The End of Safari was commissioned by Mass MoCA for their Elegies
exhibition. The project took nearly two years from beginning to end and
is by far my most ambitious piece to date. The end result was the
transformation of the gallery into a kind of “set” within which a thirty
minute, fourteen channel audio work unfolds. All technology is
concealed. Ten of the speakers are used to replace the existing acoustic
space with a shifting landscape that moves the listener through a
sequence of locations. Three creature-like sculptures are made of wire,
fabric and died silicon, two of which erupt into warped operatic episodes
(treated elements from an english translation of the orientalist opera,
Turandot) emanating from their headless bodies. The third is mute and
unfinished.The final channel is a special speaker (Holosonics) whose signal
sounds as though originating from the site of it’s first reflection, rather than
the speaker itself. If this first reflection is one’s head, it sounds almost like a
raspy, interior voice has entered one’s skull. If it hits another surface, it
seems as if it is emanating from it – I chose to use this speaker, accepting it’s
bandwidth limitations, for this ventriloquist-like quality. I mounted this speaker
on a microcontroller-driven pan and tilt head (hidden within the set), which allowed
the voice to move sourcelessly around the room, throwing itself, reflecting from
and speaking through the objects within the space. The material for this speaker
was a series of recordings I made with extended vocalist Yvon Bonenfant with the
intention of performing a faux-channeling of Yves Saint Laurent — a series of
wide ranging absurd fantasies and self-reflexive meanderings.

Originally I had intended to make the room extremely hot and humid,
but this was eventually deemed too risky for the museum. I decided that
by creating a diffused scent I could accomplish something similar. The
goal was to use the quality of air to place the plush fake jungle into
limbo — encouraging the body to feel as if it were outdoors, creating a
tension between the quality of the air and the objects within it. I
researched various aromachemicals that can replicate the sense of wet
dirt, grass, moss, dew, mushrooms, and so forth. In the end, I used a
combination of “absolutes” (chemical extractions of natural materials)
and resins that I think accomplished this quite well. The scent was
diffused by a near silent ultrasonic device.

The process for making the piece included an extensive research phase
resulting in a library of archival audio: early radio plays, dollar store
relaxation tapes, recordings of a wide variety of animals, and a
menagerie of miscellaneous bits of culture ripped from home videos of
East African Safaris. I had hoped to use material from Yves Saint
Laurent’s archive, but the scandal surrounding his stolen art objects
erupted and conversations with his partner dropped away (strangely, my
piece was very much related to the scandal, which might have
discouraged his estate). Given this lack of access I managed to amass a
collection of materials relating to a study of Yves Saint Laurent as a
figure whose partly researched and partly imagined eyes I would use to
challenge a conventional post-colonial reading of YSL’s relationship to
fantasy and intercultural domination.

The piece was on view from April 2009 until March 2010.