The Other Corona...

““The morning, Mr. Casey, can only be described as a glorious extravagance.””

— Flann O Brien, At Swim Two Birds

Any mysterium tremendum that one might feel about the ‘improbability’ of sentient life finding itself in a universe that seems so finely tuned to our needs, can of course be neutralised by the anthropic principle. If the universe were only slightly different, there wouldn’t be a sentient observer to comment and wonder at it all. Personally, I’m just as happy to follow this line of reasoning, because it still brings us to some interesting philosophical terrain, namely: the spectre of cosmic solipsism. Following the anthropic principle, in its weak form, all I know about the essentials of my existence in the world is that I am here and it is here and I am here, and both self and world seem to be intractably linked as one weird ontological oscillation. (Again Ring Modulation provides a metaphor for this relation. Two distinct signals modulate each other, the result being sidebands that are, like mind and matter, or positive and negative particles in quantum entanglement, opposing entitles that are intractably linked. The space that RM leaves between the sidebands, where the carrier would normally be, is perhaps a fitting analogy for what we might call Deep Self, always one step ahead of the game, the apophatic wellspring of consciousness that allows for the very notion of an ‘apophatic wellspring of consciousness’, ad infinitum…)

But what about the puzzlingly superfluous nature of solar eclipses? These would seem to me to be a phenomenon that would strongly hint at some sort of aesthetic source or motivation to our reality. One might even be drawn to speculate, if one were so inclined, whether some kind of design element was going on here… Eclipses appear to be totally unneccessary to our emergence and survival, a recurring event we could very well have got along without. It seems to me the anthropic principle has no real say in the matter here, precisely because solar eclipses are so unnecessary.

Solar eclipses are so redolent with poetic tension, and myth-making potential, but at the same time they are surely quite improbable. More improbable still would be that such phenomena would accompany the emergence of life that has the propensity to appreciate these events on an aesthetic level, extrapolating from them mythical concepts that seem to reflect fundamental truths about the dichotomised structure of our inner and outer worlds (eg. the prominance of light and shadow in alchemy, taoism, hermeticism and psychoanalysis). The sun is 92,000,000 miles away, and 400 times the size of the moon as it is observed from Earth. But the distances between moon, Earth and sun, combined with their sizes result in these profoundly dramatic natural events. Humans are in prime position both spatially and temporally (the internet tells me that because of the moon’s slow orbital drift, the occurrence of solar eclipses is temporary, in 600 million years the moon and sun won’t align as they do now) to witness this uselessly uncanny spectacle.

The solar eclipse is emblematic of a similar propensity for the lifeforms on our planet to display themselves with an equal vibrence and commitment. The terrestrial world, like the eclipse, begins to look weirdly, uncannily preoccupied with aesthetic flair, style, and theatrical resonances. But what is the significance of the human species’ being present to observe this. Of my (or your…?) ability to wonder at nature’s display? Are we witnesses in some way? Are humans the way in which nature admires itself? If the role of humans in the web of life is as audience, what then of our destructive propensities? What does it mean when nature’s observation of itself destroys itself? Is nature narcissistic?

It’s not (quite) the sheer variety of nature’s display on planet eath, that would make me consider intelligent design, much less the existence of humans; it’s the strange meeting of these two events: the weird mystery of human consciousness and the unnecessary extravagance of solar eclipses.

Open Letter

Uexküll Performance (eventually...)

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The plan was that today’s post would be announcing a live performance of a new work, on the 6th November, stemming from the Animal Faith research I’ve been doing. But unfortunately because of the new restrictions the concert has to be postponed for a while. But here’s a bit of information on it anyway. It’s called Uexküll and is a four movement fixed electronic composition over which myself and other performers will improvise. It’s about 40 minutes long, and I uploaded the fourth movement in a previous post. You can listen to it here.

I’ll be joined by Claudia Risch (bass clarinet and flute) and Anna Barth (dance), and there will also be projected visuals, created my myself. For my own part the improvisational elements will center on live manipulation of recordings from the speculative sonic bestiary that I’ve been working on. Added to this will be some live resonant percussion and synths. It’s sounding and looking really good in the rehearsals so I’m looking forward to it whenever it happens. We were lucky enough to be able to use the very spacious hall at Refugio so it will be a great space to perform in, especially with Anna’s movements central to the piece.

