Lance Olsen, War of the Welles | 2010 | 20min | Sound Performance | Canada
I had recently been listening to old tapes of the Orson Welles production of “War of the Worlds” and had noticed an underlying layer of tones, clicks, whirrs and other sounds. At first I thought they could be the artifacts of all the people who believed that martians were actually landing— that somehow they had become inextricably locked into the production. But this could not explain the sounds that I was experiencing. Then I wondered if it was because the recording was on tape, which has a physical connection to the audio hardware that a CD lacks. Tape is constantly wearing down and re-depositing particles of itself from one area of itself to another. The sounds are constantly evolving and devolving.
Fast-forward to Starbucks coffee shop for my morning pick me up—grande latte, no foam. I glanced at my cup for the printed homily and the words red planet hit me like a baseball bat. This was indeed a strange coincidence, but closer examination showed the words to be more shocking. It said, shared planet, they had not all died of the common cold, they are still here.
Back in my studio I replayed the tapes, this time through a headset while working in my notebook. I am not sure what happened next. I seemed to have lost a period of time. My notebook was covered in signs and markings that I did not remember producing. It was as if the underlying layers of signs, signals and tones were telling my synapses to send signals to my hands, resulting in the markings before me. Is this a parallel universe, or is another layer of our universe somehow trapped in the tapes? Are the martians in fact with us, trapped in the tape, together with the actors from the production and the folk who panicked?
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Prior to the year 2000, Lance Olsen worked exclusively in painting, drawing and printmaking. In 2000 he began a series of performances called “The Garden of Cellular Indecision” with Jamie Drouin, which moved his efforts to audio and video works. These performances were a combination of field recordings of an ancient pear tree in my garden, and lowercase sounds coaxed out of a set of copper plates, linked together by contact microphones, and worked upon with engraving tools, stones and other objects. The diverse sounds of physical interaction with the metal surface were fed live into a laptop computer, mixed, and played out to the audience as an informational feedback loop, allowing the audience to discover new relationships between the physical activity and the reconfigured auditory events.
Olsen’s approach to working is the same in any discipline. The materials he uses and the method of gathering information, both aural and visual, are as important as his ideas. With regards to the tree, each fragmentary vision or glance, each tiny sound or vast rumbling, and each touching produced a different but linked idea or emotion in him. This method of working— this matrix—is transferable to an endless amount of aural and visual information gathering, allowing for a wide variety of performance and installation works that are vastly distinct and inextricably linked.
