs are much more nutritious than those of a chicken — it is in dire risk of extinction. The maleo bird does not incubate its eggs. Instead, it works the volcanic sand to find the perfect temperature, buries its egg, and then leaves. The earth’s touch, itself, does the rest: each one a modest phoenix. To breed maleos in captivity, by contrast, they pull the egg from the sand as soon as its parents depart, and put it in an oven. Two sets of opportunists, then, each reliant on the earth’s heat. And for as long as these creatures have lived, they have sense and capitalised on it; but we, we took a little longer: we needed to name this heat, order it. To this end, in 1785 the scientist James Hutton set off in search on an answer, to a place in the Scottish highlands called Glen Tilt. His aim was to prove that the earth was once molten; that what fuelled it was something like a huge eternal furnace; and what separated granite from sandstone, for example, was in fact only time. Coming close to a point where the first inklings of the Tay met another, smaller tributary, he was to get the answer he wished for. At this point in the valley, time itself would have appeared sensible,
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the sandstone awash with swathes of pinkish granite, which had gushed into it, molten, some millennia later. Time now looked liquid; the rocks spoke of a planet that constantly created as it took away; of a blaze, deep in the earth, that did not stop; of vertigo: of a time that humans could not touch. Hutton’s realisations meant that the world was seriously old. The changes that shaped it had been playing out over billions, rather than millions of years; and, what came to be know as the Great Unconformity meant that continents had fractured, drifted apart and crashed back together, creating mountains. Landmasses had emerged from the seas, goaded into verticality by tectonic plates atop an innermost current of molten liquid. Vast stretches of land had simply moved, being swept away by wind, force, or water, and recast, sediment by sediment, elsewhere. For Hutton, all this meant one thing: that the earth was a system; that some great furnace willed it, and that this had been working, and would continue to do so, with or without us. All this, of course, was heresy: it now meant that the divine spark was a question of endless beginning, rather than one, inviolable touch. This system, which both far precedes, and is complicated by, us, is unimaginable in its entirety; mostly it is vast darkness, in which only matter speaks, indistinct. And in much the same way that you cannot affect a prior card game, as you play another, in the present, we can only really grasp its form: we sketch and guess, bending its logic through the present. Detail is always hazy. But now, to speak of causation means to speak of human causation: there is not one realm of experience that escapes our touch. Much like the granite at Glen Tilt, we have permeated nature, warped it in anthropocentrism, or what Heidegger called Gestell. As a result, nature has now assumed something like a subject position: reiterating us, it has become less predictable, less matter-of-fact. Now, we might almost speak of human rocks, human volcanoes; perhaps we might even speak of love. Fault Bound Bodies opens with an unknown, though human, voice. It speaks of ‘we,’ but it remains unclear who, or what this means. The narration starts at the beginning of the earth, with the hiss and spit of first life, when it, ‘once raged violent, volatile and unstable’. At this time, nothing was; nothing had yet taken form. All only meant a shared flux, molten and ill defined. Both nothing and everything: a factory, bottles spinning staccato, the scene overlaid by a surging red sphere, its surface a map of fiery tributaries; mutants, now in a barren warm-grey landscape, almost
lunar; gushing water, and the tell-tale push of pink into grey rock; undulating, planetary bodies against a tumultuous expanse of black; clouds of acrid smoke bellowing from the soil: in short, chaos. Keenly looking to reach stasis. But then, the narrator says, ‘we — drew inward. We were pocketed in this space where potential propagates. And in the divides, structure formed’. As the world cooled, the elements distinguished themselves; they separated and grew apart, assuming ‘many and celebrated forms’. They become productive in differentiation; but what united them was their initial, indiscriminate past. As the world grows even colder, they lose touch. Now distinct and separate, reshaped to human desires, they struggle — by dint of their newfound humanness — to keep on participating: ‘Why do we keep churning?’ they ask, ‘Why do we keep rising and falling? Why do we keep swapping cold for hot to fuel a surface only some of us will ever see?’ Fault Bound Bodies, then, is double in meaning: the bodies Doolin refers to are bound by both geological, and human, faults. They take on our foibles, even as they tap into deep time. Like us, they love and are loved, even bringing on pain so as to keep it close. Like us, they struggle to reconcile the validity of their life, their productivity, towards an end they will not see. The video tells one such story, of a geothermal site that gains consciousness, only to find that its beloved, a volcano, has been swept away in some cruel continental drift. In the interim, most likely millions if not billions of years, the first has been made productive — ‘plastic for purpose’ — its heat plundered by us, the ‘crust dwellers,’ for energy. The other is now gone, unmoored and silent in the world’s indifferent flux. This is an emotional rendering of deep time: of a system that feels as much as we do. Translating this emotion, of course, can only ever be speculative; it must act on the condition of our not-being-there. Technology, being ostensibly blank, is therefore ideal; it does not speak of the human, and neither is it restricted by human experience. It can go anywhere, anytime: back to the dawn of time, if it wants. In Fault Bound Bodies landscapes prior or indifferent to human life are voraciously technological; they effervesce and explode, day-glo hues unconfined by either the realm of subjective experience, or any known nature. Found, technological sounds — seemingly diegetic to these landscapes — crackle with the intensity of a world to which we will never be privy. A pair of languid sharks move, tail fins superlative, around the surface of an unreasonably blue, primordial lagoon;
