Disintegration Process

September 3, 2004
Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin, Germany)

Disintegration Process represented a working methodology that I developed to give form to a series of field recordings collected in derelict building sites and discarded urban infrastructures in Dublin’s city centre in 2003 and 2004. The recordings focused on capturing a sense of intimacy in these desolate places, which included an abandoned railway line, empty apartment buildings, unused and overgrown fragments of land between other properties, and sites of temporarily-halted building projects.

During the building boom that took place over the time period between 2001 and 2005 in Dublin (and in Ireland in general), I experienced these spaces as part of a city which was rapidly disintegrating, making way for something that I imagined would be cleaner and more precise; thus these locations felt precarious and empty, yet still possessing traces of previous or itinerant life within their boundaries.

The project aimed to unite these field recordings as traces of their various referent sites within different performance or installation settings, so that the abstract link between the sites’ atmospheres would be somehow made real, or at least expressed and experienced as a concise sonic entity by an audience. Subsequently, the sound sources would be subjected to various forms of sonic decay that would hint at the gradual erosion of the dormant physical locations that seemed to map a phantam series of future construction projects that would fully displace them.

Joelle Bitton (a member of the superficiel.org net art collective) invited me to present a work that dealt with urban space alongside her and fellow superficiel collaborator Raphael Meyer at a special event at the International Cultural Heritage Informatics Meeting (ICHIM) at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, Germany. I chose to present a version of Disintegration Process as an installation / performance, with a projection depicting the project’s history and approach to recording as a text while I mixed files from my Disintegration Process archive over a PA system.

This project was left somewhat open-ended, as my focus shifted to the initial phases of the Streets installation and away from developing Disintegration Process as a more finalized installation.

Click here to download a condensed version of the improvised performance of 8 x Disintegration Process, recorded at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin. The file is 13m15s, 18.2MB.