CONTEXT
Caldera's 90 acres, 3500 feet above sea
level, lie in the eastern Oregon Cascades. In summer
Caldera is a camp for under-served children and adolescents;
December through March it has a small artist-in-residence
program that allows artists to focus on their own creative
works. Caldera occupies a valley and much of its variably steep
sides. Much of this landscape burned in a large forest
fire in 2002. The property includes shores of Blue Lake,
a collapsed volcanic cone, or caldera, now 350 feet deep with
spring water. On Link Creek, which flows from Blue to
Suttle Lake, a saw mill -- now converted to
hydro-electric power generation -- attests to the site's
logging camp past. Uphill, one property edge adjoins US
Route 20, a major route over the Cascades via Santiam Pass.
Caldera's nature thus encompasses and reflects aspects of human
culture.
CALDERA LISTENING PROJECT
Landscapes reveal sounds and sounds reveal
landscapes. Land forms affect acoustics and sound
propagation through structures and materials; they also affect
sounds' content. Their plant and animal habitats provide
varied, changing sonorous eco-niches. The Caldera
Listening Project developed in response to my experiences there
as artist in residence in February, 2005 and in response to the
goals of its summer youth camp programs. The work is a
record of my observations and experiences at and in a
particular time; it is also intended to draw attention to
Caldera's sonorous eco-niches and prod people, especially young
people, to listen. Ten listening sites are marked with
specially painted and capped posts. The post colors
reflect those of Caldera's February landscape; the caps’
include a listening creature icon , a conceptual map of the
property's landscape's sounds, and maps that indicate where one
is on the property and in the larger world. Posts’
text also refers to landscape sounds: the horizontal concerns
sounds and their characteristics; the vertical concerns
conditions (for example, rain and wind) influencing those
sounds. An eleventh post, the camper's post, was painted
in summer landscape colors and without text. Kit
Stafford, the Caldera teacher at Sisters Middle School with
whom I worked, did a unit on sound with her class. They
would do their own listening at Caldera, collect and cull their
own words, and stencil this, their own post, perhaps a start to
a landscape trail that Caldera students and campers will
develop.
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