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The Port's Call
Fremantle’s Inner Harbour will be transformed, 3-12 November, by The Port’s Call, an expansive sonic installation by Thomas Supple and Byron J Scullin. Beginning at dawn on the first day of the Biennale and continuing until dusk on Sunday 12 November, the arrival and departure of each large vessel (regardless of the time of day), will be signalled by a bespoke soundscape.
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With each passing vessel, a continually changing symphony of sound, using long-range acoustic technology, will echo throughout the Port. Stretching across a square kilometre, from the South Mole into Victoria Quay, the harbour will become a living stage for this sound experience, attuned to the rhythms of industry.
This symphony will also resound throughout the ports over sunset, a welcome, and a farewell to the sun as it clings to the horizon.
Combining human voices and subtle electronics, this auditory voyage invites listeners to consider anew the cacophony, movement and epic orchestra that is our global system of commercial goods.
Resonating across the surfaces of these iconic ocean goliaths, The Port’s Call is an unrepeatable experience calling us to voyage and this place of safe harbour.
Thomas Supple is an artist and curator working across contemporary music, installation and sound. Tom has curated programs for Mona Foma, Melbourne International Arts Festival, Victorian College of the Arts and Melbourne International Jazz Festival, Vivid Sydney, Perth Festival. He has been Senior Music Curator for Dark Mofo since the Tasmanian festival’s inception in 2013. His programming highlights there include world premiere performances from Nicolas Jaar (Against All Logic) and Antony & The Johnsons and Australian premieres from FKA Twigs, Jonsi & Alex, Einstürzende Neubauten, St Vincent and Tanya Tagaq. Tom has also contributed to the Dark Mofo visual arts program with Laurie Anderson and Hsin-Chien Huang’s Chalkroom and American artist Matthew Schreiber’s monumental commission Leviathan. As an artist, Thomas has collaborated regularly with fellow Melbourne-based artists Hannah Fox and Byron Scullin. At the 2018 Perth Festival, the group presented Siren Song, a large-scale, outdoor sonic artwork that fills the skies of a city.
Byron J Scullin is a Melbourne based practitioner who explores the technological representation and amplification of sound as well as its properties as a physical presence. Operating in an ambiguous space where sound transitions into noise, Scullin’s sonic environments offer an experience of mass and multiplicity, often representing attempts to hear the unhearable. After an interest in synthesis at a young age, Scullin was mentored by producer and composer François Tetaz. He has since been involved in almost all aspects of audio in his twenty-year career, contributing sound to feature films such as Wolf Creek, contemporary dance productions by Lucy Guerin, Gideon Obarzanek, and Lee Serle, and theatre works by David Chisholm, Chamber Made Opera, and Arena Theatre Co. He has created installations for museums and galleries – including Creation Cinema as part of First Peoples at the Melbourne Museum – and produced, engineered and mastered numerous Australian and international recordings. He also works as a sound educator at RMIT and Melbourne University. A prolific collaborator, Scullin has worked closely with audio-visual artist Robin Fox and video artist Daniel Crooks, as well as Australian composers Anthony Pateras, Marco Fusinato, and Oren Ambarchi. He’s also helped realise sound for notable international artists including Bernard Parmegiani, Tony Conrad, and Steven O’Malley.
References and Links
Text from the Biennale program website.
Image by courtesy of Roel Loopers.
This page incorporates material from Garry Gillard's Freotopia website, that he started in 2014 and the contents of which he donated to Wikimedia Australia in 2024. The content was originally created on 4 November, 2023 and hosted at freotopia.org/arts/biennale2023/portscall.html (it was last updated on 4 November, 2023), and has been edited since it was imported here (see page history). The donated data is also preserved in the Internet Archive's collection.