After their live A/V performance of Somnifacient Signals during the 2021 online edition, Pierce Warnecke & Matthew Biederman return to Rewire for another collaboration using visual data sets for realtime audio and video speculative cartography. Spillover’s focal point is a mountain range in northern Portugal that is scheduled to be destroyed to facilitate a proposed lithium mine. Only a few kilometres downstream is the Alto Rabagão Dam, one of northern Portugal's main sources of drinking water. Coincidentally, two historic small villages on either side of the proposed mountainous mining site would be able to see each other for the first time if this drastic reshaping of the landscape were to go through. Through the use of aerial and land-based photogrammetry, Warnecke & Biederman have found a way to visualize and sonify the proposed landscaping project, providing a metaphor for a systemic shift and a point of reflection for our relationship with environmental extraction. As such, the audio-visual performance serves as a metaphor for a systemic shift in our relationship to the environment – rather than imposing a composition, the landscape itself becomes the instrument.

Spillover can be conceived as a follow-up to Somnifacient Signals, which functioned as a response to the global quarantine and immobility over the last few years. Here, Warnecke & Biederman propose a return to the landscape, addressing and examining issues of the borders and the transitional spaces between man-made and natural landscapes. What ties both distinctive artists together is their shared concerns for the Earth’s future, and a desire to create a work that may in some capacity bring attention and consideration to a point that requires focus: the meeting of society and nature.