CARBON SONG CYCLE
Music /composition + live performance: Pamela Z + Moving image / video sets: Christina McPhee
2013-2023
Carbon Song Cycle is a work for chamber ensemble and expanded cinema. It’s inspired by ongoing changes and upheavals in the Earth’s ecosystem and by the carbon cycle—the process through which carbon is exchanged between all terrestrial life forms and domains. AS a live performance work for voice, electronics, expanded cinema, and chamber ensemble, Carbon Song Cycle is a collaborative creation by Christina McPhee and Pamela Z. It premiered in 2013 at Berkeley Art Museum|Pacific Film Archive, with production funding from the MAP Fund for Performance, New Music USA, and New Music Bay Area. Performances at Roulette Intermedia in Brooklyn and at Joe Goode Space/Theatre Artaud in San Francisco followed. ITs most recent performance occurred at the Exploratorium, San Francisco, in August 2023, with funding from THE NEA AND CO-PRESENTED byCinema Arts Exploratorium, co-produced with San Francisco . Cinematheque and Shapeshifters Cinema.
"The densely layered surfaces that McPhee produces—whether in drawings, paintings, collages, moving-image or multimedia works involving soundscapes and live performance—ask us to rethink our environmental situation, which is at the same time to say our relation to walls of data, the lines of ones and zeros that now flicker insistently, as if they had embedded themselves beneath the skin of the phenomenal world. Yet even McPhee’s most highly mediated works maintain a sense of immediacy. Perhaps this derives from the way that drawing remains a touchstone in her work. As much as some of her works might refer to geological time, they typically insist on the fragility of embodied time...or the audible breath of Pamela Z in performance, inhaled and exhaled against McPhee’s projected images of energy uses that endanger that fundamental little exchange of oxygen for carbon dioxide. This sense of vulnerability stems from the aspect of McPhee’s work that reimagines drawing as energetic in a broad sense, as fully imbricated in the carbon cycle, the abuses of which are increasingly breath-taking. The line drawn on a surface (or over in the case of the cell phone light), perhaps especially the charcoal line, requiring both combustion and respiration, appears in a new strange light: a thing at once excessive, quixotic, and necessary. " - Fraser Ward, in Christina McPhee: A Commonplace Book (Punctum, 2017)
