The summer flurries catalogue statement (as submitted)

We chart our cities, so we chart ourselves. Peter Turchi

It is natural to assume that we would not be willing to compromise the environment if the conveniences and luxuries thereby gained did not have a substantial positive impact on our happiness. But there is room for scepticism and, in particular, for the thesis that we are compromising the environment to no avail in that our conveniences and luxuries are not having a significant impact on our happiness, making the costs incurred for them a waste.

Life is not in things; rather, things are in life, caught up in a current of continual generation Tim Ingold

It seems that we can no longer have an everyday exchange with strangers about the weather on our morning walks — we vacillate between understanding our observations as weather or climate change, or the uneasy feeling apparent dissolves instead into a fumbling disquiet. Unseasonal phenomena alert us to the renewed complexity of life. Timothy Morton uses the concept of the mesh, as “a situation or series of events in which a person is entangled; a concatenation of constraining or restricting forces or circumstances, a snare,” to describe the challenge of the increasing ‘field’ of worldwide knowledge:

Our situation is fascinatingly contradictory, On the one hand, we know more. On the other hand, this very knowledge means we lose touch with reality as we thought we knew it… If everything is interconnected, there is less of everything. Nothing is complete in itself. Timothy Morton

The summer flurries presents a landscape of droughts, dry lakes and wildfires from Lake Clifton in Western Australia, the City’s antipodean alter ego. A postcolonial invasion from somewhere else inverts the deep history of Dublin’s spoken and scribed streets with sounds of wattlebirds and Australian Shelduck. It is a folding up of the space in between and an interdigitation or involution of the two places. Participants experience the meshing of two very different locations as they hunt for invisible feathers and track the movement of water. The piece aims to create linkages at different scales across human and nonhuman worlds.

The summer flurries is an outdoor spatial sound art walk utilising high resolution GPS as part of The Sixth Shore project, hosted by SymbioticA 2009-2010.

Andreou, C. (2010). A Shallow Route to Environmentally Friendly Happiness: Why Evidence That We Are Shallow Materialists Need Not Be Bad News for the Environment(alist). Ethics, Place & Environment: A Journal of Philosophy & Geography, 13(1), 1-10.

Ingold, T. (2007). Earth, Sky, Wind, and Weather. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 13(s1), S19-S38.

Morton, T. (2010). The Ecological Thought. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.

Turchi, P. (2007). Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer. San Antonio, Texas: Trinity University Press.