Pythia (whale record)
6 : 56
notes for a whale record
Pythia (whale record)
sound object, six minutes, fifty-six seconds
played through speakers on a loop inside of a reverberant room. The sound
material for Pythia (whale record) is based on samples taken from the album
Songs of the Humpback Whale (1970), a collection of research and field recordings
by Dr. Roger S. Payne. These samples were slowed, delayed,
and pitch-shifted into three intervals of a minor 7th harmony.
Forest Lawn Museum
cathedral nave
site specific installation
on the occasion of Kim Schoen’s November 9th
oracular pronouncement: “think as a mortal.” The work
invokes Pythia, the high priestess medium for Apollo.
This work, as a meditation on the limits of language and
its many levels of mediation, aligns with an acknowledgement of the limits of
mortality. To think as a mortal, is also to think in terms of its limits.
However, the possibility to consider, or even connect with, something
beyond these limitations, emerges precisely from this set of mortal, bounded
conditions. Pythia transmits these mediated words of Apollo, as a limiting thought,
that delimits thinking, beyond itself.
