TO BE RATTLED IS TO BE ENCHANTED AND REPULSED

5.1 theatrical sound

Chiricahua Desert Museum
Rodeo, New Mexico, 2023

MAMproject 26: Curtis Tamm

Sound sculpture (8.1 channels), chalk

Curated by Kenichi Kondo
Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan, 2019.

During 2017 and 2018 Tamm traveled throughout Japan gathering hundreds of sound recordings. He met with seismologists to learn about the nature of waves, listened to the chants of blind shamans, and spent time with an engineer investigating the ability of other animal species to predict earthquakes. One such animal is the catfish, also the subject matter of Edo-period Namazu-e — satirical woodblock prints which hold the catfish responsible for the occurrence of earthquakes. In the spirit of Tamm’s work, the impact of an earthquake is both traumatic and rejuvenating.

The artist’s field-recordings attempt to follow the radiation of seismic waves outwards as they vibrate through the whiskers of the Namazu, resonate with the syncopated buzz of cicadas, and chime against the ritual process of casting and striking multi-tonne bells known as Bonsho. Tamm explored ways in which waves interact with his own body by standing inside these temple bells. He surveyed the unique character of a dozen different bells throughout Kyoto and Ibaraki, recording rarely-heard ultra and infra-sonic frequencies which resonate and decay within the large open cavity — an empty space known as the bell’s “womb”.

The centerpiece of this latest MAM Project (Spelling for Protection Against Oneself) is a sound sculpture which invites visitors into the womb of the Bonsho. Tamm summons a state of deep listening within the body, a catfish-like condition in which our senses are recast by bandwidths usually obscured by noise.

Project support by Adam Audio, Arcus Project, and the Art and Technology Lab at LACMA. Illustration support: Andrew Paul Hunter, Maki Ohkojima

In the Path of the Father's Death

3-channel HD video

Bonsho aren’t used like other traditional Buddhist instruments. The bell, often centuries old and multiple tons, is kept outside; alone, housed within a separate pagoda, off-limits to visitors and patrons. Yes, bonsho marks time, but from a dimension separate from musical practices. They’re more like a layer of architecture that, through sound waves, extends beyond the grounds of the temple—enlarging the space it encodes–– every sunrise and sunset.

The bell is an object which honors and complicates our perception of emptiness. The sound of bonsho—such as the one housed at Zōjō-ji temple in Tokyo, which weighs around thirty thousand pounds and is over ten feet tall—bears its teeth with an initial ferocious attack, gritty, but then quickly transmutates into a decay of tidal silk, rhythmically waning off beyond the horizon of silence. Aural characteristics, unquestionably unique to every bonsho, are born out of the dimensionality of the bell’s negative space as much as they are forged into the material which contains that emptiness.

Tympanic Tether

Proposition for new-aural warning siren, 10-channel sound perfomance

Santozeum; Santorini, Greece, 2015.

While searching for mythological and contemporary identities of the ‘siren’ on Santorini, the island claimed by Plato as the one time Atlantis, I collaborated with volcanologists, firefighters, policemen, bird-breeders, ambulance-drivers, goat-farmers and airport personnel on a new aural-warning siren for that volcanic island, based in field-recordings rather than tritones. Over the course of a month-long residency with the Santozeum, I amassed an audio-library of 'siren-candidates' resulting in an hour-long live spatialized sound composition entitled Tympanic Tether, with accompanying text (written in collaboration with Hermione Spriggs), performed as part of Aural Lighthouses; an international symposium exploring sound and natural catastrophe, organized by PS1: Fluids States.

Let Sleeping Gods Lie

Archaeoacoustical performance, 360 video

Meteor Crater Natural/National Landmark
Winslow, Arizona, 2021

“The site of this celestial body has long been known to the Navajo Indians. According to tribal traditions, the arrival of the meteor betokened the flight of three of their god’s, who, seeking endless repose, rode from the stars on roaring clouds of blue flame, to descend, accompanied by thunder that shook the mountains and reduced the rocks in the valley to an impalpable powder. To this day the “rock flour” is ritually used in certain of the sacred dances, and in fortune is predicted for all those engaged in the business of dis- turbing the sleep of the ancient Indian deities.” (Anonymous, 1924)

Medium-format photographs by Andrew Hunter

Center For Cellular Alignment

Earthquake Research Institute, 4-channel sound, live improvisation

Arcus Project; Moriya City, Japan, 2017.