The images above are part of the costume design for the performance. It’s algae that Anna took from a lake and dried. In real life they look like incredibly delicate shawls. Very beautiful. Yet more Lovecraftian intimations…

Cygnus cygnus :: Animal Tao :: The Lovecraftian Wyrd

I’ve been working this morning on an audio recording of whooper swans. The video features a quick mixdown of the results, just whooper swan calls with a few simple processing techniques. The end result sounded surprisingly like brass instruments, quite haunting. This was all the more surprising as the call of the whooper swan is, to my human ears anyway, not obviously of aesthetic interest — it’s fairly abrasive and quite comical in a way. “Honking’ is a descriptive term that seems to be widely used, and that’s pretty accurate. ‘Strident’ is another more diplomatic term.

Here’s the unprocessed audio example.

To begin to explore the question of animal ontology entails attempting to imagine non-human subjective experience. Bird calls are a good starting point. What does it feel like to create avian sounds and to hear them being created by others and by oneself? This is to try and put ourselves in the place of something fundamentally alien to us. How do we begin to really imagine the experience of something so different? The entire comportment of bird physiology is radically different to human embodiment, not to mention the nuances of its sensorial life-world. And since cognition is rooted in embodiment, what about avian psychology? The bird world is not my world. But birds would seem to be more or less entry-level difficulty in the game of imagining trans-human embodiment. There are still spiders, octopuses, plankton…sea cucumbers!

Listening to this recording of processed whooper swans brings me back once again to the recurrent theme of this blog. What are the undisclosed aspects of animal experience? What am I missing as a human listener encountering animal vocalisations? Would it be wiser to assume that when whooper swans are calling in groups, what sounds to me like incoherent honking and squawking is experienced by them as something closer to the mood of this processed recording? They certainly seem to be enthusiastic about making these calls. Why should this be? Two opposing possibilities come to mind.

1) It’s because they’re insensible, tone deaf, barely conscious conglomerations of biological matter, forced by a blind life preserving instinct to automatically produce rather ugly sounds at a certain time of day.

2) It’s because they are participants in the midst of a strange ritual, infused with unknowable significance, expressed as a long-form, post-spectral, microtonal, site-specific drone installation.

What I’m suggesting is that the sense of the uncanny that my human ears detect in this processed recording, reflects a similar aesthetic import for swan ears, as they listen to and produce their unprocessed calls. The psychoacoustic experience is not the same for swans and humans, but perhaps the mood that surrounds that experience is similar. And of course, my Romantic take on this is that the human tends to have access to an impoverished version of what animals experience.

As it turns out, I recently read that this idea correlates with certain strands of archaic quasi-shamanic attitudes that found their way into ancient Chinese Taoism. Mircea Eliade points out that “animal life was, for the Chinese, the pre-eminant example of an existence in perfect harmony with the cosmos” (Eliade, Yoga, Princeton, 2009, p 61). Eliade also suggests that neo-Taoism appropriated older ‘mystical’ ideas that expressed “the immemorial nostalgia for the bliss and spontaneity of animals” (Ibid, p. 62).

In terms of the audio processing, I didn’t actually need to change the original sound very much. The processes were related to time and filtering, both perceptual zones that we know vary from species to species and from individual to individual. It doesn’t take a great leap of the imagination to consider that animal temporality and audition are different enough to yield perceptual results that humans would consider highly unusual. So, in terms of digital processing those eerie microtonal sonorities were very close by, all along. Perhaps this is also the case in terms of perception. It only took a handful of simple steps to transform these swan honks into something more Lovecraftian and wyrd, which, I like to think, defines at least some aspect of whooper swan experience.

Ring Mod. Research Strategies: research*praxis = ....?...

I’ve begun sketching ideas for a new work for piano, synthesisers and computer. I’ve spent the Summer thinking a lot about animals and aesthetics and going through the enormous amount of recordings in Berlin Natural History Museum’s Animal Sound Archive. The question is how to integrate all this research into a written composition. One clear thing I wanted to avoid was in some way imitating animal sounds. In a sense I wanted to keep the animal research and the compositional activity totally separate, but extremely close together, so that they influence each other subtley by just being around each other. Now that I think about it, it’s basically ring modulating research and praxis.

