Project Description — Working Project Descriptions

In the artists own words:

Chris Brookes

The Outer Battery

The Place: My project will focus on the tiny 200-year-old community of the Outer Battery that fronts the entrance to St. John's harbour. Lying at the end of a narrow road that winds around a sheer cliff, it is technically a part of the city of St. John's, but it has always looked and felt more like a fishing village. Residents going grocery shopping refer to "going into town."

Nowadays residents are watching their community evolve from a traditionally poor neigbourhood of fishermen and stevedores to a prime upscale residential area attracting executives and working professionals. Simultaneously they observe an evolution in the harbour traffic passing in front of their wharves and homes. Since the cod fishery collapse eight years ago, fishing boats have increasingly been replaced by offshore-oil supply vessels.

Visual: The seen neighbourhood environment reflects the evolution of the acoustic environment. Smaller, flat-roofed traditional architecture is giving way to larger, expensive dwellings; cruise ships are replacing the parade of inshore fishing boats past residents' windows, visual metaphors of a changing economy. The faces behind the windows are growing older too, and few young faces are to be found. BMWs and SUVs challenge the rusty pickups in the tiny parking lot, yet there is still a hopscotch game chalked on the pavement.

Sound: The sound environment of the neighbourhood is changing. The small diesels of fishing boats give way to the powerful rumble of offshore-oil supply vessels, colouring the sound of voices as well as the content of conversations. Children's voices are seldom heard -- there are fewer of them as B&Bs and higher-income childless professionals begin to dominate the neighbourhood environment. Wharf construction, the landing of fish with its attendant seagull chorus, and twine-loft chat is increasingly becoming the sounds of history.

The neighbourhood's acoustic environment is wearing heavier shoes; its focus is shifting from outdoors to indoors, from the lilt of vernacular speech to the flatter cadence of "educated" voices. These shoes are also the shoes of progress. For example, the sounds of the "night-soil" truck and the water supply vehicle disappeared twenty years ago when the city extended water and sewer services to the tiny community.

This tiny neighbourhood has been a well advertised "poster village" for the province's tourism campaigns touting folk architecture and traditional ways of life, yet tourists arrive to find those images changing. The challenge of this project will be to create a portrait of a community experiencing the dynamic of rapid change, and residents who are characters in an evolving story.

Darren Copeland and Victoria Fenner

Sounding Killaloe

Killaloe is a rural town with a population of approximately 700. It is located an hour and a half west of Ottawa about 45 minutes from the eastern edge of Algonquin Park. Killaloe is beautiful and rugged country where it is difficult to carve out a living. Poverty rates are high in Killaloe among the regular residents. Most people make their living off the land, either in logging or subsistence farming on the rocky pastures and fields carved out of the bush. The connection with the land is strong.

It is also a transitional place where different cultures meet. In the 1960s, it was a favourite location of back to the landers and draft dodgers wanting to escape big city southern Ontario. A lively alternative culture still exists, with newcomers (many of whom are still proud to be hippies) not always mixing comfortably with families who have lived in the area for generations. The community also changes in the summer when urban folks from Ottawa return to their cottages.

In many ways, Killaloe is a step back in time. There is little economic reason to "develop" the community. Because of the lack of development, the soundscape has not changed as dramatically as in other communities.

Killaloe is also the community where the Full Moon Audio Art camp is held each summer. Darren Copeland will be discovering the Killaloe soundscape for the first time this summer. Victoria Fenner has been visiting Killaloe for five years. The resulting piece will build on their shared experience of this unique and distinctive community.

Chantal Dumas

Sous les pommiers

La petite ville de St-Hilaire est sise au pied du Mont-St-Hilaire, tout près de la rivière Richelieu, à 32 km au sud-est de Montréal (Québec). Elle est reconnue entre autres choses pour la culture de la pomme. C’est ce qui m’a donné l’idée de capter l’atmosphère sonore d’un verger pendant la période très courte période de floraison des pommiers, au printemps. Cette période riche en couleur et en parfum devrait aussi posséder quelques spécificités sonores. Je ferai des enregistrements à différentes heures du jour, du matin au soir et de ces captations, je saisirai le moment le plus éloquent.

