In 2008 and 2009 I recorded sounds and
images of the spring ice breakup on the Red, Seine, and
Assinoboine rivers. Roughly coinciding with the ice
breakup in spring 2010, sound and video composed from these
documentations were projected onto architectural surfaces in
installations in downtown Winnipeg and at the University of
Manitoba. New music, collaborations with composers Richard
Festinger and Michael Matthews, premiered at a special concert
on March 30.
Installation sites included the outdoor
entry to Plug In Institute for Contemporary Art in downtown
Winnipeg (below), and, at the University of Manitoba, the
Engineering Building’s atrium stairway (above left) and
the J.A. Russell Building’s foyers (above right).
Five sound-and-image videos, with working titles of
"ice intact," "chasms and drips," "09
drive," "candled ice drive," and
"Seine," each 12 to 55 minutes long (see video links
below), alternated at each site. The intention was to bring
attention to the rich phenomena of the ice breakup
(Winnipeg’s great harbinger of spring) in places where it
would be otherwise far from signt and hearing, and also to
create something luminously and aurally beautiful, arresting
and revealing. The concert Ice,
performed in Eva Clare Hall of the
University of Manitoba’s Marcel A. Desautels Faculty of
Music, was devoted to Matthews’s winter is when snakes and Festinger’s Spring Ice (see
link below.) In both compositions, my recorded ice
breakup sounds were incorporated and manipulated so that they
became in a sense an additional instrument.
