Earth and World: Echo-making: Where the Whistles Mingle

On March 20^th, 1980, Mount St. Helens (traditionally known as Lawetlat’la or Loowit) erupted. Rocks boiled, rivers evaporated into clouds, and Spirit Lake—a site connected with Indigenous whistling spirits known as Tsiatko—was smothered under a blanket of pyrolized trees. As part of a continuing series of works under the “Echomaking” umbrella, in this audio essay, Kristen Gallerneaux (Métis-Wendat) uncovers the sonic, material, and poetic resonances connected to this story. She will focus on the contagion effect of folklore born out of cataclysmic events, new mineral formats, and recovering knowledge within charged landscapes affected by geological and ecological transformation.

This recording was made on land occupying the ancestral, traditional and contemporary homelands of the Meškwahki·aša·hina (Fox), Peoria, Anishinabewaki ᐊᓂᔑᓈᐯᐗᑭ, Bodéwadmiakiwen (Potawatomi), and Myaamia people.  The people of these nations were forced from their land through the 1807 Treaty of Detroit.

Kristen Gallerneaux is an artist, curator, and sonic researcher holding a Ph.D. in Art Practice & Media History (UC San Diego), an MA in Folklore (University of Oregon), and an MFA in Art (Wayne State University). She is also the Curator of Communication and Information Technology at The Henry Ford Museum in Detroit, Michigan, where she continues to build upon one of the largest historical technology collections in North America. In 2018, she was a Future Thought speaker at Moogfest and premiered the experimental short film, The Hum. She has presented at Unsound editions Dislocation (2014), Presence (2018), and Intermission (2020). In 2017, she spoke about the history of the Votrax text-to-speech synthesizer and taught an electronic music production workshop at Pop Kultur Berlin. She has written for the Barbican Center, ARTnews, the Quietus, and Herman Miller’s WHY magazine. She has published on wide-ranging topics like mathematics in mid-century design, the visual history of telepathy research, the world’s first mousepad, and car audio bass battles in Miami. Her book, High Static, Dead Lines, is available via Strange Attractor Press and distributed by MIT Press in the United States.

Produced by: Zakia Sewell
Music by: Nicolas Gaunin
Design by: Mariana Vale

This series has been programmed as part of the Freelands Lomax Ceramics Fellowship.