15 Feb Melissa Ryke
Swift Take
Installation, AADK July 2022
Using the wind as a tool to compose….
Melissa Ryke is addressing sound from a haptic perspective. Understanding haptic as a set of sensorial experiences which requires an active exploration, mainly related to touch.
Her work questions the hierarchical relationship between senses and underlines the relevance of a full body attention
For her proposal, she uses the wind as the sound source which clearly reaches us by its friction, touch or affection to other elements.
Starting from field recordings of the wind – or what the wind moves – this work captures Blanca’s July soundscape. From the screaming swifts as they weave figure eights in the early morning and late evening to feed their fledglings, the drone of the fans that push the warm air around the room, the whirr and thrum of the air-conditioning units that drip as you pass by them in the street, the rustling cane that borders the river Segura, to the air that is pushed from our lungs, breathy or melodious.
This sound composition is reproduced by the transducers, a pair of small speakers which vibrate the tubes and send the air resonating, pulsing, whining out into the space, rebounding off surfaces and tickling our eardrums. Aiming for a full body experience, the tubes are also haptic – we can feel the air moving, we can create individual compositions with the sounds by moving around, like an analogue phaser while playing with movement and proximity.
Her process of making is playful and documentative in nature, evolving out of looking and developing a certain sensitive awareness of everyday experiences, place and materials. By documentative she means taking notice of and responding to our own environment.
This becomes a key process in the artistic methodology and part of a larger research in which lived experiences are mediated and transmitted through installation.
