Carrizo Parkfield Prime (excerpt) from Christina McPhee on Vimeo.
This film (2008-2024) by Christina McPhee will premiere at UCLA for the Pacific Standard Time (PST) Getty initiative, Art | Science Collide, September 2024-March 2025, as part of the exhibition Atmospheres of Sound: Sonic Art in Times of Climate Disruption, Los Angeles California.
The full film is 10 minutes, 4k, stereo.
At Carrizo Plain, one hundred miles northwest of Los Angeles, the San Andreas Fault is in plain view above an alkaline salt flat, Soda Lake, ringed with mountains. Carrizo’s sublime terrain has inspired a series of site studies from field data, including scientific information shared publicly by geologists whom I interviewed in the immediate aftermath of the Parkfield 2004 Earthquake; drawings and notations arising from my own experience with post-traumatic stress disorder nightmares; and field recordings in drawing, sound, and video on location.
My core insight is speculative: let’s imagine a cybernetic feedback loop between the Earth’s earthquake geology and our human neurologic response to trauma. A metonym, ‘seismic memory’ could stand in for human emotional fragmentation in post traumatic stress disorder. Seismologists have limited tools to predict an earthquake incident before it occurs, and can forecast aftershocks only after the initial event. Similarly, the amygdala records the emotional impact of shock in unpredictable, apparently random-access fragments that, in my own experience of nightmares, appear in dreams as intense light/dark contrasting shapes and sudden sounds.
Carrizo Parkfield Prime (2008-2024) montages documentary landscape to performance footage, geomorphological data visualization, abstract dream animations, and site-specific sound. Field recordings made on site combine, in post-production, with sonifications of p-wave recordings made during the 6.0 Parkfield Earthquake, by the United States Geological Survey at a depth of three kilometers inside the San Andreas Fault Observatory at Depth (SAFOD). Ella Mudie notes: “In the topological studies of McPhee, seismic events, then, are envisaged as triggers that activate an otherwise-dormant landscape. It is this triggering phenomenon that underpins the artist’s concept of ‘seismic memory,’ which draws a correlation between seismicity and the human mind, particularly in relation to how traumatic memory may be reactivated by familiar yet often indeterminate events.”
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