My current idea for this new piece is for the psychedelic onto-aesthetic bio-acoustic angle to be evoked by the Lyra 8, modulated by this tiny but powerful mini modular synth the Bastl Kastle. The Kastle sends control voltage to modulate the Lyra 8 (which is already modulating the heck out of itself in all sorts of esoteric ways) and they combine to make an active, unruly, intensely textural racket. I’d like to include this extremely quietly behind the piano, and maybe cross modulate the live piano with the synths too. The Lyra is played via these pairs of contacts instead of keys. When the performer touches both sensors, his/her body acts as a conductor, completing the circuit. Apparently cheese works well as a conductor on these Lyras too, and I’m wondering if it would be possible to cultivate some mushrooms to grow over the contacts. Are mushrooms conductive?

Anyway, here’s a quick example of what the synths sound like together.

As for the piano part, it will be very much non-narrative / static in terms of temporal flow, hopefully expressing in some way the weird animal inscrutability I’ve been exploring in this blog. The word static is little a misleading and a bit overused… temporally expansive maybe? I’m planning on using ring modulation to create these beautiful Gamelan type sonorities, and add harmonic and timbral unpredictability to the instrument. I’m really into the simplicity and symmetry of ring modulation, there’s something very interesting about the idea of sidebands reflecting each other around a carrier signal that isn’t there (or is present in a negative modality).

Murmurations : Hypercubes : The Illuminated Uncanny

Starling Murmurations, Eyrecourt Co. Galway Ireland. Photos by Alan Malone

One of the most beautiful spectacles in nature I think is the weird, viscous patterning of starling murmurations. In 2014 I received an Arts Council Bursary to study the music of Horatiu Radulescu with Bob Gilmore in Amsterdam. The result was my second String Quartet, which was inspired by the notion of murmurations. It included the use of a flocking simulator algorithm in Max/MSP to create swarming textures behind the string quartet.

Here is an excerpt of a sketch I made of the electronics from that time….

Anyway, I was watching a small murmuration yesterday and the thought occurred to me — no doubt brought on by an entire summer reading sci-fi and C.G. Jung —that maybe what I was witnessing was not so much birds in formation, but rather, a shape expressing itself through the medium of starlings. Or, to modify the idea a bit, the undulating of the murmuration suggested a three dimensional cross-section of a higher dimensional form, with starlings as the medium; the undulations of matter serving as three dimensional shadows or impressions caused by higher dimensional movements of other forces. A little like the experience of the square in Edwin A. Abbot’s Flatland for whom a sphere passing through his world appears only as a circle that fluctuates in size along his 2 dimensional plane.

And what applies for the starlings would apply to the morphological variety of all other dynamic forms of matter, be it animal, vegetable or mineral.

This type of trans-dimensional thinking was very much en vogue among both mathematicians and theosophists in the late 19th and early 20th century. If you’re feeling adventurous you can dive into some of the more esoteric stuff here, here or here.

Views of a tesseract (a 4 dimensional hypercube), C. Howard Hinton, The Fourth Dimension

Does nature express itself? Is expression going on with these murmurations? By expression I mean energies directed towards creative acts that are not purely for the function of self-preservation? Could self-preservation be an epiphenomenon of some sort of hedonistic drive in nature? Like inadvertantly prolonging your life because you’ve just always liked going for long walks. Aesthetic hedonism would then be the fundamental reason for life and species survival would have its own telos: to continue to express itself.

This chimes closely with Adolf Portmann’s theory that the morphological variety we see in nature is unnecessarily rich if we assume that biological appearances are solely meant to help with protection and propagation. I’ll be writing a bit more on Portmann soon.

And then there is the question of our own ability, our instinctive drive even, to appreciate these forms. Why have an aesthetic sensibility at all? What is it pointing to?

