Ten Minutes in the Glia River

Jake Gatehouse

Gila Wilderness

Blog Post

2019

Ten Minutes in the Glia River                         

During our final trip we were camped in amongst the Gila wilderness, right on the banks of the river. As the semester has gone on my projects have become more and more focussed on water, submerging myself and recording self-portraits, whilst being dunked under the surface. The ultimate outcome of this project is to have an expanse of time accumulated through an amount of images. Intercepted time. The rich relationship between rivers and time therefore led me to further experimenting with time based media and the performative. This was mainly conducted in a two hour-long river walk in which I walked down a stretch of the Gila s in the middle of the river, stumbling and sometimes swimming until i got back to camp. This was to gain I higher sense of the river, to succumb to it and adapt, to view the land from the water in this kind of absurd performance. And to see what intuitive thoughts and practices this experience could evoke.

On the walk up to my start point I found an old water canteen submerged in the mud. It was like ones you see in old westerns, leather and round and cap-less. I decided to keep it with me as I embarked on the walk. And it turned out to be a very interesting instrument to record this experience. A gift from the river. As I walked down the centre of the water I inevitable took a few tumbles, the canteen would fill with water then empty again. The fluctuating amount seemed to have a significance to me and when I eventually finished the walk, I kept the amount of water left in the canteen as a record of this journey, in an old pickle jar garnished with a single leaf that crept its way in.

The next day I wanted to get another recording of the water with the canteen but this time using sound. As I was walking down the river the wind interacting with the canteen would make a soft airy noise  like the ones you get when you blow on the tops of glass bottles. It was interesting to me that this device which was used to capture water eventually was sunken by a body water, these echoes felt like lost sounds of the river so I embarked on a journey up one of the empty washes in hope that the wind would be funnelled down them and I could capture these sounds or wind traveling down trenches made by past water. However due to the sheltered canyon this was an impossible task. It was the lsat day and a very calm one. So I aborted that attempt and went back to the river. Where I conducted a different experiment. I attached one of the lapel microphones to the top of the canteen so the pea-sized microphone would dangle in side the canteen but not hit the sides.  I then dipped the canteen into a section of rapids in the river so technically the mic existed below the surface but protected but the leather hide of the canteen. I then recorded 10 minutes the water traveling past this small installation.

After getting back to Albuquerque I was interested to hear how this experiment sounded. I had been interested in slowing down videos of the water and how this simple manipulation abstracted the image so I was keen to do the same to the sound. I elongated the 10-minute recording to an hour. The result of this was quite extraordinary, the melodic echoes of the internal reverberations of the canteen gently come through at completely random places and a huge ominous bass can be perceived. This soundscape made through the recording of time in this canteen found buried on the river is a result of the decision to make that river walk and how time can be perceived in many alternative ways through the technology we have at our disposal. I have selected the first ten minutes of this now hour-long recording. I would suggest listening with a good pair of headphones if possible!