•  endling  •
a duet for sound and video

Recordings capture fragments of time—serving as both reminders of a moment passed and also a connection between past and present. But do these recordings really capture the past, or are they illusions? 

The Kauaʻi ʻōʻō was once renowned for the bell-like call of its song, including varied duetting calls between the male and female birds. A series of recordings from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology capture these duets, along with a recording of what is thought to be the last bird of the species. This recording is permeated with both the noise of the recording device and haunting silence as the bird calls out for a partner that no longer exists. When the field recordist, Jim Jacobi, played back the audio in the field, the last Kauaʻi ʻōʻō sang a duet with the recording device, believing himself to be reunited with another bird, and sang in response to his own call. The result of this encounter is something that was never recorded: the duet between the last Kauaʻi ʻōʻō and his own recorded echo. 

The 1986 recording of the last Kauaʻi ʻōʻō functions as a duet on multiple levels: as a duet between the the sound of last Kauaʻi ʻōʻō and the silence that answered it; as a duet between a recorded sound and an absent image; as a duet between two moments in time, as well as a duet between recording and reality—the living bird, and the recording playback.

As an eighteen-minute intermedia piece, “Endling,” uses duets and echoes as its underlying structure through sound, image, recordings and objects. The piece is designed for three channels of projected video arranged into a cube, seven channels of audio, and two physical sound-emitting objects in the room—a telephone and a cassette player. 

Polyphony unfolds on several different levels in “Endling” – through its overall structure of interwoven and evolving objects and motifs, through moments of independence and interdependence between channels of image and sound, as well as polyphonic relationships between recordings and physical objects, and different recorded times and spaces.

Above all, “Endling” reflects on the story behind this archive, exploring its noise and silences, its presences and absences, in order to answer—or at least echo—an unanswerable call.