Offering was born from what artist Billy Mark had begun calling, in phone conversations between Detroit and San Francisco, the low-down surveillance blues.
Our collaboration eventually bloomed into an interactive storytelling project and a book, but it started as a series of questions Billy was asking about what it felt like to be traced and tracked and monitored and to have what is known about us monetized by, among others, Google.
Composer Jon Armstrong, and I joined Billy for this collaboration, using a soundwalk app to map seven of Jon's compositions to seven sites around Google's headquarters in Mountainview, Ca.
Billy and I spent a day traveling clockwise around the Googleplex perimeter, seeing and being seen, in a kind of contemplative migration.
We moved from site to site, in the grooves of older rhythms of contemplation: 5 am, 7 am, 9 am, noon, 3 pm, 5 pm, and finally 7 pm.
Using an iPhone and a handheld speaker, Jon’s compositions were triggered whenever we arrived at a new site on the soundmap. Billy’s performance in each specific location wove together the sounds, our inquiry, and specific place we occupied.
For me, working with Billy and Jon to create Offering meant asking what photographs might become in conversation with music and movement.
What if I embraced the limitations of a particularly dark hour and and let the representation go subtle and unfocused?
What if the combination of music and movement made me look away from Billy and toward something else?
What if—as happened during the making of the imagery at 3pm, I made images while being misconstrued by bystanders as a woman photographing a body she had found floating in Kaiser Creek instead of attempting to call out for help rescuing it?
Offering, is an story of our particular encounter, and the soundmap remains live—an invitation, as Billy says—for anyone who gets overcome by those low-down surveillance blues.