HERE THERE
Caroline Louise Miller, Stefani Byrd, and Alarm Will Sound Ensemble
Immersive Media Installation - Three Channel 4K Video Projection, 5.1 Surround Sound, 3 Channel Parabolic Dome Speaker Audio
Work in Progress (2020 - Present)
Here-There is a long-form multimedia collaboration between Alarm Will Sound, composer and sound designer Caroline Louise Miller, and video artist Stefani Byrd. This project finds its texture in hidden, quotidian, or suppressed histories of industry, labor, and human movement in the United States. It explores experiences that fall outside dominant colonialist narratives of westward expansion and economic motivation, and weaves together stories of people’s everyday lives that will never be found in a mainstream historical narrative.
Through video, music, sound design, and projection design we create a tapestry of personal and archival anecdotes of movement, stasis, and work as they relate both directly and metaphorically to the railway. Using anti-racist texts and community archives as a framing point, we investigate the history of the American rail system as a turbulent story of economic expansion, exploitation, and resistance in which many lives are entangled.
Through these threads are crosswoven imagery and sonic landscapes of abandonment and overgrowth of this system in the present, taken at various sites around the United States. The beauty and desolation of industrial ruins embody the reversibility and fragility of economic fantasy. In its utilitarian haste, “progress” doesn’t envision or lay claim to these spaces. After labor is done for the day or for eternity, relics of industry enter into new relationships with their environments, while residues of their former lives remain.
An accompanying music video taken through the window of a moving train focuses on the many rough and “undesirable” textures of the American city landscape that are often found alongside railroad tracks. So-called “eyesores” like rubble, graffiti, warehouses, unfinished construction, muddy ravines, factory pipes, defaced billboards, and power plants find interplay with sound design and music, reflecting on the countless gestures of unrecognized labor on which American society is built.
Featuring interviews with Dr. Gordon H. Chang, History Professor at Stanford University and author of The Ghosts of Gold Mountain and Dan Stone, retired of
