Collective Return

BACKGROUND: Collective Return is a durational sonic installation performance commissioned by the Museum of New and Old Art (MONA) Festival of Music and Art, (MONA FOMA). The work emerged over the three 12-hour days of MONA FOMA (MOFO), with four levels of recursive processes involving: an ensemble of megaphones to record improvised sound installation events throughout festival; replaying these sounds in an installation of looping, overlaying and over-writing sounds; live-streaming and re-installing this emergent sound score into a headphone listening experience at the festival; and an online archive of the resultant thirty-six hour sound score. The work was conceived and directed by Douglas, and performed collectively with artists Simon Maisch, Michael McNab, Cobie Orger, Amaara Raheem, Theron Schmidt & Alex Talamo. CONTRIBUTION: Collective Return departs from traditions of acoustic ecology and the social festival context to actively construct layering and re-sounding micro-actions to produce non-linear experiences of time-space, calling forth expanded senses of attention to the enfolding of the temporal present and an eternal dynamism characterising the ecological. Deploying simple 'off-the-shelf' sound technology, the work challenges the anthropocentric broadcast of the human to recast human perceptions of - and yearnings for - connectedness with realms other than the reductively human. The work poetically elicits contemplation on collective effects, affects, and impacts. SIGNIFICANCE: The significance of this work is evidenced by its inclusion in the MOFO program, curated by Brian Ritchie (Violent Femmes). MOFO is renowned internationally for high caliber and diverse programming prioritising experimentation and collaboration across various platforms, and MONA was recognised as the best contemporary art museum worldwide by Lonely Planet in 2015. Douglas' work was critically reviewed in The Guardian.