Steve Heimbecker

Grain Dust: An Audit of a Prairie Village

Springwater is a dying prairie village. It reached its peak just before the depression in the 1930s with a population of several hundred people. Since then, its population has steadily decreased and is now a village of about 20 inhabitants, of which I am one. I grew up here, and returned nearly three years ago after inheriting an old family cottage.

During the depression, as a make work project sponsored by local businesses, dozens of trees were planted down the boulevards by out of workmen in the otherwise un-treed prairie landscape. They did this work in trade for merchandise and food vouchers redeemable at the local shops.

These trees have now become the habitat of dozens of species of birds, animals and insects which outnumber the human inhabitants of the village by quite a lot. The songs of the birds, and the wind through the trees are very predominant acoustic elements of the village. The bird songs and the wind are the focal point of my sound composition in the creation of an "Acoustic Mapping" of the village, which really is a sonic review or an audit of Springwater's current situation. At times, in the many sound recordings I have made of the village over the last 3 years, along with the sound of the birds and the wind, are the sounds of the human community, the occasional vehicle driving by, a farm tractor in the background working in a field, a barking dog, a laughing child, a transport truck driving down the highway through town.

GrainDust: An Audit of a Prairie Village will use my many sound recordings of the village and through the process of sound collage, I will piece together an audio portrait of the village, now with the birds, the trees, and the wind as the defining sonic elements claiming this village for their own.

Katarina Soukup

Tundra Tales

During summer 2000, an Arnait Video Productions crew filmed the daily life and the stories of the Kunuk family for a documentary video entitled Anana (Mother). This program is being produced with the support of APTN, Telefilm Canada, and the Canada Council for the Arts, and will be released in May 2001. With the aid of the latest satellite telephone and mobile computing technologies, we will produce a dynamic website based on audio visual elements from the Anana shoot which will permit a small team of Inuit and Quebecois participants at an outpost camp on Baffin Island to create a daily journal of their experiences, tell oral histories, host special events, stream audio and video, and interact with the outside world via the Internet. The project will be coordinated by video artist Marie-Hélène Cousineau and myself.

I will create original audio works based on the unique sound environment of the Arctic and the unforgettable life stories of the Kunuk family. These short sound pieces will be composed of soundscapes, experimental audio/video, oral histories, legends, story telling, interviews, performances, concerts, mini-documentaries, etc. We will focus on activities such as hunting, fishing, travelling over the tundra, discussions, and others.

My audio piece for Sounding Canadian Communities will be based on the recordings and sound pieces made during my stay with the Kunuk family's summer camp.

Hildegard Westerkamp

Ghosttown, B.C. — Sonic Snapshots of a Silenced Place

I will return to an area of British Columbia that has fascinated me ever since I emigrated to Canada in 1968: a stretch of road between Kootenay Lake and Slocan Lake alongside which one still finds remains of many old mining towns from around the turn of the 19th to the 20th century. These sites bear witness to the way industry tends to penetrate a wilderness and then, once resources are drained, leaves behind open gaps in mountains, junkheaps, trailings, and waste. Natural rhythms and movements eventually soften the edges, transforming an abandoned industrial site into mysterious rusty shapes and collapsed wooden structures overgrown by moss, weeds, shrubs, and trees. A once noisy, bustling place becomes a quiet ghosttown full of memories and imagined stories.

With the sounds and silences of its natural surroundings, of the rusty objects and structures, of footsteps and human voices as they explore the place, the piece will grapple with the contradictory impressions that inevitably characterize a person’s encounter with such a site: contemplating the edge where junk and artifact, destruction and new growth, noise and quiet meet; where perceptions of a shameful past in need of clean—up collide with feelings of pride towards a heritage worth preserving. Some of the materials were collected in 2000 for At the Edge of Wilderness, a sound installation about ghosttowns in British Columbia, created in collaboration with photographer Florence Debeugny. Additional sound materials involving local inhabitants will be gathered for the purpose of this project.