Public Rumination

You spot someone publicly ruminating - head down, avoiding eye contact, rifling through a skip bin. Earlier, you noticed them sorting through logs discarded by council workers, carefully loading certain finds into a disintegrating pull cart. They’ve also been seen outside your front window, sifting through a hard rubbish pile, removing speaker cones and LCD screens. Recently, you spotted them under a footbridge recording the creaking of rusted metal and, just last week, filming tangled plastic flowing from a drain pipe on a busted iphone.

Why do they look as if they are doing something illegal?  Whatever they are doing, it is definitely antisocial, they could at least smile. Public spaces are meant for other things. These spaces are functional, transitional areas between places of sleep and places of work. Public spaces are designed for walking, jogging, cycling, driving - not for rummaging or ruminating. We rummage through our emotions at home.

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In the animal kingdom a ruminant is one that is prone to bring up and chew again what has already been chewed. For us animals, rumination is a form of over-thinking. In recent times it has become a pathological term, a cause for anxiety, paranoia and distress. Any sensible person would advise against it.
Thinking is out; doing is in. Just swallow life whole - no need to chew.

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This installation is a regurgitation of wasted materials. At BLINDSIDE gallery, these scavenged materials converge to take part in a precarious assembly of tree limbs, media technology and construction waste. Screens littered throughout act as portals into a 3D environment, virtual renderings of a flooded trash heap bubbling at the surface. Speakers ring, proliferating a generative soundscape composed of field recordings and resynthesized “organic” sounds. Motorised branches twitch sporadically in response to audio stimuli from the installation space creating a perceptual feedback loop within the installation.