Damara Arrowood is an experimental audiovisual artist, sound designer and composer generally based in San Francisco and Los Angeles. Currently she is both Founder and Director of Operations for a new global nonprofit company in development, SciDVA (Scientific Data Visualization Alliance).
Formerly Operations Manager of the non-profit arts organization AlVb Ltd (formerly AlVb for UK), she was the both lead conceptual designer of the Morindome, a proposed immersive new media art center and scientific research facility and lead designer/architect of a mobile touring venue structure Inspired by the designs of Buckminster Fuller and Zaha Hadid) to be made available for festivals within the UK.
She is the creator and curator of the Songs of the Solar Winds project, originally proposed in 2007, and to be a proposed future project in participation with the NSF Antarctic Artist and Writers Residency program and the NASA Spaceweather program. These latest projects are endorsed by the Oliver Ranch Foundation and the London Science Festival. She has created an archive of restored, de-noised and enhanced auroral and other spaceweather phenomena.
Songs of the Solar Winds relates to her ongoing personal research of genetic irregularities within the ear canals of several indigenous peoples of Mongolian descent, namely those of the polar regions who have been known to “sing” to the aurora using sounds very much like audio collected by VLF/ELF radio receivers . Her studies include the possibility that these irregularities create an enhanced perception of the audio frequency spectrum. She is of Cherokee, Shawnee, and Ojibwa origin and hopes to one day hear the aurora unaided.
“Damara Arrowood recognizes and explores the connection between electronic music's expanded sonic vocabulary and the sounds of the natural world. This is a project seldom picked up by most modern practitioners, although the lineage extends back to the medium's earliest practitioners such as Louis & Bebe Barron and David Tudor. Sounds that cannot be reduced to mere aesthetic objects, but that we have screened out as background noise, or forgotten how to hear entirely, or are as yet unknown, can first recapture our attention when organized musically, as compositions that help us perceive the sounds we have been hearing our entire lives. I look forward to more of the music that exists as perceived by her unique pair of ears.”
Written by Jonathan Leidecker aka ”Wobbly” curator of the Radio Web Macba podcast series ”Variations”. RWM is a radiophonic project from the website of the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art that explores the possibilities of the internet and radio as spaces of synthesis and exhibition.
