D A Calf

aspectralgeology.info

2020

Sound, text, photography, online archive. Twenty-three vitrines

A SPECTRAL GEOLOGY is the initial outcome of a continuing investigation into new conceptions of the relationship between sound, memory, historical agency and time. Treating sound as a geological phenomenon creates speculative possibilities for hearing the past in new ways that can act to counter the narrative-based, top-down, and official tellings of history. Like other geological phenomena, sound can lay dormant, sedimentary and stratified in a site. It can erode, petrify and dissolve. It can be excavated, and with it traces of past agency.

In this first instalment of the project, this paradigmatic approach has been applied to a series of contested sites in the former Yugoslav republics of the Western Balkans. These sites have been variously subjected to material decay, commemoration, forgetting, erasure, destruction and revision. Regardless of any official claims on the sites, they are living, dynamic places, imprinted with renewed agency, both human and non-human, on a daily basis. The work invites the audience to consider these sites as if the sounds of the past always remain audible and with this allowance comes a deprivileging of any one type of voice. Textual and photographic materials act as prompts for this process whilst simultaneously highlighting the arbitrary nature of many dominant and received readings of sites.

N.B. Best experienced in full screen mode on desktop browser using headphones.

A Spectral Geology is part of the wider Spectral Geologies project (2020–). See also Spectres (2023)

2017

Twenty-four video installation with sound. Narrowcast into gallery via webcam from an offsite location.

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A continuous, twenty-four hour live feed of this work lives here in perpetuity.

Twenty minute excerpts of the complete twenty-four hour piece.

These excerpts show the changing light over the course of the twenty-four hours.

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Remnant presents a continuous real-time, synchronised, twenty-four hour image of the empty and unmade bed where the artist’s father died in late 2014. His body lay for three days before being discovered. The video, together with a twenty-four hour unedited field recording of the remote and rural location, was captured in the days immediately prior. Nothing changes in the film except the light and the sound of the ambivalent natural surrounds.

The work considers place, the passing of time, personal history, and the experience of loss through death. It engages duration and exclusion as means to investigate the liminality of this shifting space. The video stream captures the changing of light that occurs in the room through the course of the three days whilst the body cooled and quieted, connecting the viewer to the space through the experience of real time. The sound component documents the continuing and unaltered sounds of the surrounding lands. Thus the work is the artist’s attempt to inhabit a space and time, forever made impossible.

As he has noted:

“The grieving process was bound up with feelings of exclusion. I was excluded from being present at the time of death, excluded from any opportunity to say goodbye prior to death, excluded both geographically from the site by a distance of a thousand kilometres, and temporally by the fifteen years that had elapsed since I had been a resident in my father’s house. The site of his death was formerly my childhood room, the bed was my childhood bed.”

Remnant I marks the first in a series of semi-related works approaching death and trauma from an archival and durational perspective. This exclusion is reflected in the dislocation between the site of death, the external streamed space, and the gallery site. The work is a live-streamed projection of the footage as it is being projected twenty-four hours a day in real-time in an anonymous, isolated space. While the gallery may only be open limited hours, the work continues on in this other space regardless, for the duration of the month.

On the anniversary of the three days the body was in situ the artist was present in the gallery during the work’s premier and seated in front of the work for six hours a day in a further attempt to inhabit this impossible space and time.

The accompanying piece Remnant II (forthcoming) is an almost identical replica of Remnant I, distinguished only by the elapsing of time. The shot is identical, though taken a year after Remnant I. It presents the same room, now repainted, clear of all furniture and bereft of any trace of it’s former inhabitant.

2023

Three-channel video installation, 5.1 sound
10’26”

VIEW (password required)

What happens when we listen to a space with which we have a previous experience? Can sounds laying dormant in a site prompt recollections? Spectres investigates monument sites through the memories of their visitors. When monuments are put to work in service of national and cultural narratives they can take on a haunting, continuing presence. When these sites figure in diasporic contexts, such as those from the former Yugoslavia, the memories they elicit expose the slippage of time and memory.

