Route Service Interruption. The Jepma Effect

These site-specific installations were created at Lokaal 01 in Breda, Holland for the State Your Business exhibition curated by Leigh Clarke.

As I was only in Breda a week before the show was to open, my response was shaped more by my views from far away. In looking at the history of The Netherlands, I noticed that economic transmissions and translation from one currency to another were central to shaping this country. In current times, natural gas is a huge component of the economy of The Netherlands, and the transit of gas through a complex system of pipelines is one of the key driving forces of the Dutch economic system, once again dictated through the intricate tariff systems  that shaped its past.
 
At Lokaal 01, my site-specific installation created a sense of the huge complex of pipelines that moves gas within the country from Groningen to the south, and that is used as a passageway for gas moving from Norway to other countries, from the north of Germany to its southern provinces, and from east to west, linking Dutch to British gas pipelines.

For the sound elements, I recorded continuous spoken word narratives as text fragments and spliced and superimposed those sections over the top of each other to fracture the flow of reading and to build new narratives on top of the original text.

At the same time I began working with pipe constructions to funnel the sound, as an intimate experience is created when the listener has to come up close to the opening to listen to the sound. The other aspect of this is that the works announce themselves visually first and through sound second, allowing the viewer to slowly engage with them.
 
Working with a dense economics text on gas transit tariffs, I created two sound works piped through PVC tubing constructions installed in the exhibition space. The Jepma Effect is a sound shred with segments of the text in Dutch, German and English layered over the top of each other, creating breaks in the flow of reading and giving a sense of different transmissions going through at the same time. For the second piece, Route Service Interruption, I worked with the noise emanating from gas pipes, both the constant noise leaks reported by people living near the pipelines and the frequent emissions recorded at compressor sites along the route.