It is a bit disconcerting that it seems so natural to delineate between aesthetic and non-aesthetic thinking. As if the dichotomy between function-orientated, materialist thought and apparently ‘useless’ aesthetic or metaphysical interests is brought about from the fact that whatever it is that aesthetics is concerned with, it is receding from the sphere of human experience. We see it because it is no longer an intrinsic part of our ontology. Of course we needn’t necessarily take the pessimistic route here. If the aesthetic milieu is indeed separate from us, it might just as well be approaching as receding. We might be on course for some kind of soteriological collision with pure aesthetic being. Who knows?

In any case this brings me back to the idea that, for the moment at least animal subject-hood, and not human, is a lived aesthetics, and animals are engrossed in a mode of being that is a non-linguistic affirmation of whatever it is that makes up their lived experience — animal onto-aesthetics: the illuminated uncanny.

You Again! (The Cosmic Horror of the Familiar)

It’s the classic sci-fi scenario: an alien craft finally lands on earth, the population crowds round, waiting in trepidation as the landing doors open and the aliens appear for the first time, having travelled countless light years from a distant planet. We ready ourselves for the profound shock of cosmic unfamiliarity.

It strikes me that there could be no alien deformed or be-tentacled enough, slimy or malign enough to match the truly cosmic horror of encountering a couple of humans stepping off this inter-galactic vessel. More of the same! This would, I think induce a sort of subtly catastrophic diffusion of existential dread in human culture (as it would in the bewildered non-terrestrial humans). It would be much worse for us in the long run than the ordeal of encountering some murderous eleven headed acid-spitting inter-planetary colonists. Radical unfamiliarity would give us something to sink our teeth into, metaphorically speaking. But finding out that the cosmos was permeated by the familiar, this is a chilling thought I think.

I must admit I’ve always been lukewarm when it comes to a lot of John Cage’s music but I very much like the story of how excited he got when Morton Feldman, early into his career, showed him a new composition. When Cage asked how he wrote it, Feldman replied “I don’t know how I made it”, to which Cage jumped up and down with excitement and said “It’s so beautiful and he doesn’t know how he made it!”

Still Life

They’re genetically closer to animals than to plants and are pretty amazing all round. The instruments I used for this are the Lyra 8 and the Bastl Softpop. I really love these synths as they’re unpredictable and consistently produce sonic surprises. The audio here was composed from edited and processed fragments of a few improvisations I did with them.

I’m reading Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris at the moment and came across the following description of the incomprehensible data the human researchers received from the ocean on the titular planet. On certain days it sums up the experience of working with these synths…

“Had it revealed its innermost workings to us? Who could tell? No two reactions to the stimuli were the same. Sometimes the instruments almost exploded under the violence of the impulses, sometimes there was total silence; it was impossible to obtain a repetition of any previously observed phenomenon”

— Stanislaw Lem, Solaris

Speaking to Animals: Communication, Community, Communing...

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Untitled with Buffalo Scent, Martin Finnin (oil on canvas, 100 x 150 cm)

I remember coming across an article quite a while back, where the writer was of the opinion that humans’ tendency to speak to animals was demeaning to both animals and humans. On the surface this perspective would seem to tally strongly with the theme of my own project. The idea would be that speaking to animals treats them like fellow humans, and divests them of the dignity and mystery of being specifically non human etc. etc. It also casts a question mark over the motivations of the human in wanting to communicate to the animal in question.

But funnily enough I’m not sure I completely agree with the idea. There might indeed be something quite appropriate in humans speaking to animals, as long as it is not some sort of deluded attempt at communication, that is: if it is ultimately an aesthetic act. In this sense it would be similar to prayer, where no response is, or should be, ever received. Receiving a response would make it a rather deflating and depressing experience, on consideration. It would set up a mundane and restrictive cause and effect relation between humans and the Godhead. We have enough of cause and effect in everyday life.

It would seem that language — which, being “language” (the word in my “language” for “language”…I find myself wanting to put every word in inverted commas) is only ever my human language— is the defining characteristic that makes us humans the animals that we are. (For now, I’m going to ignore the possibility that authentic humanity lies in transcending language…). Language is our special move so to speak; spiders spin webs, chameleons change colour, cats land on their feet and humans speak. So perhaps it is by speaking to animals that the rift between us can be, certainly not crossed, but made less divisive somehow. Speaking to an animal, without ever expecting a response, is perhaps when a human animal exists in its most human-animal-like state with other beings. This thought, which admittedly I’m finding hard to express, hinges on the idea of communing, or community, rather than communication.

