Woven Chronicle
2015
circuit boards, speakers, electrical wires and fittings
10 min Single Channel Audio
The flows and movements of travellers, migrants, labour across the world have produced major social and economic implications as well as new forms of cultural exchange. It has not only allowed us to free cultural identities from a physical place but see us all as entwined in a symbolic web as it were. The work was conceived with electric wires to form a drawing, that will trace migration patterns globally where multitude of actors interact without knowledge of the overall situation.
While technology and commerce are blurring geographic boundaries, there are inherent contradictions that the electric wires here seem to suggest both as conduit and barrier, serving on the one hand as channels of transmission and yet on the other their linear formations evoke barbed wires or different kinds of fencing. By changing the instrument of this quasi-cartographic drawing from a pencil line to a wire, I’m interested in the notion of the map as dynamic, ever changing, streaming and transferring data with the global flows of energies and people, as the courses of these travelers intersect.
The audio component resonates with high-voltage electric current sounds drowned within deep-sea ambient sounds, slow electric pulses, the hum of engaged tones from telecommunications, mechanical-sounding drone, factory sirens, ship horns intermingle with migratory bird sounds.
