Seismic media: art and geological co-creation in Ōtautahi Christchurch, Aotearoa New Zealand

Abstract

In September 2010 the city of Ōtautahi Christchurch, New Zealand was rocked by the first of a sequence of 16,000 earthquakes. This essay considers art and creative practices that have responded to the experience of living in the earthquake-damaged city. In an environment transformed by seismicity, we argue that artists became co-creators with the planet, using its instability as a medium of art making, an active agent and long-term collaborator in creative practice. Those practices mediate the experience of seismicity, communicating the overwhelming energy of a faultline rupture in artworks that employ sound, touch, image, memory and emotion. We use the term seismic media to describe an expansive field encompassing the unstable earth as medium, the practice of mediating seismicity, and the media texts and objects that attempt to express it. In this essay we employ the concept of seismic media to discuss artworks created within the city of Ōtautahi Christchurch as it undergoes an extended period of rebuilding. We identify artists’ relationships with the material geology of a city with a focus on new geographical and aesthetic understandings. Seismic media enables people to work through the experiences of earthquakes and their long aftermath, while remembering the city as it was and imagining the city that could be.