Rspb

In my next life I would like to be an arctic hare.

arctic hare

Or perhaps one of these creatures, who live only in China and Mongolia. They prefer desert habitats, favouring sandy river basins with low shrub cover. They are capable of eating flying insects, using sound to pinpoint the location of the prey. Then they do a very quick leap to catch the flying prey. The long eared jerboa is classified as an endangered species.

Long Eared Jerboa

Now take a moment to consider the male angler fish, who ends his life as “nothing more than a pair of gonads”.

Anglerfish employ an unusual mating method. Because individuals are presumably locally rare and encounters doubly so, finding a mate is problematic. When scientists first started capturing ceratioid anglerfish, they noticed that all of the specimens were females. These individuals were a few inches in size and almost all of them had what appeared to be parasites attached to them. It turned out that these “parasites” were the remains of male ceratioids.

At birth, male ceratioids are already equipped with extremely well developed olfactory organs that detect scents in the water. The male ceratoid lives solely to find and mate with a female. They are signifantly smaller than a female angler fish, and have trouble finding food in the deep sea. This necessitates his quickly finding a female anglerfish to prevent his death. The sensitive olfactory organs help the male to detect the pheromones that signal the proximity of a female anglerfish. When he finds a female, he bites into her skin, and releases an enzyme that digests the skin of his mouth and her body, fusing the pair down to the blood-vessel level. The male then slowly atrophies, first losing its digestive organs, then its brain, heart, and eyes, and ends as nothing more than a pair of gonads, which releases sperm in response to hormones in the female’s bloodstream indicating egg release. This extreme sexual dimorphism ensures that, when the female is
ready to spawn, she has a mate immediately available.

angler fish

listen to radio astronomy

radio astronomy website

This includes a composition I made a long time ago - Figment (Epiphany in Rubber). It has taken on a life of its own as part of Matt Hulse’s Audible Picture Show, an international touring show of short audio works created for cinema.

The Audible Picture Show

SCREENINGS INCLUDING ‘FIGMENT’t:

2009: The Magic Lantern, CCA Glasgow, Scotland; Diversions Film Festival, Edinburgh, Scotland; The Dukes, Lancaster, England

2008: FACT, Liverpool, England; Reading Experimental Film Festival, England; Cinema Nova, Brussels, Belgium; Scheld’apen, Antwerp, Belgium; Cat Strand, New Galloway, Scotland.

2007: Cinema Nova, Brussels, Belgium; London Short Film Festival, ICA, England; Studies in Sound: Listening in the Age of Visual Culture, University of Iowa, America.

2006: Split International Festival of New Film, Croatia, Curzon Soho, London, England. Kunstvlaai, Amsterdam, Netherlands; European Media Art Festival, Osnabrueck, Germany; Flatpack Festival, Birmingham, England.

almost the truth

Give my regards…

Norman Mclaren

Guerilla Girls

Secret City Arts is a new mixed media arts organisation consisting of animator Claire Evans, sound artist Helena Gough, writer Mandy Ross and mask maker Pyn Stockman. This summer we worked with a group of 8 - 11 year olds in Balsall Heath, Birmingham. We traced the River Rea from its source in the Waseley Hills and into Digbeth in the city centre, using this as inspiration for a multitude of different creations….

The hard-to-spot source of the River Rea…

A soundtrack made by Guneel and Laraib to accompany their masked performance: