Yolande Harris “Sun Run Sun”

“I am witnessing a sensation of dislocation from my immediate environment by its alternative representation in the data of position, the figures of longitude and latitude updated every second as I move. What place is there for my sensations, my phenomenology, my conscious and unconscious awareness of space if this knowledge is so efficiently and functionally made redundant by the technologies of satellite navigations?”  – Yolande Harris

Sun Run Sun: On Sonic Navigations (2007-9) investigates contemporary, historical and animal techniques of navigation through the use of sound.  This series of works includes Harris’s Satellite Sounders, Dead Reckoning, Sun Running, and Navigating by Circles.

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“Charting a path between environmental engagement and technological development, Sun Run Sun explores the relationship between the embodied experience of location and the calculated data of position.”  In Satellite Sounders a “continuously changing musical composition is generated from signals of navigation satellites in orbit, together with the participant’s coordinates on earth. By exploring the individual experience of navigation technologies through the intimate and immersive qualities of sound, it re-establishes and renegotiates a sense of embodied connectedness to one’s environment.”[1]

Video from performance at “Playing the City” Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, 2-3 May, 2009.

[1] Yolande Harris, Sun Run Sun project site