CVAG Window + Plaza Media Gallery
WITNESS — Video | Sound | Poem + Text Installation
by Ruby Singh
Witness is the final research and development project commissioned by the Comox Valley Art Gallery for presentation on the gallery’s newly acquired LED screen. Funding from the British Columbia Arts Council’s digital Arts Impact Grant provided the gallery with the opportunity to support artists in developing new skills to add to their creative practices and to offer the community encounters with artists and their work through digital presentation experiences in public spaces
Witness is an immersive audiovisual installation that employs data sonification, marine soundscapes, and visual storytelling to highlight the ecological impacts of colonialism and capitalism, with a focus on the oceans. The project transforms global ocean temperature data into an evolving soundscape, interwoven with the songs of humpback whales, orca echolocation clicks, and hydrophone recordings from the Comox Valley. Visually, it combines manipulated footage of kelp forests with NASA visualizations of ocean temperature rise and atmospheric carbon dioxide, culminating in the symbolic image of an eye — representing the act of witnessing. This multisensory narrative underscores the interconnectedness of human and more-than-human life, creating an emotional bridge between environmental data and the urgency for transformative action.
What do we hold secret?
without words from darkness
Can a sense of place emerge
Maybe from a soft tongue
into this chorus of worlds
credit to all beings that breathe
life into us (and those we suffocate)
An ocean rises
Inside you but only through your eyes
In passing moments
Profound loss
Rare beauty
Love
Churn the well of salt waters
and through our pores
When hard labour is given
when a deep panic takes hold
Or the world opens our skin
A humidity index
amphibious ghosts could steer a future of lost voices
a haunting for humanity
feel the threat in your animal hairs
listen for cetacean language to mark the generations lost
And the generations to come
adapt to true temporal magic
enchant the mother tongues
and crumble these borders
decompose this colonization
fix your harpoons like tuning forks on the hearts of humankind
like prayer for a forgotten path
Interpret this creation as you wish
after all it’s your climate crisis too
A specific melody rises from a broad choir
transformation like water
build your connections and
see our webbed story
an intersection of growth of science of studio
a new empathy
the familiar made strange
made wet
Listen for the music
Out of your hearing range
The kind that helps you stay
wet between the ears
stay fluid
stay
a story of migration of accent and language
inhabit each other and feel the uncomfort
this rupture this loss this devastation
look through these polluted veils for the return of orca of humpback of porpoise
They are singing to our absence
a needed medicine for this demonic greed
we are in transition
We are in recovery
We are in need
of direction
we follow the sound
the responsibility we follow understands our duty
to build new structures
and forgotten relationships
sympoeasis
after all we are making us
Alterity of pleasure and sound
we remain porous to understand the bioacoustics
speculate and raise your voice in collectivity
make your feedback loops
a mediation of microphone and ritual and frequency
evolve the audible
every being has a bandwidth to belong too
every being has a bandwidth to belong too
every being has a bandwidth to belong too
Consigned to the past
In the chorus of the porous present
solarpunk for the future
Ear worm for a frog song
get wet
An ocean rises
Inside you but only through your eyes
In passing moments
Profound loss
Rare beauty
A love that churns the well of salt waters
and through our pores
When hard labour is given
when a deep panic takes hold
Or the world opens our skin
A humidity index
Churn and draw droplets and streams
Estuary us back to our oldest ancestors
The undertow reaches from before
A tide that futures us forward
Condensing being and belonging as cloud
So we can learn to speak thunder
ARTIST STATEMENT
Through Witness, I seek to explore the intersections of colonialism, capitalism, and ecological collapse by engaging the senses with a layered audiovisual narrative. This piece interrogates humanity’s extractive relationship with the Earth, a dynamic rooted in colonial systems and perpetuated by capitalist structures that prioritize profit over the well-being of the planet and its inhabitants. By weaving together sound, video, and data, Witness calls for a reckoning with the consequences of our actions as they reverberate across the more-than-human world.
The sonic dimension of Witness is rooted in data sonification, transforming global ocean temperature rise into sound. This sonification triggers the hauntingly beautiful songs of humpback whales, the echolocation of orcas, and hydrophone recordings from the ocean outside of the McLoughlin Gardens. These aquatic voices form a complex symphony, evoking a sense of both wonder and warning. They remind us that the oceans are not a silent backdrop to human activity but a living entity deeply impacted by our choices.
Visually, the piece combines manipulated video of kelp — a lifeline in marine ecosystems — with NASA’s visualizations of global ocean temperature rise and atmospheric carbon dioxide increases. These elements converge to form the image of an eye, a potent metaphor for the Earth itself as a witness to humanity’s actions. The eye serves as both a mirror and a gaze: a reflection of our impacts and a reminder that the natural world observes and endures the consequences of our carelessness.
By merging scientific data with the voices and sights of the oceans, Witness invites viewers to consider the interconnectedness of all life and the profound responsibility we hold as stewards of this planet. The work seeks to move beyond abstraction, fostering a visceral understanding of the ways colonial and capitalist ideologies have harmed the Earth. It is both an elegy for what has been lost and a call to action, urging us to reimagine our relationship with the natural world and our more-than-human kin.
RUBY SINGH
Ruby Singh is a multi award winning performer, composer and producer residing on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səl̓ílwətaʔɬ/Selilwitulh Nations (Vancouver, BC.). His creativity crosses the boundaries of music, poetry, photography and film engaging with mythos, memory, justice and fantasy. Singh is an artist whose work is informed by sound found all around us, from the whirling planets and stars of distant galaxies to percussion of an umbrella under coastal rains, to the perpetual moving birdsong of the dawn chorus, constantly circling the globe. The richly imaginative visual textures to his sound design have found kinship in the theatre, film and dance worlds, where he has been celebrated by multiple Jessie and Leo award nominations. His distinct approach uses traditional and emergent sonic practices to create compositions that express the vast spectrum of the human experience. In 2022, Singh received the Lieutenant Governor’s Jubilee Award for excellence in Art and Music. In 2023, he received his inaugural Juno nomination and he won both the WCMA award for best Global Music Artist of the Year and BC Touring Council’s Artist of the Year.
Singh’s offering are wide ranging and expansive from ambient audio-visual worlds of the Polyphonic Garden to Jhalaak, a Sufi hip hop album made alongside Manganiyar musicians recorded in the clay huts of the Thar desert in Rajasthan India, reinterpreting 13th century Sufi poetry. Vox.infold, an a cappella project bringing together the sounds of Inuit, Indigenous, Black and South Asian voices that has been met with critical acclaim. RupLoops, a solo live looping project that is a highly engaging, interactive experience using vocal percussion, rhythmic rhymes and an arsenal of eclectic instruments from around the globe. The Future Ancestors, a blues and soul infused live hip hop project; kraKIN, a more-than-human collaboration that brings together a boom-bap menagerie of banging Westcoast flora, fauna, and fungi. Singh believes in art’s ability to reimagine futures, to repurpose aesthetic freedoms toward civil and environmental justice.
“A visionary artist… blending the technological world with art, social and environmental causes… Singh’s work reveals a new, malleable reality that is long overdue.” – CBC Radio Canada
“Mesmerizing, vibrant… Singh isn’t just crossing genres, he’s straddling astral planes.”
– Globe and Mail
“Singh spins the sounds of plants and animals into a symphony.” – Vancouver Sun