Unless they’re engaging in the drama of predator and prey, different species of animal more often than not seem to ignore each other. Even symbiotic relations are healthily self-oriented. And yet if we observe a simple scene in nature, where a number of animals are present — a frog in a pond, a spider in a hedge above it, a flock of geese flying above this, a ladybird on a leaf a few meters away, a dog barking in the distance, all simultaneously engaging in their own specific animal being — what we see are animals gracefully ignoring each other, in such a way as to render the scene, ‘appropriate’ somehow.

Animals ‘hang together’ easily, like the balance of forms in an abstract painting. Birds and fish and frogs etc. are thus in a communal state of being even though they never communicate, because they exist fully immersed in species specific states. They commune because they don’t communicate. But despite this mutual detachment, there is an underlying rapport there; ‘abiding’ maybe is the word. For the human then, speaking to an animal could be a communal gesture, a way of entering comfortably into this abiding community. Like the strange geometric lines that commune with the other more organic forms in Untitled with Buffalo Scent the brilliant oil painting above by Cork-based artist Martin Finnin.

Speech would be the specifically human contributiuon to the ethereal rapport that exists between all living organisms, situating the animal that speaks within the arena of the other animals that do their own species-specific things. And this idea of rapport interests me because, on the one hand it leaves the rift between animals and humans untouched, but on the other renders this rift less divisive somehow.

As always, I’m drawn to the suspicion that language, thought and reason are no more or less expansive or commendable than other special attributes that other animals possess; as ‘deep’ and sophisticated as web-spinning or trans-oceanic navigation in birds etc. This would make language more a mode of behaviour than a carrier of meaning. (Q: Would this make the results of language, whether destructive or constructive, a natural part of the whole ecosystem?)

But, if we are to accept speaking to animals as being philosophically justifiable, it would still, I think, have to be quite a specific mode of speech to ensure that the sense of human superiority doesn’t break the rapport. Again it’s a question of aesthetics. No pontificating, no ordering about and no baby talk! Keep it cool. A quick greeting maybe and a brief, happily one-sided chat? I don’t know…

Some Images

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The horse photo was taken by Maeve O’ Neill. The starling murmurations were taken by Alan Malone around Eyrecourt in East Galway, I think. The rest were taken by me, except for the one with the enormous spider, which comes from a sci-fi movie whose name escapes me.

Hive Feedback

This was shot a day later, this time with a community of bees. In this one the feedback was a little more unruly.

Watching the video the following question came to mind:

What is the relationship between the mammal on the right, the insects on the left and the technology in the middle?

or maybe just…

What is the mammal doing?

Forest Feedback

Here is a new work I did while visiting Lower Bavaria. It’s a nicely minimal setup that allows me to play the feedback between the environment, mic and a portable speaker. Again it’s using Max/ MSP, with reverb, band pass filtering and ring modulation. The sidebands created by ring modulation (the most Hermetic of all modulation types I’m sure you’ll agree….) allows me to offset and modify the feedback pitch and texture in quite subtle ways. In sub-audio rate frequencies it also adds a nice pulsating quality to the tones. It felt quite instrumental from the beginning. There was a real sense of playing the feedback, and also of having to interact with something that had a mind of its own, so to speak.

Feedback is also an Ouroburos, which pairs up nicely with the ‘as above so below’ character in RM.

This is an avenue I’m looking forward to exploring much more in the future, as it does create the feeling of a more intimate relation between the performance and the location.

Excerpt from a New Work... The Uexkuell Études

Here’s an excerpt of a new work provisionally called Uexküll Études. I might also end up calling it Lem, I haven’t quite decided yet. Both men have wonderfully evocative surnames to name pieces after! Also the strange new worlds that they presented us with were obviously not that dissimilar, and the excitement I get from the works of both is much the same.

The final piece will be in four movements, which I’ve almost completed, and it’s looking like about 35 minutes altogether. This is the fourth movement. The pitch material was composed quite quickly over just two days. It was very fluid and improvisational, and was done by recursively using just a few simple processing techniques of one shortish sound file. The end result turned out surprisingly rich and orchestral. To this I added some processed speculative bioacoustics, which function a little like a soloist to the orchestral textures. So it’s a concerto of sorts.

