The thickets are full with branches of poison ivy and beach shrubs. The air is thick with mosquitos, clinging onto the folds of a cotton t-shirt in the morning sun. This is a place where even the sprays of 100% deet don’t deter them from piercing through fabric and into skin.
Layered beneath these images of thickets and mosquitoes we hear the arrhythmic rhythmic sounds of wind reverberating, and it sounds like a slowed down train on a faraway track or like a simulated tide hitting something not quite natural.
These are sounds from a contact mic, “a form of microphone that senses audio vibrations through contact with solid objects. Unlike normal air microphones, contact microphones are almost completely insensitive to air vibrations but transduce only structure-borne sound.”10 If you hold them up like a regular mic, nothing happens. But if you place them against something, you begin to hear vibrations that sound both familiar and strange. They’re particularly good at picking up vibrations on man made objects like metal or glass. I’ve placed them on a telephone pole, or a chain link fence in the wind, or on asphalt as cars go by, on the mesh wiring around an outdoor air conditioner. I even tried a cactus, but it didn’t work so well. Contact mics seem best suited to capture the vibrations between the natural world and the man made world, and the resonances and dissonances between. They create otherworldly sounds that are completely and utterly based in real world objects interacting.
From the thickets we start to hear a sound more familiar, overlaid. The sound of a chainsaw. And the body of a man. In order to cohabitate we have to slice into the encroaching nature. We have to tame it, inside and out. The camera follows the man as he slices into the foliage around, bending down, leaning up. It cuts, pans, catches him, loses him, a wall of leaves appears, he disappears, the act of the camera cutting him up as he cuts up the untamed nature of the world around him.
This particular man runs the campground at Fire Island National Seashore. It’s the beginning of the season and he’s clearing campground spaces for summer visitors. Over the winter poison ivy, Virginia creeper, and other beach shrubs tangle to form a dense wall of leaves and roots. They quake and shiver as the electrical teeth of the chainsaw cut through them, revealing layer behind layer of entanglement.
This man uses his labor, and his technology, to shape the landscape. To make it hospitable to human visitors. As hospitable as it can be given the mosquitoes. (We have friends who camp there every year, and every year I ask them how they can stand the swarms and they say they spend most of the time on the beach and then run into their tents in the evening. They say they tried to have a barbeque one time, but it wasn’t possible).
In one shot, a dense wall of foliage tremors in the wind. The chainsaw appears on the left hand side of the frame, where the leaves start to shake more vigorously. His arm appears, and then his body. He swipes at the wall, occasionally ripping out his chainsaw which has become entangled in vines and roots. Over the course of five minutes, we watch the greenery get cut away to reveal the gray and brown innards spilling out.
This man has used his labor and his technology, so does he now own this?
Layered beneath these images of thickets and mosquitoes we hear the arrhythmic rhythmic sounds of wind reverberating, and it sounds like a slowed down train on a faraway track or like a simulated tide hitting something not quite natural.
These are sounds from a contact mic, “a form of microphone that senses audio vibrations through contact with solid objects. Unlike normal air microphones, contact microphones are almost completely insensitive to air vibrations but transduce only structure-borne sound.”10 If you hold them up like a regular mic, nothing happens. But if you place them against something, you begin to hear vibrations that sound both familiar and strange. They’re particularly good at picking up vibrations on man made objects like metal or glass. I’ve placed them on a telephone pole, or a chain link fence in the wind, or on asphalt as cars go by, on the mesh wiring around an outdoor air conditioner. I even tried a cactus, but it didn’t work so well. Contact mics seem best suited to capture the vibrations between the natural world and the man made world, and the resonances and dissonances between. They create otherworldly sounds that are completely and utterly based in real world objects interacting.
From the thickets we start to hear a sound more familiar, overlaid. The sound of a chainsaw. And the body of a man. In order to cohabitate we have to slice into the encroaching nature. We have to tame it, inside and out. The camera follows the man as he slices into the foliage around, bending down, leaning up. It cuts, pans, catches him, loses him, a wall of leaves appears, he disappears, the act of the camera cutting him up as he cuts up the untamed nature of the world around him.
This particular man runs the campground at Fire Island National Seashore. It’s the beginning of the season and he’s clearing campground spaces for summer visitors. Over the winter poison ivy, Virginia creeper, and other beach shrubs tangle to form a dense wall of leaves and roots. They quake and shiver as the electrical teeth of the chainsaw cut through them, revealing layer behind layer of entanglement.
This man uses his labor, and his technology, to shape the landscape. To make it hospitable to human visitors. As hospitable as it can be given the mosquitoes. (We have friends who camp there every year, and every year I ask them how they can stand the swarms and they say they spend most of the time on the beach and then run into their tents in the evening. They say they tried to have a barbeque one time, but it wasn’t possible).
In one shot, a dense wall of foliage tremors in the wind. The chainsaw appears on the left hand side of the frame, where the leaves start to shake more vigorously. His arm appears, and then his body. He swipes at the wall, occasionally ripping out his chainsaw which has become entangled in vines and roots. Over the course of five minutes, we watch the greenery get cut away to reveal the gray and brown innards spilling out.
This man has used his labor and his technology, so does he now own this?