abstracts, with love
Commissioned by The Future Places Centre / Culture and Place strand at Lancaster Institute of Contemporary Arts
Thanks to thebookartbookshop
A collaborative intermedia project between Cameron Graham, Klara Kofen, James Oldham and Chihiro Ono. Produced by Waste Paper Opera.
An intermedia tapestry and opera that weaves together research into the effects of the Chernobyl fall out on the Cumbrian ‘wilderness’, the history of domes, water cycles, the evolving landscapes of the local and the global, and the relentless movement of the tides that drag our history into our future at ever increasing speed.
This project is an experiment in collaborative world-making. Following an initial exploration of the ‘energy coast’ and its complexities, the research was developed collectively, creating a rich tapestry that invites both performers and audiences to navigate the intertwined uncertainties and questions of our time. Songs were composed around Sellafield’s high-integrity building evacuation system and reset to sections from Sun Tzu’s ‘The Art of War’. All harmonic and percussion material was derived from the sounds recorded at the Heysham Nuclear Power Station, while words were drawn from scientific reports on the progress on plutonium consolidation and storage, research on sonic warfare and Aztec hydro engineering, Yukio Mishima and Buckminster Fuller. Visuals were constructed from footage, taken on site, radioactivity measurements transformed into graphs and programmed to create animations.