I’ll be making a visual accompaniment to this as soon as I can find a snail or two. For now the above image is of a member of the Grimpoteuthis genus of octopus, otherwise known as the Umbrella octupus, also known, even less auspiciously, as the Dumbo octopus.

What’s in a name? More on this soon…

Dark [animal] Matter

This is a new work that follows the idea I had a few posts back (Specimens iii) about animal ontology being like dark matter. The idea is that what we think we know about animals is based on attributes we can recognise in ourselves, related to food, reproduction, territory, tool use, society etc. But animal ontology may be unimaginably more expansive and unfamiliar than we think. I imagine a great mass of rotating dark [animal] matter, where occasionally a tiny fraction of its bulk becomes briefly visible. We catch a glimpse of it and mistakenly think we've accessed a large part of the whole.

For a number of reasons I really wanted to use Schubert here, not least because of the Kubrick connection — its a fragment of the piano trio Op 100, that features in Barry Lyndon.

Animal Divinity, Nietzsche and the Language Parasite...

I had an interesting conversation with a friend a few days ago. He is studying theology and during our chat the following train of thought came to me. Humans, to meet with God, can only do so by being open to divine silence. This is done by transcending the snare of language, the roots of thought. And this can only come about by firstly recognising language as a snare. To my mind, this is essentially what serious religious practices entail — the slow process of freeing oneself from the web of language, creating an opening for the divine.

Is it possible that animals, being bereft of language, have already attained this state, that humans have to work so hard for? Maybe it’s humans who are the last in line for divine attainment, being destined to have to take these long arduous spiritual paths through and beyond the thicket of language. (In a previous post I mentioned the Romantic theory that language is a living being — does this make language a parasite and humans the host…?)

We can imagine, after years of meditation, prayer or spiritual practice, at last a clearing in this thicket opening up. It is empty of words, but populated already with animals, who have been waiting all the time for our arrival as newly-redeemed beings freed from language; at last cured of the sickness that Nietzsche attributed to us, the animal that calls itself ‘human’ — or the animal that language wants to call ‘human’…

The story goes that Nietzsche’s own last action as a sane man was to try and protect a horse from being flogged by its master in Turin. Behind the apocalyptic rhetoric, there is a tenderness and sophisticated morality in Nietzsche’s philosophy that I have always found a bit moving. It is no coincidence that animals feature so prominently in his work. He lapsed into dementia after this episode and spent the rest of his life in an unresponsive state. For us, a key signifier of his madness is of course this unresponsiveness. But like the reticence of animals and writing in Derrida, maybe Nietzsche’s madness was the final attainment of a specifically animalistic silence. Zarathustra was after all emphatic that transcending the impoverished human condition, rising to the state of Ubermensch, was simultaneously a ‘downgoing.

And finally,… two cultural items related to this post that (aside from all of Nietzsche’s work…!) are worth checking out.
Brian Aldiss’ science fiction classic Hothouse, which features a parasitic morel fungus that grows on the heads of its simple-minded human hosts, and bestows eloquence and intelligence on them.

The Turin Horse directed by Bela Tarr. One of my favourite films of the last ten years. It follows the aforementioned Nietzschien horse and its owner, beginning a few hours after the incident that marked the break in the philosopher’s sanity. Minimal and apocalyptic with very little dialogue and way too short at two and a half hours.

Quinta

A new study into the possible lived psychedelia of non-human subjects. The main material is some synthesised cyberacoustics composed in the modular habitat I built in Max/MSP. I improvised with a short recording of this using another patch I made in Max. The chords are performed on Soma's Lyra 8 synthesiser, an instrument that, at times, seems to have a weird sentience of its own. The visuals are my own footage processed using Vizzie patches in Jitter.

Jacob von Uexkuell, Acid Zoontology, Bubbles

In 1934 biologist Jacob von Uexkuell (1864-1944) published A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans. Its central idea, which was very much against the grain at the time, and perhaps even now, was that animals are subjects with ‘first-person’ perspectives, not merely squashy automata, blindly reacting to stimuli. Of course, this subject-hood has nothing to do with being human-like…

Each species of animal, humans included, has what von Uexkuell called its Umwelt, its own species-centric lived environment. The environments of each species and, by extension, each individual of that species, are defined by the perceptual strengths and limitations of the animal in question, its physiology, and its needs.

