CauseLines is a multimedia musical performance by Dylan McLaughlin, presented on Friday, May 11, 2018 at 7pm (free). This project engages a historic technology of music composition used by people of the Northern Plains. This is a practice of studying horizon-lines from which to create melody and tone repertoire. It is a process of resonating the landscape. Binding geography to culture. Singing the song-lines of belonging. Referencing this pedagogy through a confluence of newer technological platforms. Creating scores from imagery of drone aerial footage that we have generated during times of resistance in places under threat of extractive industries. Places of Cause. This imagery follows natural and human influenced landscapes; river-lines, tree-lines, road-lines, pipe-lines. These are the CauseLines from which we score. The intention of these scores is to invite processes of belonging, clarity of place. Not creating meaning but finding the meaning that already exists. The scores are to be interpreted as song, as dance, as story. It is from the complexity of interpretation, subjectivity of improvisation, that we begin dialogue around how we establish our practice of place. In this work, Dylan explores land-based systems of movement (i.e., river lines, tree lines lines), systems of lineage (i.e., geographies, eco-systems), and systems of culmination (i.e. story and personal narratives). In addition to his performance this event will support multi-disciplinary conversations and mediums to deepen our investigation of place, belonging, home, indigeneity, with landscape as protagonist, and the idea of humans belonging to landscape.
This event is sponsored by Space-Relations and Terra Incognita Art Series, both UW-Madison Center for Humanities Borghesi-Mellon Workshop Series.
