The first in a series of three mixtapes of aural atmospheres.

compiled march–april 2012
mixtaped april 2012

tracklisting :
lawrence english    …and clouds for company
fennesz            city of light
andrea polli        round mountain
robert henke        studies for thunder
brian eno            1/1 (ambient 1: music for airports)
chris watson        vatnajökull
thomas köner        nieve penitentes 2
clams casino        waterfalls

Thanks to Hamer Dodds and the ASCUS committee for their help in facilitating the project.

This publication collects a number of works from my Wild Creations residency in Fox Glacier, including the student works from the GPS drawing workshop that I offered. Though documenting mostly video works, they are adapted to the book format to give a sense of their intended presentation. The publication is introduced by Joe Gerlach, a PhD candidate in geography at the University of Oxford.

There are plans for a physical edition of the publication, but for now it is available for download as an electronic publication.

Still frames taken from performance-to-camera piece.
Charcoal and pen drawing on nylon, video projection.
20 minutes 25s
produced with assistance from Jemma Nissen and the support of Kathy Waghorn.

This performance piece reconstructs a series of walks on Fox Glacier, which were recorded via a GPS device. Five routes are traced, building up a drawing that reveals common routes and landmarks used in navigating the glacier. The quality of line/movement reflects the experience of moving across this jagged and icy terrain. The projected images are views of the glacier surface, taken from standing height, which slowly zoom, pan and dissolve into each other.

The act of drawing these routes conflates scales of the experiential, bodily and cartographic, where walking becomes digital code becomes drawing becomes moving image. Glacier Tracer uses experiential and abstract strategies for representing landscape, through a process of drawing myself into the landscape.

compiled december 2011 to january 2012
mixtaped january 2012

featuring: A$AP rocky, africa hitech, animal collective, bone thugs-n-harmony, cypress hill, dibiase, dj earl, fennesz, gang gang dance, hertta lussu ässa, kemialliset ystävät, king midas sound (ggd remix), kingdom, korallreven, kuedo, lunice feat. azealia banks, missy elliott, múm, naughty by nature, paavoharju, rustie, samiyam, snoop doggy dogg, tomutonttu, warren g feat. nate dogg, the weeknd and zomby.

iOS users can listen to this here.

I have been invited to speak about my practice to Masters of Design students at Unitec in Auckland. I will discuss a selection of projects and offer some tactics for creative practice after graduation.

In Scotland each bank is responsible for printing its own money, a major point of difference with most other countries, and one that reflects the history of banking in Scotland. The Bank of Scotland was the first bank in Europe to successfully introduce paper currency, and a Scottish economist, John Law, helped establish banknotes as formal currency in France.

Made as I was preparing to leave Scotland, the title of this work is also a play on Adam Smith’s “The Wealth of Nations”, considered to be the founding text of modern capitalism and free-market economics.

This rarely seen one pound note produced by the Royal Bank of Scotland is taken out of circulation as a way of thinking about issues of value, nationhood, identity, and  representation. This seems particularly relevant in a period of financial instability as well as the political context of an upcoming referendum on Scottish independence.

GPS trace from a 6.8km walk at the confluence of the Fox and Cook Rivers, South Westland, New Zealand.

This piece explores the propositional nature of mapping; the assertion that “this is there”. As a walked text piece the statement connects the direct experience of walking with a playfully banal statement of truth-testing.

Paired GPS drawing and digital video.
15 minute looping video

These paired images offer complementary ways of thinking about stillness in the context of Fox Glacier and any attempt to represent it through mapping. One is an image of my GPS location taken over a 15 minute interval while sitting still, with the GPS device subject to “drift” due to the geometry and material nature of the glacier. The other image is a still from a 15 minute video, recorded at the same times as the GPS drawing. The video records the subtle changes to the glacier in real time; melting, cracking and changing light conditions.

Vertically tracking video projection
7 minutes 44s

Constructed from video footage recorded while walking in Fox Glacier valley, this video slowly tracks up the space in which it is shown. It forms a vertical section of the landscape, from the Fox River, up the valley and finally on to Fox Glacier itself. The work attempts to create a spatial document of this environment without resorting to cartographic encoding, seeking a balance between abstraction and the experiential act of walking through the landscape.