Catalogue > At random

The Great Refractor, a collaboration with Irish poet and neuroscientist Laurence O’Dwyer, charts the undulating terrain of our attempts to understand the world through both scientific and poetic inquiries. The film contrasts histories of mapping, visualizing and territorializing with contemporary practices centered on sounding, listening and collective resonation. The film models a ‘refractive’ method of narration and authorship, one that seeks out possible transformations and decolonizations of our processes of interpreting and sharing the world. The film presents a series of solitary figures engaged in their work, including an astrophysicist, an artist, a translator and a weather station engineer. Participants were asked to mimic with their voices the sounds of sonified observations, from underwater hydrophone recordings to black hole gravitation waves. All the sound in the video was made from these vocal recordings. Through a chorus of voices, stories and practices, the project prods at the sensitive and uncertain interface between outer and inner worlds, exploring regions of doubt where an often inscrutable reality meets the echo chambers of human knowledge.

Andy Graydon is an artist and filmmaker originally from Maui, Hawai’i. His work is concerned with natural and social ecologies, and with sound and listening as creative practices. Recent projects have focused on island ecologies and the imaginal and narrative forms employed by the natural sciences. His projects frequently engage structures of music such as the ensemble, the score, improvisation and variation, and techniques of the voice. His work has been presented internationally including shows at the New Museum; Mass MoCA; Berlinische Galerie, Berlin; Frye Art Museum, Seattle; and the Honolulu Biennial. Screenings include the Fulcrum Festival, Los Angeles; the Flaherty Series at Anthology Film Archives; WRO Media Arts Biennial, Poland; Arsenal Institut für Film und Videokunst, Berlin; and Millennium Film Archive. Graydon has collaborated widely as a sound artist and composer, including work with Jennifer Walshe, Jan St Werner, Michael Pisaro, Richard Garet, Delia Gonzalez, Stephen Vitiello, David Grubbs, Amnon Wolman, Kato Hideki, John Hudak, Sandra Gibson and Luis Recoder.