Dublab is a non-profit internet radio station based in Los Angeles. As well as broadcasting music they have also been involved in art exhibitions, film projects, live events and record releases. The broadcast is eclectic ranging from electronic and noise to ambient, post-rock and folk. An example of their film work is Secondhand Sureshots where they gave producers five dollars to buy albums from second hand shops and sample the music to create new tracks. Their soundsystem an DJ collective has been featured at diverse venues such as The Getty Centre and Hollywood Bowl. Notable guests include Flying Lotus, Four Tet and Animal Collective.
Below is one of their more avant-garde film / art projects – mi casa es su casa, “an international home field-recording quilt.” It is a collage of sounds from personal spaces around the world. People have sent 30 second recordings of the most interesting sounds in their homes which were then stitched together to offer an audio insight into their intimate environments.
The finished piece was presented at the Sound in Space field recording festival in Los Angeles on Saturday, February 14th 2009 and is also available on dublab.com as a free audio download.
This is part two of two in our look at this incredible photography exhibition. Part 1 is here. Apocalyptic man-made wounds, the schisms of oil’s emanation caused by mechanical fiends which dry their surroundings of the black gold in service of an unlimited thirst. The components are established in reality, but they convey a vision of an industrial junkie, reaching ever deeper to hit a vein.
Edward Burtynsky, Oil Fields #22, Cold Lake Production Project, Cold Lake, Alberta, Canada, 2001. Chromogenic color print.
There is a cold dominance and depersonalisation to the artist’s style. Absent, we are simply present. There is no overt voice to cloud our interpretation. The extraordinary scenes are sterile like a disembodied dream. Oil is a source of wealth, the fuel of progress, yet has dark promises.
Edward Burtynsky, Highway #1, Intersection 105 & 110, Los Angeles, California, USA, 2003. Chromogenic color print.
Burtynsky uses cranes and helicopters to provide his angles. There maintains an aura of impossibility. The detachment offers the power of physical remoteness from the mastery and control of nature and the promise of its destruction. It is an edge which can not be backed away from, its too late: we’ve already gone over.
Edward Burtynsky, Oil Refineries #23, Oakville, Ontario, Canada, 1999. Chromogenic color print.
The artist maps a world shaped, ordered and rendered almost to submission. To honour human effort in bringing oil the surface, nature bends to our will. Places and people are united by oil as it is taken from the ground. The images astonish because they give shape to our suppressed realisation of what our lifestyles have caused.
Edward Burtynsky, AMARC #5, Davis-Monthan AFB, Tuscon, Arizona, USA, 2006. Chromogenic color print.
Remarkable scenes of the reordering of nature at unknown sites through obscure industrial activities depict a world of oil which is beyond comprehension and outside our control yet ultimately resulting from our own existence. Human mastery of the natural world has contained the force of our environment. and tempered our fear of God. The shock of these images arises not from the scale and crushing power of nature; but rather from the organisation and extraction of profit from resources.
Edward Burtynsky, Trucker’s Jamboree, Walcott, Iowa, USA, 2003. Chromogenic color print.
Burtynsky is no technophobe. He acknowledges out dependence on the mechanical world, its pleasures and extremes. But in finality, our own creeping terror at its inevitability. Oil is no simplistic villain, in fact it is our own black hearted rationalism which has the chilling, corrosive effect.
Edward Burtynsky, Oxford Tire Pile #9ab, Westley, California, USA, 1999. Chromogenic color print.
If these diagrams of exploitation and vectors of progress are visions of our shared subconscious, they foretell the future. If God is dead; then it is man we must fear – and his creations.
