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Carrizo Parkfield Prime (excerpt) from Christina McPhee on Vimeo.

This film (2008-2024) by Christina McPhee will premiere at UCLA for the Pacific Standard Time (PST) Getty initiative, Art | Science Collide, September 2024-March 2025, as part of the exhibition Atmospheres of Sound: Sonic Art in Times of Climate Disruption, Los Angeles California.

The full film is 10 minutes, 4k, stereo.

At Carrizo Plain, one hundred miles northwest of Los Angeles, the San Andreas Fault is in plain view above an alkaline salt flat, Soda Lake, ringed with mountains. Carrizo’s sublime terrain has inspired a series of site studies from field data, including scientific information shared publicly by geologists whom I interviewed in the immediate aftermath of the Parkfield 2004 Earthquake; drawings and notations arising from my own experience with post-traumatic stress disorder nightmares; and field recordings in drawing, sound, and video on location. 

My core insight is speculative: let’s imagine a cybernetic feedback loop between the Earth’s earthquake geology and our human neurologic response to trauma. A metonym, ‘seismic memory’ could stand in for human emotional fragmentation in post traumatic stress disorder. Seismologists have limited tools to predict an earthquake incident before it occurs, and can forecast aftershocks only after the initial event. Similarly, the amygdala records the emotional impact of shock in unpredictable, apparently random-access fragments that, in my own experience of nightmares, appear in dreams as intense light/dark contrasting shapes and sudden sounds. 

Carrizo Parkfield Prime (2008-2024) montages documentary landscape to performance footage, geomorphological data visualization, abstract dream animations, and site-specific sound. Field recordings made on site combine, in post-production, with sonifications of p-wave recordings made during the 6.0 Parkfield Earthquake, by the United States Geological Survey at a depth of three kilometers inside the San Andreas Fault Observatory at Depth (SAFOD). Ella Mudie notes: “In the topological studies of McPhee, seismic events, then, are envisaged as triggers that activate an otherwise-dormant landscape. It is this triggering phenomenon that underpins the artist’s concept of ‘seismic memory,’ which draws a correlation between seismicity and the human mind, particularly in relation to how traumatic memory may be reactivated by familiar yet often indeterminate events.” 

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staying around c - orca sound circles 2024-vimeo from Christina McPhee on Vimeo.

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SPILLBANK (Voyage of the Pelican, Day 2, draft from Christina McPhee on Vimeo.

rough draft of footage shot in December 2010 in the deeper waters of the Gulf of Mexico (off the continental shelf) on board the Pelican, a marine biology research vessel for Louisiana public university researchers This clip involves observing scientists working with field specimens just collected

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La Conchita N = Amour 2008-2024 update H264 1080p from Christina McPhee on Vimeo.

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Breathing | Carbon Song Cycle from Christina McPhee on Vimeo.

Excerpt / Carbon Song Cycle Exploratorium San Francisco

August 24-26, 2023

Pamela Z music composition, voice and electronics Dana Jessen bassoon Charith PRemawardhana, viola Crystal Pascucci, cello Mark Clifford, percussion Christina McPhee, video photography, animation, and composition Drew Detweiler, video performance technician

Commissioned by Liz Keim for the 40th anniversary of Cinematic Arts at the Exploratorium Supported with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts

Experience environmental balance and imbalance through a site-specific multimedia performance created by composer/performer Pamela Z and media artist Christina McPhee, Carbon Song Cycle is a work for chamber ensemble and expanded cinema. It’s inspired by ongoing changes and upheavals in the Earth's ecosystem, and by the carbon cycle—the process through which carbon is exchanged between all terrestrial life forms and domains. To compose the music, Pamela knitted together melodic motifs inspired by scientific data on the carbon cycle and texts referencing environmental balance and imbalance. Playing on the idea of the natural exchange of elements they pass sonic material between the players and explore audio elements related to the imagery in Christina’s video material. The video is built from footage Christina shot at petroleum fields, natural gas locations, and geothermal sites around backcountry California, along with carbon-inspired drawings and images of processes involving intense heat and chemical transformations. The artists have crafted a site-specific experience that utilizes the architecture of the space to create a unique and intimate experience.

This video illuminates ‘Breathing,’ a song from the Carbon Song Cycle.

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breathing exploratorium vimeo 108p 2023 from Christina McPhee on Vimeo.

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Spillbank Experiments from Christina McPhee on Vimeo.

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quivirablue-sancarpofaro-herndon from Christina McPhee on Vimeo.

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first part ; to speak feralysis theatre from Christina McPhee on Vimeo.

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first part ; to speak feralysis theatre from Christina McPhee on Vimeo.

draft sketch for a forthcoming video installation sound: Julie Herndon, To Speak, with Jack Quartet image: Christina McPhee 2023 architectural plan drawings: Charles Moore, courtesy ADA Museum archives, UC Santa Barbara

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autochamber (slipstreamkonza) from Christina McPhee on Vimeo.

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LOVE GOD_christimacphee_2023.-1280x720vimeo from Christina McPhee on Vimeo.

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Tomboy Rambles / excerpt from a 78 minute ambient silent spatial video 2022. from Christina McPhee on Vimeo.

When you were a kid, you wanted to roam. Walk so silently that the bottoms of your feet become ears, said Pauline Oliveros. Just draw. Parallel lives, assynchronistically, with a playlist of the same name on Spotify, here: open.spotify.com/playlist/5Br5uULuqqVT8DtfgM9Ata?si=34cdf872e5da4ef3

. Debut: Christina McPhee: Listening, at Osos Contemporary, San Luis Obispo, 7 October to 18 November 2022. ososcontemporary.com

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Carbon Song Cycle at Roulette, Brooklyn 2013 from Christina McPhee on Vimeo.

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Yes! Lord Paradise Remix (excerpt) from Christina McPhee on Vimeo.

Yes! Lord: Paradise Remix, 2021; 36 min Music: Yes! Lord (2021) by Ashon Crawley Animation and photography by Christina McPhee

Yes! Lord: Paradise Remix is a fusion of music, spoken word, and kaleidoscopic landscapes abstracted from footage shot at Mono Lake, California and the artist’s garden. A joyous choir of Black voices repeatedly affirms “yes” to “otherwise possibility," Crawley's term for the persistence of community and love in the face of systemic violence. As centripetal color-shapes contract and expand, hummingbirds dive-bomb their source of sugar, at the heart of a choreosonic space and place. Performers: Abdul Hamid Robinson Royal, Hammond organ; Jyvonne Haskins, soprano; Priscilla Perry, soprano, Khyle Wooten, alto, Naomi Washington Leapheart, alto; Jadrian Tarver, tenor; Ashon Crawley, tenor. Resamples from Music for Eighteen Musicians by Steve Reich (1978), by kind permission of Boosey and Hawkes, 2021.

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Yes!LordParadiseREmix_clip2021mcphee-crawley-vim from Christina McPhee on Vimeo.

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Biospheres (a song from Carbon Song Cycle) from Christina McPhee on Vimeo.

This is a newly edited visual composition by Christina McPhee, based on a part of the multimedia performance work, Carbon Song Cycle, with music by Pamela Z, and moving image by Christina McPhee. This work premiered at Berkeley Art Museum / Pacific Film Archive, California, in the spring of 2013. Later that year, McPhee and Z performed Carbon Song Cycle at Roulette in Brooklyn, New York; the sound recording for this short film is from the live performance at Roulette.