Preview: Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI), March 2023

Official debut: UVUU Reflektor Gallery, Užice, Serbia July 2023

Kvaka 22 Gallery, Belgrade, Serbia September 27–October 7 2024

KINGS, Melbourne, Australia October 10–November 9 2024

Spectres is part of the wider Spectral Geologies project (2020–). See also A Spectral Geology (2020).

Filmed in Bosnia & Herzegovina, Croatia, Kosovo and Serbia.

2022

Artist book, 48pp, risograph printed, handsewn binding, with accompanying audio. Edition of seventy-seven, hand-numbered.

Created in residence at the Footnote Centre for Image & Text Belgrade, Serbia – August 2022. Printed by Jovan Jović at Praksa Kvaka, Belgrade.

Based on fieldwork conducted at the Monument for Battle of the Wounded at Makljen Pass, Bosnia & Herzegovina.

2020–

Currently in development

Speaking to Monuments is an interactive, site-specific, phone-based work that provides the participant the opportunity to speak back to monuments and to contribute to a wider conversation about their meaning and legacy, their past and future.

Monuments may exist as manifestations of official history or as flowers that sprout through the cracks in concrete. They are designed to be resilient and permanent. But they can also be fragile and transient. Anything made by human hands is just as easily un- or remade.

The world that surrounds monuments is in constant flux, calling into question their significance and situating them firmly within the tensions of the contemporary. What happens when we start to tell and listen to different stories about our past? How are monuments challenged, remembered or reconfigured when we talk back to them?

Supported by The Australia Council for the Arts and Rising proposal funding.

Plaster, granitic sand, stone dust 

Dimensions variable

(2022-2024)

Earth with the sound of its own making (2022) is an inverted or counter monument of sorts. Based on audio field recordings of a monument site on the border between Bosnia and Croatia – a region inculcated in the forced dispersal of peoples via the Balkan asylum-seeker route – the sculptural form renders a three dimensional representation of the sound of the site, as visualised by way of audio spectrogram software, in the materials used to cast the actual monument. The sounds that this rendering represents are sounds of the quotidian and the contemporaneous. As such the work both elevates the background and the flux of the site as well as performing a hauntingly silent elegy to the problematic and out-dated notion of monuments as sites of fixed meaning.

This work is part of the wider Spectral Geologies project which explores the act of listening in the contested field via both a creative re-imagining of the role of sound in the transmission and sequestration of memory and a speculative conceptualisation of the duration of audibility. If imagined as an enduring, cumulative presence, sound would seem to contribute to a vast terrestrial archive in which all pasts remain within the present. The research investigates how this approach suggests new possibilities for framing histories of place that offer unofficial, social, and multi-vocal histories counter to official and top-down narratives. In positioning monument sites as the loci of these investigations it contends with the tension that arises between the everyday and the authorised.

2020

Isolation Loops - a series of fortnightly, live-streamed, socially distanced performances incorporating field recordings.

See past dates

2018–2019

Quad-channel data sonification installation incorporating live keylogging and text-to-morse code generation)

Tilde Festival of New Music & Sound Art (Melb, AU) - January 2019

Electrofringe (Syd, AU) - September 2018

‘These shifts of gaze and plays of imagery, this emptying of the consciousness, can be caused - this time in systematic, generalised and prosaic fashion - by the characteristic features of what I have proposed to call ‘supermodernity’. These subject the individual consciousness to entirely new experiences and ordeals of solitude, directly linked with the appearance and proliferation of non-places.’

- Marc Augé (Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity)

From My Non-Place investigates the habitation of the micro non-place - the computer keyboard, to consider the ultimate significance of the content that we produce daily and that constitutes so much of our personal archive. Additionally the work attempts to free past streams of agency by allowing them to survive as alternate entities through sonification and encoding.

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When Marc Augé first began identifying the alienating and transitory spaces that marked his notion of the supermodern life they were big, architectural and public. Computers had yet to so thoroughly inveigle the personal space, let alone become miniaturised, super-powered and portable. The revolution that has occurred since has shifted the site of the non-place from the public to the personal, and from the large to the small. The new non-place par excellence is the QWERTY key[board/pad]. It exists as a our prime zone of interaction with, and mediation of, the world yet they are inherently empty. We spend more and more time with them, for digital transition and transmission, for the genesis of our identities.

