2024 VIDEO INSTALLATION
CARRIZO PARKFIELD PRIME
OCTOBER 6 - November 14
NIMOY THEATRE, Westwood
with the Exhibition
ATMOSPHERE OF SOUND: SONIC ART
IN TIMES OF CLIMATE DISRUPTION
UCLA ART|SCIENCE LAB
curated by Victoria Vesna and Anuradhapura Vikram
in association with
GETTY PST|ART: ART & SCIENCE COLLIDE
2024
also forthcoming with atmospheres of Sound: :
Carrizo Parkfield Prime
Friday, 1 November
Saturday, 2 November
CALIFORNIA NANOSYSTEMS INSTITUTE, UCLA
At Carrizo Plain, one hundred miles northwest of Los Angeles, the San Andreas Fault is in plain view above an alkaline salt flat, Soda Lake, ringed with mountains. sonic Field recordings at surface and P-Wave Scores at Depth following an M 6.0 Earthquake at Nearby Parkfield, California unfold in landscape loopS between geomorphology and PTSD visualization:
Seismic memory.
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 , Carrizo-Parkfield Prime 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.