In the forward to the book von Uexkuell invites us to take a stroll with him…

“We begin such a stroll on a sunny day before a flowering meadow in which insects buzz and butterflies flutter, and we make a bubble around each of the animals living in the meadow. The bubble represents each animal’s environment and contains all the features accessible to the subject. As soon as we enter into such a bubble, the previous surroundings of the subject are completely reconfigured. Many qualities of the colourful meadow vanish completely, others loose their coherence with one another, and new connections are created. A new world arises in each bubble.”

— von Uexkuell, A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans

Von Uexkuell’s ideas were clearly contrary to behaviourist theories which really took hold in the early to mid 20th century. (This was the paradigm that almost brought us pigeon-guided missiles and succeeded in making Little Albert scared of furry objects). He proposed that animal worlds are not based around stimuli as such, but around signs, the difference being that signs are things that have meaning for a perceiving subject. This idea is not meant to reveal a hidden animal intelligence (which is always assessed on the basis of similarity to humans) or bridging the ontological gap between humans and non-humans. The idea is not that animals were more like us than we realised. Instead von Uexkuell’s theory leads us to realise how radically different the lives of other animals are. If we consider the vast sphere of knowledge and seemingly infinite range of experiences that define the human condition, this is merely one Umwelt among countless millions of others. Because an Umwelt represents totalised reality for a subject, it is indeed an entire world. Animals are otherworldly in a literal sense, and the Umwelt of a stork or an octopus is equally as rich as that of a human.

But how exactly does a silk worm experience meaningful percepts? The meaningful experiences involved in the life-world of ticks or starfish are unimaginably different to what we as humans (die-hard logo-centrics that we are) conceive of as ‘meaning’. And this opens up a whole weird vista of speculative possibility. We tend to conflate the concept of meaning with coherency, which is tied up with translatability and verifiability. But what of untranslatable meanings, or meanings that are direct and self-evident, or pre- or trans-logical? It seems to me that meaning that is conveyed without the mediating agency of language, whose roots taper down to the very core of the human experience, would be something similar to the aesthetic import found in abstract, non-narrative forms of art. Some examples would be Morton Feldman, Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Samuel Beckett, Franz Klein, Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music, Merzbow, Elaine Radigue, La Monte Young, Horatiu Radulescu, Kubrick, Finnegan’s Wake…

It has something to do with an intoxication and incomprehension and a mood of sensorial affirmation. The bubbles that define each individual animal’s Umwelt are, from the inside (and the inside is all there is…) boundary-less. It’s zoosolipsism where, without an external frame of reference, all meaning that arises within an Umwelt is ultimately self-referential. Self-referential (self-sustaining) meaning is aesthetic meaning, direct and untranslatable. Meaning in this form is revealed or shown, not deduced. This would obviously hold for human Umwelten too (Is rational scientific discourse aesthetic? Is empirical truth a stylistic mode?) The borders that mark the limits of our Umwelten are always positioned just over the horizon of the total expanse of what there is. So if we want to get a deeper understanding of the selfhood of the animal Other, we may have to content ourselves with engaging merely with radically unfamiliar modes of human experience, at least to begin with. Hence the psychedelic undertones to my own project.

Perhaps animal selfhood is defined by what we could call a lived or embodied psychedelia. This would infuse the entirety of the animal’s Umwelt and ground it in an abstract multi-sensory aesthetics. As a self-contained world, such a psychedelic existence would have its own weird coherency that allows the animal to function more or less perfectly within that world. We might begin to understand animal experience on the basis of onto-aesthetics, and assume a kaleido-mystic quality to the life-worlds of non-humans. This obviously raises the question of how all this relates to human subjectivity. Are we estranged from such uncanny fecundity, or already living it; does naming bar the way to what is named, or open a path towards it?

