Accumulation

Sound Installation, Winter 2019

Featuring the voices of Avery Yebernetsky, Akshaya Tucker, David Fong, Emily Gittins, Brian Ellis, Emma Boardman-Larson, Josh Barker, Luke Berringer, Sabrina Mari Uriegas, Jessy Eubanks

I put “Accumulation” together in my junior year of college, the fall of 2017. In 2019 I revisited the concept - I chopped up all the original samples and made a 12-minute looping sound installation. The premiere of this was at a house concert, and I set up four speakers around the room to play the installation in a quad mix. People were free to come in and out as they pleased - some stayed for the whole 12 minutes (or longer!), other simply entered the room curious about the source of the voices.

See my original program note:

“I recently have noticed I throw a lot of things away. Food trash, packaging, much of it is hard to avoid.  

I try to a small extent to diminish my waste. I sometimes bring mesh produce bags to the grocery store instead of using the plastic ones provided. I have these weird semi-cloth reusable sandwich bags. I think composting is a good idea and I use rags instead of paper towels to clean my bathroom. But it’s difficult. I still use paper towels to dry my hands after using the bathroom at school. I still get plastic shoved into my possession practically any time I buy something. 

Maybe we forget that when we take out the trash, it doesn’t disappear. It goes to the dump, then the landfill where it stays for a very, very long time. Maybe we aren’t better because it’s such an inconvenience. It’s so easy to buy paper towels, so easy to buy plastic bags, so easy to throw away half a plate of food. 

For a week, I had some friends kept track of anything and everything they threw away or recycled. Basically, any waste they produced was tracked. Then I layered recordings of them reciting these lists. The goal is to highlight how much waste we produce, and that once something is thrown out, it does not disappear.”