Tallgrass: An Osage Reverie

May 2 – 6, 2018
Gallery M, CICA Museum
Seoul, Korea

Video & Compositing by Aaron Higgins
Soundtrack by Norbert Herber

“As to scenery, while I know the standard claim is that Yosemite, Niagara Falls, the Upper Yellowstone and the like afford the greatest natural shows, I am not so sure but the prairies and plains, while less stunning at first sight, last longer, fill the esthetic sense fuller, precede all the rest, and make North America’s characteristic landscape.” –Walt Whitman

In recent years my sound work has been preoccupied with the construction of mediated worlds. These worlds have been primarily conceptual in nature, exploring the ways that a process or an idea could be conceived as a place. Tallgrass Prairie is the first work in which I seek to connect an actual, geographic location with sound and music.

It is an interesting coincidence that an engagement of my work with an actual place would involve Tallgrass Prairie, for it also, in many ways, is a mediated environment. Reclamation and preservation of native flora and fauna is an ongoing and deliberate act, carefully managed by conservation experts to recreate the prairie as it existed until the mid-1800s.

What one hears in this installation is complementary to Aaron Higgins’ video re-composition of the Tallgrass Prairie. Sounds of birds, bison, and insects aren heavily edited and processed to remove the “hand” of audio recording technology. Musical elements are composed as a song and played on instruments designed to act as a patina to the natural field recordings. These elements are systemically bound to a variable form and structure that preserves its initial character and stretches infinitely into time.

René Magritte wrote, “Ceci n’est pas une pipe.” Similarly, this is not Tallgrass Prairie. But in sound, video, and interaction, we have made Tallgrass Prairie.