For Tamm, sounds, a tsunami, and an earthquake are all things that result from waves and, as such, inherently possess correlation. During his residency, he visited the Earthquake Research Institute at the University of Tokyo and the National Research Institute for Earth Science and Disaster Resilience, and conducted research on the relationship between sound and Buddhism, Shinto, and folk beliefs. He also came into contact with traditional Japanese instruments such as the koto and continued to increase his collection of sounds in his audio library, recording the sounds of bells at temples in Kyoto and Ibaraki Prefecture as well as the sounds made during the casting of a temple bell at a foundry in the town of Makabe in Ibaraki. He also conducted a workshop involving an amateur chorus group in Moriya.

In Center for Cellular Alignment, visitors are invited to lie down and listen to the sounds. This “listening session” is an attempt to use sounds in order to evoke some hereditary ability within our bodies, similarly to how catfish can supposedly sense tremors before earthquakes happen, and that has perhaps lain dormant since ancient times. In Tamm’s way of thinking, we can find the connectivist idea of trying to locate links between things that initially seem unrelated.

Kenichi Kondo (guest curator, Arcus Project)

During open studios at Arcus Project, Tamm also appropriated an abandoned network of loud-speakers which he used as a platform for exploring new siren sound-design specific to Moriya, Ibaraki.

Explorations of Sirenic Thinking

audio-tour, infrasound, lecture

Center for Science, Technology and Public Life
University of Southern California
Los Angeles, California, 2023.

Explorations of Sirenic Thinking investigates the role of infrasound as contributing to the ability of other animal species in predicting catastrophe. For this performative sound work, Tamm locates the resonate frequency of a six-story emergency stairwell using an infrasonic subwoofer, capable of achieving 11hz at 90db, designed and built with audio engineer Ken Gorres.

In its unsteady and vibratory state, the stairwell functions as a site from which to take seriously ‘sirenic thinking’, a notion concocted by Tamm as being central to a form of pre-cognitive, disaster resilience. As the emergency stairwell resonates unpredictably, listeners are guided by Tamm’s voice as they descend, encountering images and diagrams used as aids in explaining his theory.

The Viscous Shape

Geo-philosophical exploration, foley, 16mm, HD video

Skaftfell Center for Visual Art; Seydisfjordur, Iceland, 2016.
With Hermione Spriggs

Where does “hard” science (in this case the geological study of rocks and their formation) collide with a “runnier” pre-scientific understanding of the world as animate, imbued with agency and soul? What personal, corporeal compulsions drive scientific research, beneath the visible crust of objective knowledge production?

George Walker was a British volcanologist who helped to popularize the worldview of Plate Tectonics through a seminal study he conducted with Icelandic lava flows. His films and manuscript, known as the “The Viscous Shape”, are filled with intimate perceptions and encounters with geology: listening to the sound lava makes while cooling, descriptions of its transient color and even its smell. For Walker, the lava-flows of Eastern Iceland were embedded with a pattern, which he called the “language of stone”, that when decoded, “reveal the record of their making”. Walker referred to all lava as having but a single shape-shifting form, illusory and inversely proportional to its current trajectory.

