Embedded Files
BIOGRAPHY
Yolande Harris is an artist and researcher exploring ideas of sonic consciousness. Her projects consider techniques of navigation, expanding perception beyond the range of human senses, the technological mediation of underwater environments, and our relationship to other species. Walking is central to her practice, creating sound walks that awaken our perceptions within both natural and urban environments. Her projects on underwater sound aim to bring us closer to this inaccessible environment, encouraging connection, understanding, and empathy with the ocean.
Her series Taking Soundings (2006-8) explores historic, contemporary, and animal navigations using sound; Sun Run Sun: On Sonic Navigations (2008-2010) expands this into instruments and installations of sonified and visualized GPS data; and Scorescapes (2009-2012) examines relationships between sound, image, and place, especially in underwater environments. Listening to the Distance (2015) explores expanded sensorial perceptions, the technological mediation of distant environments and the animals that inhabit them. Melt Me Into The Ocean (2018) is an ongoing investigation exploring our relationship to the world oceans through underwater sound. Her current project From a Whale’s Back (2020) uses video, sound and data from tags used by scientists to monitor whales.
Yolande studied music at Edinburgh University and music at Dartington College of Arts, she holds an MPhil from Cambridge University in Architecture and Moving Image and a PhD from Leiden University in ‘Sound, Environment and Sonic Consciousness’. She presents her work internationally, past exhibitions include Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, the House of World Cultures Berlin and the Exploratorium in San Francisco. Awards include stipends from the Dutch Funds for Visual Arts Architecture and Design and research fellowships at the Orpheus Research Center in Music in Ghent, the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne, the Jan van Eyck Academy of Visual Arts in Maastricht. Yolande was Assistant Professor in video and open media at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) and is currently lecturer in digital media art at San Jose State University and lecturer and research associate in electronic music and media art at the University of California Santa Cruz.
Check out more of Yolande Harris' work!
FROM A WHALE'S BACK
Yolande Harris, FROM A WHALE’S BACK, Solo Exhibition, Radius Gallery, Santa Cruz29 May - 26 July 2020,
From a Whale’s Back (2020) is an installation that explores the visual and sonic underwater world inhabited by whales of different species—orcas, humpbacks, and minke whales—from Antarctica to the northeastern Pacific. It uses video taken from tags used by scientists to monitor whales. From A Whale’s Back explores the latest technology for researching behavioral characteristics of whales, using tags suction-cupped to the back of the whale. Simple advances in technology (miniaturization, power, storage) are enabling collection of data in a way that begins to provide an exponentially more detailed view/image of the underwater world from the perspective of animals in it. Video cameras, combined with hydrophones and other sensors, literally allow our human eyes to dive with these animals.
What we see through the camera lens, our surrogate eyes, is not exactly what or how the whale sees, yet it takes us to a place of understanding we have not been before. It opens a world to us. Viewing it, we absorb the speed, the floating relationality of other animals (comparable to antigravity in the ways it flips our physiological assumptions) and the need to breathe by breaking through the surface before diving again. At the point where the whale surfaces, we see and feel our air-breathing world, before diving below for many minutes. There is a strangeness in breaking the surface and trying to orient oneself in distance and sky, a distinct change from the closeness of the underwater world. Considering this, what are we doing peeking into their world? Knowing that technology both enables and inhibits understanding at the same time—that what we see is extraordinary and yet what we don’t see may be more important—how do we apprehend this material? How do we learn while understanding the privilege of our viewpoint?
Page updated
Report abuse