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in another vista, a gargantuan volcano in the middle distance belches orange smoke up into the sky, its veins on show in a molten crack that zigzags all the way back to us, who watch. This beginning of the earth looks a lot like the apocalypse: both, of course, mean the obliteration of the human. Voices, too, become sites of technological translation. The geothermal site communicates in a technological performance of voice — text-to-speech — its pacing manipulated by Doolin so as to render it markedly uncanny: telling cracks in automation; neither human, nor not human. And its voice is weirdly affecting, because we cannot but cast it in human terms. We have no alternative — language can never be sufficiently othered to account for the vagaries of a geothermal site; technology, likewise, can never be wholly unyoked from its human trace. To make themselves sensible they instinctively revert towards the well tread tropes of human, romantic love: clichés, even. To cope with loss, the geothermal plant looks, as it should, towards the human: we know heartbreak well. And in particular, they find instances of sound, of song, which somehow point back to some common eternity: a fallacy, of course, considering our relative late coming. These sounds are not perfect, they’ll admit, but there is something in their mode of address that speaks of the sublime; reaches outside of time, and into theirs. Their strategies, shaped in our image, are of course familiar; they obsessively reminisce, growing attached to these bits of sound much like the jilted masochist who listens to playlists of songs on repeat, pining for a lost love. At times, they are as melodramatic as teenagers: ‘we will beseech these forces to leave us where we lay. We’ll make pacts we can’t keep. We’ll sell any soul we once had. You will labour with us or we will lie dormant with you’. But, being billions of years old and thus reconciled to waiting, they are patient. They yearn for Ultima Pangea - the much-awaited undoing of each and every continent, which ‘may cause us to rouse and converge once more’. Hopefully, at that point they will be reunited; but nothing is certain. In human terms, the geothermal plant, like all other non-human life, is meant to be flexible, plastic only insomuch as it concedes. It must bend to our needs. Its narrators parrot our own motivational quotes back to us, cast through the dry irony so specific, apparently, to entities that have lived for billions of years: ‘Plough on. Make it Matter. Stay Resourceful’. They have been rerouted towards an end, a human one; and this productivity is almost shameful — it smacks of giving in. ‘How could you ever love us,’ our inhuman narrator intones,
‘when we have become so practical, so fit for function?’ And so love, it would seem, offers an alternative model of productivity, in distinct contrast to the demands of us humans. For these entities cannot reproduce, but only work alongside each other, churning along to a common primordial rhythm. Their love is useless: a new, untranslatable resource. And so in it, these entities achieve something like true plasticity: resisting, creating uselessness as much as tap-able, quantifiable energy.2 A new language, versed in deep time, of a domain distinct from the human. Resigned to waiting for Ultima, when all the continents will reunite, our primordial narrator gets back to waiting. It has spoken, and now it will go back to work, back to this infinitesimal and trivial understanding of time, and of heat. As it does this, though, it often communes with this ‘true heat’ — catching glimpses here and there, and keeping it close, while it can. A black backdrop recedes and we can understand one such glimpse as strings, then a voice, start to swell: Can only happen in my dreams/Only in dreams/In beautiful dreams. An inhuman eye sweeps out from what looks like a disco floor, its flat back ground some variant of transcendental parquet; mountains in pink, yellow, and green stand at its periphery, atop a grid of lurid green lines. It resembles a landscape, a scene, only partially constructed, like a technological model that’s yet to be filled in. The horizontal grid’s lines undulate as small clusters of light, almost planetary, heave and move underneath. There are two larger than all the rest, and they encircle each other, as though in a dance. Finally they touch, coalescing in one ecstatic ball of light; not long after, this ball of light, of energy, becomes indistinguishable once again, just one light amongst millions: there, where ‘the sound of collective voices doesn’t seem too good to be true’. Reunited, they are now ecstatic in uniformity; euphoric in indistinction. 1 Blaise Pascal, Thoughts (New York: Cosimo Classics, 2007) pp. 280-1 2 Catherine Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain? (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008)
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Admission to the visual arts at Project Arts Centre is always free. Gallery exhibition hours: Mon – Sat from 11am (excluding bank holidays) @ProjectVisArts #FaultBoundBodies #ProjectArts www.projectartscentre.ie Project Arts Centre 39 East Essex Street Temple Bar Dublin 2 Ireland