Elliott Larson-Gillmore

For Bike Bells with XC98

A common meeting ground between species is proposed through sound and voice while pointing out the ongoing material and acoustic mark-making taking place within the environment.

“The interaction between XC98 as a social, environmental, and political (indeed, a national) symbol, and myself, is an attempt at acknowledging acoustic territories, boundaries, and their breaches. I engage in a kind of zoosemiotic mimicry whereby certain barriers of communication are suspended. This results in an uncanny exchange of voice and gaze, implicating questions concerning the cultural representations of animals, as well as the systems of representation used by those animals themselves as agentive and actant bodies participating in semiosis. XC98 evidences a failed relationship between symbolic ideologies and practices of care. They dwell in a contested landscape and wear the signs of it on their body. They are in the midst of culture and nature, both a political token and a subject of surveillance.”