CARRIZO PARKFIELD prime

 

 

 

OCTOBER 6 - November 14, 2024

NIMOY THEATRE, Westwood

Center for nano systems Institute (CNSI), UCLA

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  ATMOSPHERE OF SOUND: SONIC ART  

IN TIMES OF CLIMATE DISRUPTION

​​UCLA ART|SCIENCE LAB
GETTY PST|ART: ART & SCIENCE COLLIDE 
 

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"Christina McPhee’s film Carrizo-Parkfield Prime (2008-2024) sonifies and visualizes “seismic memory” as the overlay of geographical fault data from earthquakes with human grief and trauma carried within our neural pathways. Since 2004, McPhee has worked with data collected by geologist Dr. Ramon Arrowsmith and the United States Geological Survey in Parkfield and Carrizo Plain National Monument, California, where earthquakes along the San Andreas Fault occur with relative frequency (averaging every 22 years). New to her larger multimedia project, Carrizo-Parkfield Diaries, this film draws its primal audio source from sonification of the 6.0 Parkfield Earthquake at the San Andreas Fault Observatory at Depth (SAFOD). Through frequent landscape site studies, which incorporate drawing-as-performance, photography, sonic field recordings, and video, McPhee creates matrix-like works of art that forge an intimate link between scientific earthquake data and personal observation. 

 

Using her physical memories of waking nightmares as a template for studying earthquake terrains, McPhee illuminates connections between terrestrial and human aftershocks. She associates post-traumatic stress disorder visualizations with seismic sonification and visualization data. Like a cybernetic update for surrealist strategies of body-as-sensing-machine, the film, and the artist herself, perform as a psychic seismograph. Ultimately, the film shapes terrain and trauma into unpredictable and resonant landscapes, through multiple forms of drawing, in a quest for healing." -

 

- Anuradha Vikram, curator, from the exhibition catalog Atmosphere of Sound 2024