BROKEN RECORD (Éin Uisce)
BROKEN RECORD (Éin Uisce) was commissioned by Galway City Council as part of the inaugural Galway Climate Festival in 2024
Birds have ceaselessly inspired us with their mellifluent voices and polyphonic exchanges, undoubtedly instilling some of our earliest impulses toward song and spoken word. They have been for us messengers, intermediaries, envoys from the forest and its wider life, bearers of intelligence we could not do without. Something in their songs touched a forgotten chord within our chest, a fleeting memory of contact with a wider more ubiquitous awareness.
Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology - David Abram
BROKEN RECORD (Éin Uisce) is a collaboration between visual artist Mark Clare, ornithologist and wildlife sound recordist Seán Ronayne, and electrical engineers Aness Al-Qawlaq and Daniel Alvarez Carreno, It is a low-energy, portable, audio-installation that highlights that we are now living in the period of the sixth mass species extinction, due to the climate emergency and habitat loss, and the multitiered effects these have on our local biodiversity.
The artwork consists of 3 modified megaphones, mounted on stands, that play an alluring composition, consisting of multilayered recordings from the 29 species of coastal birds, listed on the Irish AMBER and RED Lists of Endangered Bird species. The individual audio soundtracks, produced from Seán’s extensive field-recordings, interplay with, and across each other, to create a polyphonic representation of our endangered species.
The modified megaphones are powered by internal, rechargeable batteries, allowing the installation to be free-standing, portable and presentable in any location. Megaphones are often used as a tool during public protest to amplify a voice. Often this voice is representative of those who are vulnerable and unable to highlight their own circumstances. In this case the ‘voices’ being amplified are those of our own vulnerable and endangered bird species.
