Yolande Harris
Yolande Harris is an artist and scholar engaged with sound, its image and its role in relating humans and their technologies to the environment. Her artistic research projects consider techniques of navigation, sonification of data, sound worlds outside the human hearing range, and underwater bioacoustics. They take the form of audio-visual installations and performances, instruments, walks, performative lectures and writings. She weaves together her artwork with her theories of techno-intuition and sonic consciousness, in which expanded forms of awareness emerge through technological media and critical listening techniques. Her work is presented internationally in the context of visual art exhibitions, music venues and media art festivals and conferences.
Residency: Getty PST ART 2024 X UCLA Art|Sci Center
Proposal
From a Whale’s Back will be installed across UCLA’s EDA (Experimental Design Arts) and CNSI (California NanoScience Institute) exhibition venues.
Project Research
Sept 11th, 2021 | Ars Electronica, Sound of Atmosphere Day 5, Water Bodies
Presented by Victoria Vesna and Claudia Jacques; featuring Water Keeper by Yolande Harris and ecologist collaborator Ari Friedlaender.
Sept 9th, 2021 | Ars Electronica, Sound of Atmosphere Day 2, Yolande Harris: That Unseen Vibrance
Yolande Harris’ audio visual worlds setup hope that an expanded sonic imagination can contribute to re-balancing human relationships to our environments. Sound is the harbinger of such a renewed relatedness. Yolande will lead remote underwater sound walks along the Pacific coast as part of ‘Melt Me Into The Ocean’ (2018) and present work with collaborating scientist Ari Feidlaender using video and sounds from tagged whales in ‘From a Whale’s Back’ (2020). Her most recent highly resonant sound work presents the oceanic with dense vibrations, larger than our bodies, larger than our eardrums, sounds that work through us, in ‘That Unseen Vibrance’ (2021).
Jan 20th, 2021 | Under the Hood: Episode 2, with Yolande Harris
For the month of December we hosted sound artist Yolande Harris as our Artist-in-Residence for our virtual program Atmosphere of Sound: Sonic Art in Times of Climate Disruption. Shilpa Rao interviewed Yolande to find out more about the behind-the-scenes of her intricate sound artworks. Yolande discusses two projects, From a Whale’s Back, and Melt Me Into The Ocean and focuses on the underbelly of topics such as interpreting spectrograms, editing sound files with Adobe Audition, hydrophone technology and data retrieval, and marine citizen science. We also get a glimpse into what data collection for marine animals and environments may look like.
Dec 21st, 2020 | Artist in Residence: Yolande Harris, A Waterfall of Sounds that I Catch Dreaming
Can our conscious listening effect the world around us? This dreamscape pulls together a collection of moments in sounds and images of the “super bloom” of wild flowers in California, wind in Joshua Tree National Park, a visit to James Turrell’s Roden Crater, full rapids at Grand Falls on Navajo and Hopi land in Northern Arizona, the fragile crystal crunching of a lava field near Flagstaff, and the liminal spaces of the Pacific Ocean coast of the Monterey Bay. The dream begins with sounds I recorded at the pediatric intensive care unit of Stanford Children’s Hospital, a liminal space suspended in the in-between
Nov 30th, 2020 | Artist in Residence: Yolande Harris, Melt Me into the Ocean
Melt Me Into The Ocean sound walk by the lighthouse in Santa Cruz California, listening to underwater sounds from the Monterey Bay. This walk is part of the Atmospheric Sound Artist in Residence for the Vibrations Matter research project on sound, environment and healing, hosted by Victoria Vesna, at the Art|Sci Center, Design Media Arts, UCLA.
Oct 2nd-9th, 2020 | Noise Aquarium Panel: Vibrations, Frequencies & Ecotistical Art Sci Works, hosted by Ars Electronica at the Laznia Center for Contemporary Art
This is a very special moment as the pandemic has actually made the seas and oceans quiet and the underwater creatures happy and scientists are able to make a comparison with the pre-industrial age. Many on the land are reporting that they hear birds again which were either drowned out by noise or forgotten to exist. So, we have a chance to listen and take a moment and consider, imagine how we would like our future to look once the virus goes away. This is the time for artists and scientists – those of fortunate enough to be in safe spaces with a job — to work together and raise the frequency of our collective brain waves and move away from consumerism to new ways of thinking and being that respects and honors not only the scientific and technological advances but also the ancient and indigenous wisdoms.
We will hear from Yolande Harris and her marine biologist collaborator, Ari Friedlaender, about their recent work From a Whale’s Back.
Further Involvement: UCLA Art|Sci Center
Oct 31st, 2014 | Pop-Up Seminar: Edward Shanken + Yolande Harris
Historian/theorist Dr. Edward Shanken and artist/researcher Dr.Yolande Harris collaborate to bring their lecture-performance-seminar to the Art|Sci center. Together, they will share complementary and contrasting perspectives on current experimental art practices, addressing ideas of techno-intuition and sonic consciousness, of the potential of transdisciplinary research to generate innovation and the intersections between art, theory, and contemporary social practices.
Apr 17th, 2008 | Sun Run Sun Guest Lecture for UCLA DMA Students
Sun Run Sun charts a path between environmental awareness and technological development, using sound as the medium to enhance both. The project investigates the split between the embodied experience of location and the calculated data of position, exploring the individual experience of current location technologies through a personal experience of sound. It seeks to (re)establish a sense of connectedness to one’s environment, and to (re)negotiate this through an investigation into old, new, future and animal navigation using sound.