It takes more than guts to peer into an erupting volcano... Or to stand beside a river of lava moving at 40mph... Or to gaze at a cloud of tephra larger than any skyscraper. It could even be said that in doing these things it's not just the earth's stomach that you witness but also your own insides, your human guts and sense of scale. During the later years of his life, George P.L Walker turned to investigating active volcanoes as a way to perpetuate and develop the then little-known science of rheology (the study of fluid dynamics). Walker used cinema to record his rigorous explorations of lava flow during the 50's and 60's, and only now have his films been rediscovered and preserved for the public to share in his life's work. With an eye for the unlikely and ineffable, artists Curtis Tamm (USA) and Hermione Spriggs (UK) reopen the unseen cinematic and textual archives of George Walker through a multi-faceted research project entitled Viscous Shape. Through a collaboration with Breiðdalssetur, a geology center in East Iceland, the artists work with Walker's archive as a way to engage the literal and metaphysical implications raised by the groundbreaking work of this scarcely known geologist.

As collaborators our ongoing work involves a search for this space wherein science itself “drips” into other belief systems, becoming inversely proportional to the calcified stereotype of objectified progress and colonial discovery. Our fingernails grow at the same rate that the earth’s plates move during continental drift. Where and in what is this pattern uncovered? Can we find ourselves revealed in the layers of our geosophic making?

The Thing Is All Around Itself

Ec(h)osophical Listening Lab

4-channel sound, live acoustical performance, field-recordings

School of Visual Arts and Design, University of South Carolina; Columbia, South Carolina, 2019.

The Ecosophical Listening Lab was a temporary rejuvenation-department within the School of Visual Arts and Design at the University of South Carolina, where students and faculty could reserve one-on-one immersive sound performances consisting of live instrumentation played in tandem with multi-channel sound work, developed in a nearby sanctuary-swampland, Congaree National Park.

The Mineral Cabinet of Pietari Skytta (Balancing the Stone)

Sound-sauna in mineral library; 4.1 channel sound, 22 mineral specimens HD microscopy, plants

Titanik Gallery, Turku, Finland, 2016.

During his two-month residency in the Titanik workspace, Curtis befriends and lives amongst a rare collection of stones and minerals. Ranging from specimens of sulfur and chromium to copper and hematite, the artist presumes these objects as “sculptures which make themselves; astronomical hieroglyphs from another world (the world which is also our own)”. By investigating the geological gesture evident in each of the terrestrial object’s shape, smell, texture and taste, the artist develops a recombinant, object-oriented sound composition, from which to perform with and play improvisationally as visitors to spelunk his now made-public workspace. The composition is part of an ongoing project Tamm has been working on for the last three years, developing a sonic library of intensive audio-elements, which can be re-combined ad infinitum into an alphabet of stone. During his residency, Tamm developed improvisational compositions with a variety of instruments in including Turku Cathedral’s large pipe organ, marimba, xylophone and piano at the local universities music school.

Sparagmos or Silence? Understanding the ever-burning lamp of Shiprock

Slideshow (Medium-format photography), lecture

Dornsife Center for Science, Technology and Public Life (STPL), University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, 2022.

HUMMINGBIRD'S SPACE FLIGHT

nectar helmet, HD video, sound

Mesa Verde National Park, Cortez, Colorado, 2021. 35mm Photography by Andrew Hunter.

"Humming Bird wanted to see beyond the sun, way up in the heavens. He took lots of atsa' [mustard] seeds and filled his trousers full. He was going to eat just one seed a day. He started flying upward. He ate just one seed a day, but he turned back because he ran out of food. He didn't see anything.

When he came back, everybody was anxious to know what he had seen. He told them he had seen nothing."

Other words for tremor

Performed by Dolce Choir, 2018

Improvisational singing conducted by Curtis Tamm, utilizing Japanese onomatopoeia for 'tremor'.

Copper Communion

HD Video, excerpt, 2013

A Room in Which the Only Wall Is In the Middle

Cinematic Trap; 10-channel sound, 16mm, HD video, custom fabricated benches, rear projection

Experimental Digital Arts, UCLA; Los Angeles, CA, 2014

Modeled after the Malaise Trap, this installation redesigned a theater to mimic a ubiquitous tent-shaped flying insect trap, which has a single wall protruding down its center. The piece was performed live with 11 channels of audio, long swaths of black-out darkness, showcasing a 16mm film + HD video work shot along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge in locations at sea, throughout the Faroe Islands and Iceland; all locations where Rene Malaise (inventor of said trap), believed to be the lost site of Atlantis.

A Room In Which The Only Wall Is In The Middle was an attempt to re-vision the food-chain as a closed loop, and proposes that the cinematic space of the theater, has always/already been itself a hungry being; with human psychology being its primary food source.

“To set such a trap requires a deep sensitivity to the materials at hand - a responsiveness, that is, to the opportunities available in the environment: an unnerving ability to coax effects from it, rather than imposing effects on it by the application of force alone; an activation of hidden possibilities, rather than, as it were, barking instructions at the world” - Benedict Singleton

“The fish trap exists because of the fish; once you’ve gotten the fish you can forget the trap. Words exist because of meaning; once you’ve gotten the meaning you can forget the words.” - Zhuangzi

Fly In The Eye

Effigy of the obsolescence of cinema (Icelandic midge, ionized 24k gold, insect pin, publication)

with Hermione Spriggs
New Wight Gallery, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA, 2014.

“My body is all eyes. Look at it! Be not afraid. I look in all directions!”

In the summer of 2013, while shooting 16mm film of a Malaise Trap (ubiquitous trap for gathering flying insects), I temporarily lost my vision when a small flying midge landed right in my eye. The sting forced me to stop the camera, everything went black as I squeezed the muscles in my forehead. It was a complex situation, a fly caught in the eye of a filmmaker making a documentary about an insect trap.... ‘The Malaise trap’ is considered by initiated entomologists as a passive entity, because it gathers its bounty of flying insects while standing still, intersecting with their flight paths, which as it seems, are largely determined by currents of wind which flow through the immediate surroundings, interweaving with higher-level weather patterns. We were shooting near Iceland’s most powerful fumarole, and standing near to it with my eyes closed made me realize just how loud this breathing entity actually was. It was at a volume which made the deep roaring sound inseparable from the force which was apparently creating it. I wasn’t just listening to the center of the earth, but encountering it as it spilled out into this completely empty, frigid landscape. Having finally removed my gloves I was able to pry my eye open for a moment and remove the still intact specimen.

Minuscule, around two millimeters in size, the midge lay dead in my cupped palm.

Wings and legs out, perfectly intact. A golden effigy of the obsolescence of cinema…

Flatlander

Ceremony for dissipative entities (quadraphonic sound, water cast bronze)

Bemis Center for Contemporary Art; Omaha, Nebraska, 2016.

Flatlanders is a performance and sculpture series inspired by Omaha's last major tornadic swarm (May 6th, 1975). The work consists of bronze sculptures (made in collaboration with Vivian Chiu), and a multi-channel sound performance making use of never-before heard archival recordings taken by Omaha’s 911 emergency response call center.

“Behold yon miserable creature. That Point is a Being like ourselves, but confined to the non-dimensional Gulf. He is himself his own World, his own Universe; of any other than himself he can form no conception…” ― Edwin A. Abbott

The Destruction of Royal Gardens

The Thing Is All Around Itself

Lecture/performance, 16mm, HD Video, publication

Screened, performed and lectured at variety of locations between 2014-2016.

with Hermione Spriggs

What began as a research expedition retracing the casuistry of Swedish Naturalist/Entomologist Rene Malaise in his 1940s search for Atlantis, became a series life-threatening encounters with an Icelandic volcano, a ruptured ovarian cyst, and a coincidental Los Angeles earthquake. In the end, The Thing Is All Around Itself attempts to articulate the need for those working in the arts and sciences to adopt a physical and conceptual flexibility whilst pursuing any spiritual or scientific investigation; that investigations themselves are hungry beasts —to be devoured by one’s own research is the consequence of adopting animistic ontologies.

This seemingly endless labyrinthine project follows the steps of two friends as they learn to dance with the reality of their imaginative research, rather than demanding it into obedience. The Thing Is All Around Itself is documentary research project about an animal trap, which eventually turned to entangle its makers.