The source data set for this work is activity on a personal laptop, as tracked by a covert keylogger. This data is broken into four subsets which is each parsed by a discrete morse engine using Max/MSP. The text generates a stream of morse code. Each engine is tuned so that the four voices, when occurring simultaneously, comprise a D minor chord. The tempo of each voice is also controlled independent of the others. The voices are then routed into Ableton Live where they undergo additional processing and spatialisation. They are then presented in a quad speaker array, with each discrete voice granted into its own speaker. Echoes of each voice can heard in its cardinally opposite speaker.

The choice of morse code as a carrier codec for the data set reflects its suitability for sonically creating the impression of a celestial scape. Using spatialisation techniques, the attempt has been made to immerse the listener in a stream of personal data that may as well be distant points of energy. All information has been preserved, and is available for decoding to any listener. It is not long before the listener ceases to hear textual communication and in it’s place hears musical tonality and perhaps randomness. Any traces of significance have been erased.

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The keyboard user has been surveilled in the process of having their data scraped and is again surveilled, albeit by a non-understanding listener, in the presentation. Not dissimilar to our current online lives - our personal data floating online awaiting it’s malevolent repurposing.

NB: This work is adaptable to site by harnessing the data streams that are suggested by each new context eg. traffic flow data, nearby tweet emanations, etc.

Audio sample.

2022

Three-channel 4K video with sound
7’30”

Premiere: Five Walls Gallery, Footscray, AU. June 2022

Postal Driver is a multi-channel video work exploring tenuous working conditions and the way in which their intensification through a period of global pandemic has disappointed utopian hopes of a reappraisal of labour in late capitalism.

Developed during a guerrilla artist residency undertaken in late 2021, the work reimagines a selection of driving scenes from Taxi Driver (1976) through video footage and audio recordings captured clandestinely. It portrays the repetition, impersonality and thanklessness that defines the work of lowly paid logistics and service economy drivers.

Postal Driver employs dynamics of serialisation, overlay and acousmatic sound to demonstrate the way in which time, as a commodity, is sold as a linear entity while the true cost to the worker is anything but linear or discrete.

Sketch for an Opera

2018

Perspex sheeting, technical drawings, threaded rod. (1000mm x 700mm x 700mm)

This is the first work based upon a continuing study of George Perec’s La Vie mode d’emploi (Life: A User’s Manual), 1978.

Development for the second stage of this research was supported by a residency at the Cité International des Arts (Paris) in 2019.

2016–2019, ongoing

A work of sonic cartography, Le Système Complet documents the Paris Métro through the sounds of its habitation.

Using the simple, repeated gesture of alighting a train, stepping towards the back of the platform and recording whilst facing the tracks, Le Système Complet consists of traces of all 382 platforms.

Influenced by the work of Marc Augé, in particular Un ethnologue dans le métro (1986) and Le métro revisité (2008), the work is an exploration of a defined type of space, where iterations are the equivalent of depth, and of the differences and similarities that are detectable between these spaces, and how they represent a greater cartography. The work explores the concepts of memory, place, trace and erasure, non-place, the infra-ordinary through cartography.

This project has been supported by a 2019 Cité Internationale des Arts residency.

2019–2021, ongoing

Onto-Carto is a repository for field recordings - places, non-places, ghosts in the living world.

Propelled by a desire to understand one’s place in the world by charting it.

Released through nomachinethinking

Fluid Dynamics (Gunbungwerro) - recorded June 2021, Australia. (Released September 2021)

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Fluid Dynamics (Merri Merri) - recorded March 2020, Australia. (Released June 2021)

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Four Mornings - recorded February 2020, Brazil. (Released April 2021)

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Five Mornings - recorded December 2018, Serbia, Greece, North Macedonia, Bulgaria. (Released August 2020)

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Seven Mornings - recorded August 2016, Paris. (Released November 2018)

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2017

Three hundred and seventy-seven postcards, monogrammed Duro suitcase.

