A Lonely Sailor Weather Station: Broadcast Series
The broadcasts below are a weather and weathering station. Instead of transmitting the usual marine shipping reports out to the sailors, this station receives signal from the lonesome sailors in the ocean and broadcasts them back to land. A lonely sailor is caught up in the weather, has slipped out of human signal and entered into a fluid, wet zone of weathering activity. These weather broadcasts drift in oceanic communication, composed through multiple saturation experiments with collaborators and oceanic agencies.
Iteration 2 below was created through collaborative experimentation for the 2020 National Arts Festival (nationalartsfestival.co.za), supported by POPArt and Fak’ugesi African Digital Innovation Festival.
Collaborators
Meghan Judge, Craig Leo, Baeletsi Tsatsi, Rob Murray and Roberto Pombo. With Robin Kirsten and Ukwanda Puppets and Design Art Collective: Luyanda Nogodlwana, Sipho Ngxola, and Siphokazi Mphofu.
Synopsis
An exploration of amphibious living, anchored on stories of dissolving, shifting and stillness. Far out to sea, where land-based networks begin to crackle and skip on the boundaries of their limited existence, our lonesome sailor sits, moderate at first, then rising slowly.
SECURITE:
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WEATHER BULLETIN FOR THE HIGH SEAS FOR METAREA VII.
ISSUED BY A LONELY SAILOR WEATHER BROADCAST
ON THE 29th of June 2020 AT 08:30 UTC.
FOR NORTH-EAST SECTOR OF METAREA. VII, PREPARED BY THE EMPTINESS OF A HOLLOW VESSEL, SEE AREA 2 BELOW.
NOTE: WX OBSERVATIONS.
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COULD ALL VESSELS EXPERIENCING UNEXPECTED, SEVERE WX/SEA STATE PLEASE MAKE EVERY EFFORT TO REPORT THIS TO THE SPACES BETWEEN THE SILENCE BELOW.
AREA FORECAST
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Iteration 1 below was created on land during the lonesomeness of national lockdowns whilst attempting to reach the ocean. Through the distance of space data and the nearness of print texture and stop motions techniques, I found a wet world, mood, and atmosphere. The work is inspired by memories of being adrift in the Indian Ocean after losing broadcast signal. In drift, a shifting temporality brought me into more attuned oceanic relations. These clips explore differing temporalities that encounter one another through loops and notions of "staying with".
The differing parts in the clips produce a poesis of relations of multiplicity through tensions such as silence and noise / stillness and movement. A language emerges here that plays with data, making (non)sense of them and releasing them through my body into states of desire. A whole world can be sensed in the fractalised compositions that thicken the longer you stay with them.
I’ve been out here, delta delta, rising slowly. The frontal systems, 3 or 4, occasionally 5, have been sinking below my skin.
At times I am good, occasionally poor, becoming lighter in the afternoon. My breath tends to subside, lima echo, becoming zero after midnight.
The gust, unsettled and at times cyclonic, blows knots into my core, as we build our identities in a northeasterly direction.
As the night light grows at my surface, precipitation increases in an anti clockwise direction. Rough. Good. Calm. And we swell 3 to 4.5 meters.
The moving mass - all forty-four octillion living microbial cells - transmogrifies beneath me. November Oscar, November Oscar: at mid-period it transmogrifies me.