Captiva

2015-18, 42 min.

Multi-movement work for solo acoustic harp and live electronics
Electronics created in collaboration with Matthew Ostrowski

“In August of 2015, Zeena and I spent five weeks at the Rauschenberg Residency on Captiva Island. We developed a series of creative research methods with sound, movement, photography and drawing that led to Captiva. Our process included different types of observing and notating the horizons of the island’s landscape, through line and rhythm. Taking photographs of various points of view on the beach, framed and punctuated line. Once printed, we traced the lines of waves, tidelines and other edges of the landscape’s image, following what became less and less line, as it became more and more the movement of light on water, sand or sky. Our bodies, now positioned to look down as though from the sky, instead of outwards from a vertical stance, were reoriented to a new perspective. This changed our relationship to space, both flattening and dimensionalizing the experience of line.

Short studies were developed that created a set of conditions that were used to explore and create new systems. These investigations were part and parcel of the rhythm of our days: swimming, walking, recording rain and frogs, watching storms move across the sky, and dancing together.

Captiva transmits an understanding of a relationship between and of systems that is deeply embodied. The kind of knowing and listening created in these sonic systems holds multiple orbits of sensation, time, structure, and rhythm.”
—Jennifer Monson

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