Sheaf of Times
Field sampling & audio composition
2012
Artist Statement
With Sheaf of Times, Dib and Meza delve into the foreign world of plants. Using both contact microphones and open-air microphones, they create lofty and minute sound samples. Blurring the boundaries between passively recording sounds (field sampling) and actively making sounds, they focus on plants’ materiality, their shapes and textures. This composition is a documentation of interferences, of shockwaves between humans and plants.
Throughout their work, Dib and Meza are attentive to physical manifestations of time. Sound takes time; it can only exist in time. Unlike sight, sound is immersive and simultaneous. Sound physically hits and penetrates. It bundles us with it. It requires and even creates our presence, such that we are not in front of something, but within it. In Jean-Luc Nancy’s words, “Sound has no hidden face; it is all in front, in back, and outside inside, inside-out.” Sheaf of Times is a layering of moments with plants. Using both contact microphones and open-air microphones, Dib and Meza bring together a bundle of interactions, a sheaf of encounters: from lightly touching, to rubbing, to stomping, to caring for and watering. This composition is a documentation of interferences, of shockwaves between humans and plants.
Biography
Lina Dib is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at Rice University and an affiliate artist at the Topological Media Lab in Montreal and TX/RX labs in Houston. She has received awards from Canada’s Social Science and Humanities Research Council, AMIDA’s European training program, and Rice University’s Humanities Research Center. Dib’s installations and compositions range from the ethnographic to the experimental, and have been shown in Montreal, New York, New Orleans, Stanford and Houston.
Abinadi Meza received a Master of Architecture degree from Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) in Los Angeles. His installations, performances and spatial fictions have been presented in numerous exhibitions including at Utzon Architectural Centre, Aalborg; Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; La Casa Encendida, Madrid; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Biennale of Electronic Arts, Perth; and Uppsala Art Museum.
