Electric Sky, Skykomish Ballpark, 2017
Church of the Black Hole Collective, First-Year Collaboration
Art as experience is my jam.
I wanted to to propose a site-specific installation at tech/arts festival, Electric Sky. Event producer and massive culture builder, Shelly Farnham, invited artists to make new work riffing on the theme “Whispering Woods.”
WHO WAS WITH ME
I’d been talking about a collab with light artist (a gross oversimplification of his ouevre) Dylan Neuwirth, that would be a city-wide poem about the future, written (by children) in neon letters. That project languished as Dylan’s new studio took off, so I crewed up with a talented sculptor (Michael Henderson), an incredible rigger (Shawn Drew), my former audio engineer (Durin Gleaves) and a jack of all trades (Steve Ochs) to play with this idea but completely changing the medium to suit our environment, resources, and skills.
This team-up was the first iteration of the Church of the Black Hole, an arts collective that swells and flexes with different members depending on opportunities and availability across a host of venues.
WHAT WE MADE
We decided to bring into existence a simple, haunting idea: a sound vortex hidden in the forest, where faint voices from the future would drift down from illuminated pods suspended just above our heads.
After scouting the land, we chose a natural cathedral—a cedar grove that seemed almost to hum with its own quiet gravity. There, we shifted our design toward a an “abduction-style” beam of light shining from enormous “Blair-Witch” spheres where embedded Bluetooth speakers whispered prophecies from the future accompanied by eerie harmonics.
All sound was recorded/mixed at the festival, and the children in the recording also helped us assemble our spheres out of zip ties and fallen branches discovered in the woods.
Visitors entered the “cathedral” under a homespun archway and stood directly under the abduction lighting for the best sound.
A sign explained that time traveling aliens had found a way to communicate with Earth’s oldest lifeforms…trees. They wanted to warn Earthlings about the future and the trees had to think up some way to reach humans, who are the species most responsible for acting on the information. Since all humans sound like children to trees, they manifested an environmental disruption to lure us in and captivate our attention.
Here is a view into the pods we created. The installation worked perfectly. All night viewers could be found standing transfixed, listening carefully for the quiet voices.
Carey Christie of Seattle 
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