O'Brien and O'Brien, A Year With The Meadows Three channel video, 18m41s, 2022
A full 2K version can be watched via the following link in the title above: Please ensure quality in Vimeo is set to 2k
Method:
In search of wild spaces, and given the restrictions of the pandemic, we found ourselves walking the familiar meadow and marshlands of Aylestone Meadows. I decided to concentrate our practice on the site and use our experiments in deep canine topography to make a 12-month portrait of place, from the canine POV.
Equipment/materials:
- Go Pro camera
- Roland binaural in-ear microphones
- Olympus digital Dictaphone
- iMac
- Adobe Premier Pro
- Reaper Audio (digital recording studio)
- Tascam handheld field recorder
Discoveries:
My first instinct was to present this project as an immersive installation but concerned about ongoing post covid restrictions I opted to present this work in progress as a three channel video which can be encountered online. I added a musical composition, reflecting the deep time nature of the landscape, as a counter rhythm to the rapid movements of the canine body.
One thing that struck me about the prolonged encounter with the chest mounted camera footage is s sense of synaesthesia through a crossing of visual and olfactory senses. The close rapid movement does unsettle the senses, but it is also the closest I have got to seeing the canine smell-scape. This disorientation has become central to the project and has led me to consider deep canine topography and its document as something that troubles or perhaps suspends human subjectivity.