(pangaea) (detail)    2002
wood, file cabinet drawers, electronics 
121 x 132 x 36 cm

"pangaea" creates a new phonic.  It is illuminated by ideas of threshold and issues of liminality with respect to cultures and languages.  It is prefigured by the Borgesian Aleph that is everywhere and nowhere at once.  [An Aleph "is one of the points in space that contains all other points, a bird that somehow is all birds, a sphere whose centre is everywhere and circumference is nowhere."]  Twenty-first century spaces of hybridized culture are liminal spaces where languages mix in curious combination, where the formation of language may be seen allegorical to a once pangaea mother tongue, now many times splintered, continually remixing.  These pluralisms bear a whorling mix of language/s, the susurrations one hears when speech of different continents mix.  Two file cabinet drawers are fixed together to form a long trough.  This trough holds water and slowly oscillates.  From the water rhythms of the oscillation, a collection of sensors trigger short bursts of phonic.  Each phonic slice combines variably with other phonic slices, responding to the random action of the sloshing wave.  The result is a perpetual cycling of two opposing phonic collisions made up of the small parts of speech.  As two factions conflate, or as two or more languages variably layer within each other, "pangaea" suggests new hybrids.

Martin Peach, electronic technician for Concordia Studio Arts, has provided pangaea programming and circuit details, and Guy Gosselin of Concordia Electrical and Computer Engineering has provided equipment and technical support.