Waterfall is a meditation on the Los Angeles Aqueduct as it carries water from the Eastern Sierra all the way to Los Angeles.
Soundwalk
An app-based soundwalk with generative music at Alabama Hills
Music
Music created through the experience, following the water from the headwaters to the ocean
An interactive experience of the water as it travels from the headwaters to Los Angeles
Visitors will enter our exhibit in Mammoth Lakes at Wind Drift Studios through a section of aqueduct. Their eye will be drawn towards an immersive and interactive projection with cameras and sensors to detect visitors as they examine the image.
Their bodies will be outlined in real time and create a portal through which an inverse image is revealed – the dry Owens Lake is cut away to reveal the diverted water at a reservoir in Los Angeles; close-up, disorienting images of roaring water at a dam outlet in the Eastern Sierra are contrasted by shade balls at the Los Angeles Reservoir. Sound recorded and music composed during my original Bureau of Land Management residency in 2022 will complement the installation.
The video installation will be complemented by large prints by local photographer Ken Etzel that frame the Los Angeles Aqueduct as an essential character in the Anthropocene. A meandering aqueduct traces the contours of alluvial fans, echoed by a similarly framed image of bends along the Owens River’s still-natural course. Bizarre colors and patterns are revealed from drone photography of the Owens Lake dust mitigation project.
A soundwalk app I developed for Waterfall is designed to become a platform beyond the project itself, augmenting popular trails and natural areas with musical systems generated from local species data, weather, time of year, and more. The walk uses a combination of composed melodic and harmonic elements, processed field recordings, and generative music systems. Local biodiversity data is pulled from citizen science app iNaturalist in order to help drive the generative layer of the musical experience. The system changes zone by zone so that the sound walk has a satisfying dramatic arc.
Within Mammoth Lakes, an app-based Soundwalk takes Wind Drift visitors on a stunning walk to a 360 degree viewpoint that reveals water infrastructure from the Mammoth Lakes Basin down to Crowley Lake.
In Alabama Hills, the soundwalk accompanies the popular Mobius Arch trail, contextualizing the dramatic but seemingly dry and barren landscape with elements pulling from the local geology, local species abundance, and seasonal waterflows.
From Lee Vining Creek at the Northernmost end all the way to Los Angeles.
In 2024 I was a Bureau of Land Management Artist in Residence in California’s Eastern Sierra. As a Los Angeles native, I wanted to explore the system that nurtured the city of my birth: the Los Angeles Aqueduct.
Turning on a tap in Los Angeles draws on snow that falls hundreds of miles north in the Eastern Sierra. That water has come at a cost. For over a century, the aqueduct has profoundly affected the Owens Valley. Verdant farms and ranchland withered, wetlands and meadows disappeared, and Owens Lake, once more than 100 square miles, was drained almost entirely. Later expansions included an extension up to Mono Lake, groundwater pumping, and a second aqueduct for greater volume.
Ironically, LADWP’s ownership of the land also protected much of the valley from development, preserving some of the most dramatic landscapes in the American West. In recent decades, grassroots advocacy and legal action have led to partial restoration of the Owens River, dust mitigation at Owens Lake, and protection for Mono Lake farther up the watershed, all vital stops for millions of migratory birds along the Pacific Flyway. LADWP’s plans for wastewater recycling may further reduce the city’s dependence on imported water.
What exists now is, to borrow artist Lauren Bon’s phrase, a cyborg watershed: more than 3,000 square miles shaped by human management and by economies built on water, tourism, agriculture, and mining. I spent my residency following the water from its High Sierra headwaters through the reservoirs, down the aqueduct to Los Angeles, and finally to the ocean as treated wastewater, recording sound and video and composing as I went. The result is Waterfall, a multimedia project first workshopped at C5 Studios in Bishop. It will now be unveiled as an installation at Wind Drift Studios in collaboration with local artists, along with a soundwalk on local trails.
There is a wave of creative ferment in the Eastern Sierra, and I hope this project can gather our most gifted storytellers around the question of where our resources come from, and how even the most remote places are only a faucet away.
[Placeholder: the artist’s bio.]
Reach out if you would like to discuss our project.
The Eastern Sierra
In 2024 I was an Artist in Residence with the Bureau of Land Management in the Eastern Sierra. A Los Angeles native, I was curious about the notorious aqueduct that drew water from this region to supply my hometown. With a field recorder and video camera, I followed the Los Angeles Aqueduct from its headwaters in the High Sierra all the way to its terminus in Southern California.
Bishop
A month later, I workshopped a multimedia piece of improvised music, field recordings, and video in front of sixty locals at C5 Studios in Bishop, CA.
Mammoth Lakes
In the intervening time, I have relocated my family to Mammoth Lakes, not far from the northernmost part of the aqueduct. I have been refining the material I previewed in Bishop two years earlier, and a local gallery, Wind Drift Studios, has invited me to put together an installation in collaboration with local artists.
Headwaters to the sea
At present we are seeking partners to expand this opportunity and bring in artists from both the Eastern Sierra and Los Angeles to engage in an exploration of how we might manage our limited natural resources in what artist Lauren Bon calls our cyborg watershed.
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