Life:  Always under construction
Gallery (Multimedia)
all artwork copyright (c) Collette Broeders
Interested in the sound of information, I engaged in the idea of collecting
identity, a fingerprint, and was surprised at how willingly people I knew
and had no connection with participated.  A bottle was set to float down
the river with collected information.  Pondering the bottle floating in the
river, a book titled “Drift, Catalogue A” was created.  It contained only the
fingerprint and no information about its owner.  The realization of its
uselessness was evident as information appeared only important to its
owner, perhaps if they felt it might be jeopardized in some way.
DRIFT (Ongoing)
BREATHE (Ongoing)
After meeting, a long-living survivor of A.L.S. and being exposed to his adaptation of life, I became fascinated toward the
idea of breathing, conscious and unconscious.  The sounds of an automated ventilation machine, breathing his “breath of
life,” provided an almost haunting sound of the consciousness of existence.  Breathing while unaware is of course,
effortless, yet adding consciousness to breathing creates a form of exertion.  The fascination with breathing led into ideas
of the struggle relative to both the environment and the ability to communicate.
Footage was captured at several locations where environmental
concerns were prevalent including industrial areas as well as two
separate nuclear power plants in both Michigan and Ohio.  The sounds
of the ventilation machine were recorded and inlayed into footage
taken, showing scenes of a rural area followed by a nuclear “stack.”  A
poem titled Listen scrolls across the screen in Morse code, the fashion in
which Wilkinson communicates.  Several sounds of breathing were
collected from various individuals.  It was interesting how panicked and
aware one became, including myself, as we become conscious of our
own breathing.  I added this sound as well to the film.  The film was later
projected in rural settings, a coffee shop parking lot, scrap yard and
several locations in a civic centre.  Onlookers were confused as to the
message of the film, which generated the desire to play with
communication and struggle.
I began experimenting with patterns of breathing through breathing exercises, poetry and
Morse code.  Using Wilkinson’s poem, Breathe in Morse code, participants were asked to
breathe the dashes and dots with long and short breaths.  The collection of sound was
somewhat symphonic.  Visually, it appeared as though the poem being read was sheet
music.  Most intriguing was that the desire to create an exhaustive state or struggle to
breathe, became fluent in harmony.
In this technological era, I thought about the base point of information, “binary” and how irrelevant it is.  We don’t see it,
yet it encircles us.  I sense there is such an overwhelming amount of information surrounding us daily, we are numb to it’
s utility.  We crave it, yet we dispose readily of it.  I was interested in how this would sound and whether it could convey
its mundane utility, which form an additional collection.