Specimens (iii)

The images for these new imaginary bio-acoustic phenomena show the waveform activity of the five LFOs over about a 10-15 second time period. The images I uploaded in the previous Specimens post, were of the final audio waveform. So there is a much stronger correlation between the auditory percept and the visual image of the audio waveform, than there is here between the audio percept and these X-ray-like images. A relatively sparse sounding call, is revealed in these overlayed images to be the result of quite dense and busy LFO activity, as in sound 19422501 for example. In these images all the activity is given equal weight, showing the auditory manifestation to be only a small part of the overall behaviour. I quite like the idea that they are images of sonic dark matter, the invisible stuff that outweighs visible matter in the universe by a ratio of 6:1.

Humans base the criteria for intelligence in animals on what we can relate to i.e. the more similar they are to us the more intelligent. The idea of intelligent life in science-fiction is treated in the same manner. What if these attributes that we discover in animals are merely glimpses, or fleetingly resonant standing waves, that occur when one tiny fraction of the mass of animal dark matter happens to coincide with a tiny fraction of our own?

I get the image of two enormous irregularly polygonal black shapes, slowly rotating in the darkness of the void, resonating occasionally, and by chance, when two faces briefly come into alignment.

More of this to come…

Forest Geometry

This is something I’ve been wanting to do for a long time, and I finally got the chance to take an array of instruments into the forest and improvise. In this clip you hear a Softpop synth, a Kastle synth —both from Bastl Instruments — running through a Koma Field Kit FX unit. I intend to keep exploring this format, not only because it unequivocally adheres to social distancing regulations.

The question is whether this performance is in some way an intrusion, benign or otherwise, into nature, or itself an entirely natural event. Is human technology the same as the ‘natural’ technology that enables all those flying insects to hover and dart around the place (and pollute the silence of the forest with their own noise…), or the trees to draw water from the soil? We tend to assume that what distinguishes human design from nature’s design is that with humans conscious decision making is involved and we have control over what we’re doing. The fact that this autonomy is only made possible through the bio-technological workings of a human body whose design we’ve had nothing to do with, tends to be overlooked.

It would be too simplistic, I think, to say that the source of technology is autonomous human ingenuity. It’s becoming increasingly clear that technology is self-generating, our tools are giving rise to other tools at a phenomenal pace, and the extent to which we as a species are in control of this process is questionable. We follow our tools in a similar way to how I was following the capabilities and limitations of the instruments I was performing with in the forest.

Perhaps it’s more accurate to say that we are the tools of technology; or, taking it a step further, a medium through which technology expresses itself. Like how language, the original technology, uses humans as a medium through which it propagates, develops, mutates and exerts influence on matter. This idea of language as an organism was popular in the 1800s, Friedrich von Schlegel called language “ein lebendiges Gewebe". Gewebe has a number of related meanings so a translation would be: ‘a living tissue/fabric/network/web’.

If technology has a mind of its own (so to speak) then band pass filters, LFOs, patch chords, speakers and contact mics don’t intrude in the forest, they come from the same source as the ‘natural’ technologies of the forest itself. This would also be true for chain saws and bulldozers. My own technological intervention in the forest, would then be a manifestation of a deeper expressive drive that has nothing to do with me, where the performance tools are the image this expression takes, and the unwitting human being the medium. The source of this expressive agency is hidden and lies behind what language seems to want me to call ‘nature’.

Expanded Modular Habitat

Second Excursion from francis heery on Vimeo.

Here’s a clip of the new expanded Max/MSP modular patch. I’ve made quite a few changes to it as you can see. The biggest change is a more user-friendly routing functionality on the left, so I can improvise more freely with that aspect, without having to unlock the patch and delete/recreate patch chords etc.

Other changes I made were:

A random button to generate… random settings for some of the LFO parameters. It’s the small red button under each LFO preset.

Settings to modulate the LFO ramp settings, between linear and exponential curves.

Settings to modulate the shape of square and triangle waveforms.

The Image Capture section which I used to generate the images for the last couple of posts. Here, instead of the images capturing the waveform of the finished audio file, it captures the waveforms of the 5 LFOs. I also added some oscilloscopes to make the whole thing a bit more Pythagorean. They appear to me like different pulses, so it’s an electrocardiogram of sorts, tracing the inner modulations of the sounds.

And, in the end, I did add preset functionality too.