First Contact

First Contact is an installation and media performance-in-progress. The basis of the piece is the 1759–1769 correspondence between Medford, Massachusetts slave trader Timothy Fitch and the captains who sailed his ships. These letters offer an opportunity to examine the irrevocable point of contact between the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea, and between British settlers and enslaved Africans, whose contact, collision, and conflict will eventually produce the ‘Americans’. This production is a result of the laborious actions of the ocean and the sea, the work of British sailors undertaking a life-threatening journey thousands of miles from the familiar, and the uncompensated labor of kidnapped Africans on their own life-threatening journey over thousands of miles.

The centerpiece of the project are several 3D-printed sculptures whose sources are field recordings made at the northern tip of the island of Barbados, where the two bodies of water meet. The audio waveforms were converted to SVG files, then imported into a 3D modeling program. The 3D files were then scaled and shaped to the desired forms, while maintaining the proper measurements of the waveforms. This process is similar to creating infographics from data, but the end result is a physical object. The sound of the Caribbean and the Atlantic co-mingling, colliding, and combining becomes a wave; the wave becomes an idea, a system, a thing: a gleaming structure created from hope, trauma, wonder, fear. 

Body of Water

Atlantic Ocean, Caribbean Sea

About the Artist

Art Jones works with film and video, photography, sound, and objects. He often uses music, field recordings, text, live action, and animation to produce hybrid documents with narrative suggestions.