Specialising and Exhibiting

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Week7-Sound Arts Lecture Series

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’s 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.

I am looking at Yolande Harris’s “FROM A WHALE’S BACK” SOLO EXHIBITION in Radius Gallery, Santa Cruz. What might it mean to be oceanic? To act in the world from a place of oceanic consciousness? From a Whale’s Back is an installation that explores the visual and sonic underwater world inhabited by whales of different species – orcas, humpbacks and minkes – from Antarctica to the northeastern Pacific.

I think the project is really cool and how she put effort into video the jellyfish and the whales are very intensive and amazing. I really enjoy the melodies from the harp, I think it really matches the movements of the fish species. The sounds gathering from contact mics which are from peddles are also very relaxing and comfortable. I won’t think this project as an ASMR perspective cause it is very complicated and scientific. But the sonic sounds from the ocean are very overwhelmed and alive which we won’t see them capturing by our vision.