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JR Carpenter’s Etheric Ocean

Posted 13 May 2014 by nathan | Comments Off

This latest digital commission for the EVP website is a browser-based ‘underwater audio writing noise site’. In it, J.R. Carpenter weaves references such as Tom McCarthy’s “C’ Eliane Radigue’s field recordings, with original writing, which span the gaps between the nautical, radiographic, spectral and aeronautic. Her intuitive composition of shifting, morphing texts, audio and images makes the most of the historical, and extra-logical slippages across the themes. You read the site by scrolling across and triggering the sound works at will.

The poem/site is available to view here: http://luckysoap.com/ethericocean

J.R. Carpenter says of the work:

Ether is a hypothetical medium – supposed by the ancients to fill the heavens, proposed by scientist to account for the propagation of electromagnetic radiation through space. The notion of ‘ocean’ was once as vague. Aristotle perceived of the world as a small place, bounded by a narrow river. Columbus believed the Atlantic was a much shorter distance across than we now know it to be. Even as early electromagnetic telegraphic and wireless transmissions propagating over, under, and through oceans collapsed distances between ships and shores, they revealed vast new oceans – oceans of static, oceans of noise.

Etheric Ocean is an underwater web art audio writing noise site. It is an imprecise survey of sounds both animal and mechanical, and of signs both real and imaginary, of distortions born of the difficulty of communicating through the medium of deep dense dark ocean. Like stations dotting a radio dial, murky diagrams, shifting definitions, appropriated texts, nautical associations, and wonky word plays are strung along a very long, horizontally scrolling browser window. This is a world of inversions. Sounds are deep harbours, or are they depths? Sounds purposefully unfold. Out of its element, uncannily airborne, a flying jellyfish drone wobbles about. Noises are made. Islands are Heard.