Earwitness, Experimenta 1994

Victorian Glasshouse, Melbourne Royal Botanic Gardens

In the installation various objects were camouflaged and more or less hidden, in much the same way as the exotic and fantastic fruits and flowers of the glasshouse were visible only after some searching. The objects called back and forth to one another, as out of tiny embedded speakers came the sounds of human birdcallers.

In one corner of the glasshouse, camouflaged by a cascading plant, hang three 1920's women's shoes. One shoe contains a small speaker; the other (pictured here) contains the stamen of an antherium; and above the two is a shoe constructed as a 'wasp's nest'.

The recording you hear was made in the glasshouse as various objects (not pictured here) sounded together.

The glasshouse was an early 20th century building with old plantings and signage, and the work made reference to celebrity plantings by musicians such as Dame Nellie Melba and Ignace Paderewski in that garden.

Sound sources:

  • bird calls performed in the Australian indigenous gumleaf tradition by Herb Patten,
  • in the 'new style' by Malaysian born Australian Golden Gumleaf Champion, Virgil Reutens;
  • calls by Janet Shaw, Australian Bird Calling Champion;
  • piano phrases from 'The Prophet Bird' played by Paderewski.
 Transpoes

In Transpoes the relations of seduction...and the species connectedness practiced through mimicry, among natures and cultures and territories, among other things, become vertiginously provocative". (Doug Kahn, in RealTime 8-August-September 1995)