sounding lines / a vague machine of no

2024 exhibition @ Capri for Tierras Sonidas / Sonic Rodeo, Marfa TX
12 mm instruments

performance, reading

_{Sounding lines weighted with industrial debris from oil refinery and rig sites play with fluid dynamics— a physics that enables oil and gas extraction, its infrastructure, processes of breathing, and how sound propagates by the compressibility of its medium: air, water, earth, or flesh.

Thinking with the ways the mathematical is meant to describe processes as neutral. Turbulence is a process that has not yet been solved with an adequate equation. The figures open questions of what gets in the way. The weight of what each holds determines a figure’s internal cohesion and its fragility: artificial flowers blown up against the barbed wire at cemeteries, toys from Family Dollar, rusted things from the parking lots of Dairy Queens and underneath an oilfield billboard that says “Thou Shalt Not Make Unto Thee Any Grave,” losing lottery tickets, to-do lists and diary pages.

Wind shapes the lines in vortices and entanglements, the contact of “oilfield trash” against a wall or itself.}