‘There are people who think they find the key to their destinies in heredity, others in horoscopes, others again in education. For my part, I believe that I should gain numerous insights into my later life from my collection of picture postcards, if I were able to leaf through it again today.’ - Walter Benjamin (A Berlin Chronicle)

How does an archive of postcards - mostly unsent - stand in for a life in which travel was severely restricted? How do the postcards of my father vicariously realise his unrealised desires to travel? How do they suggest that he felt safest staying at home and travelling in his mind?

2010–present

Record label

Field recordings / Experimental / Archival / Found Sound / Ambient

Always accepting submissions.

Latest release: Alex January (IT/FR) - A view through the erygmascope (July 2021)

https://nomachinethinking.bandcamp.com

2014–2016, 2020

A work for mixing console, outboard and audio-reactive visuals)

Commissioned for Lost Empire at Substation J (a working electrical substation) for Melbourne Music Week (2014). Later iterations appeared at The Arts Centre, Melbourne Tilde Festival of New Music & Sound Art (Melb, AU) and Electrofringe (Sydney, AU). 

Hurtz was released as a double-album in June 2020 on nomachinethinking.

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Tracklisting:

1. Suffocating Notion of Eternal Absence I-III (There, Not There / Bedsit / Keeps On) 16:21

2. Suffocating Notion of Eternal Absence IV-V (Temporality / Time-stop) 06:41

3. Suffocating Notion of Eternal Absence VI (Glory) 05:44

4. Return I-II (Solo / Solo Still) 25:23

5. Cooldown / Exhaustion 21:56

6. Postscript 19:13

2017

Stereo audio
51’35”

Guitar drones, fader orchestration, text-to-voice generation, keystroke logger.

one hundred sixty-eight hours takes a one-week archive of all of the text input into a personal computer and sonifies it by way of a text-to-voice generator. The profane and the mundane are flattened equally by this transposition, suggesting that the significance and emotional import of the quotidian exists separate from the textual archive we make of it.

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2014–present

Audio releases

Terra 1: Slotermeer / Dieppe 1 / Dieppe 2

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2016–present

Audio releases

Flushes of is a continuing international attempt to catalogue the most non- of non-places.

Flushes of EU (2018)

Flushes of AU (2020)

Flushes of US (2020)

Flushes of EU II (2020)

Flushes of BR (2020)

Flushes of AU II (2021)

Flushes of EU III (2021)

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Australia / Austria / Belgium / BiH / Brazil / Bulgaria / Chile / Czech Republic / Croatia / France / Germany / Greece / Hungary / Italy / Montenegro / The Netherlands / New Zealand / North Macedonia / Serbia / Slovenia / Spain / Turkey / United Arab Emirates / US

2014–present

A standing long-term collaboration with The General Assembly as producer, sound designer, arranger and touring multi-instrumentalist.

D A Calf produced, mixed and engineered their debut album Vanishing Point (2017), the mini EP Everybody Knows (2020) and second album Goodbye Nostalgia (2024).

See Events page for shows.

2008–2020

Music for remote highways.

Outer (2020) on nomachinethinking.

Dark Continent, Cold Century (2010) on nomachinethinking/Vitamin.

All compositions, arrangements and production by D A Calf.

Extinct live line-up: Joe Salvati, Paul Raine, Matt Wicking, Fenton K, D A Calf. Previous members: Pat Brooke, Jamieson Shaw, Alex Knight.

Outer was supported through funding from the Australia Council for the Arts and Creative Victoria.

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2016

Immersive installation for hearses, humans and guided meditation

www.lastwordsinahearse.com

Debuted at Dark Mofo, Hobart AU - June 2016

Developed in collaboration with The You Orchestra.

2014–2018

Immersive, experiential theatre company founded by Marieke Hardy & D A Calf.

ALL OF MY FRIENDS WERE THERE
– Melbourne Festival 2017

FUNERAL
– Melbourne Festival 2016
– Dark MOFO 2015
– Brisbane Festival 2015
– Adelaide Fringe 2015
– Melbourne Fringe 2014

www.theguerrillamuseum.com

2022