Do Not Disturb - Stanislaw Lem's Fiasco

Stanislaw Lem

Thinking more about the reticence of animals, I was reminded of the wonderful science fiction novel Fiasco by Stanislaw Lem. The novel tells the story of human explorers who discover signs of ‘intelligent’ life on the planet Quinta and try to make contact. The mysterious beings that live there are highly technologically advanced, but stubbornly private; they have no wish to have anything to do with the humans. They don’t express this through dialogue but merely by not responding to, or rebuffing, the various attempts made at contact. The humans busy themselves with hypotheses as to the nature of these beings, and the reasons for their unwillingness to communicate with the terrestrial visitors. They devise ever more intrusive strategies for contact which all lead to increasing levels of chaos and destruction.

The Quintans remain almost a total mystery in the novel, but we learn a lot about the humans who can’t seem to accept that the aliens could be so single-minded in their aversion to the noble enterprise of intergalactic exchange. Whatever the Quintan’s ethics, culture, motivations, history, morphology, etc. they are more or less totally silent in the face of the human explorers’ mania for contact.

What is very well expressed in the novel are the rationalizations the human travelers use, to justify their increasingly destructive intrusions on a life-form which they know nothing about. Self-absorbed paranoia takes the form of rationality and superior ethical wisdom. There are a lot of assumptions being made by the humans in Fiasco, assumptions that are convincing, intelligent and sensible, but assumptions nonetheless. In Fiasco the humans want answers and get none, so they supply their own, which conveniently favour the humans. All the while, the alien other has said nothing.

...leaf hypostasis...

A study incorporating birdsong, recorded in my local park, with modular synthesis.

Aliens, Derrida and Animal Reticence

The circular images in the previous post are little reminiscent of the abstract circular glyphs that the aliens use in the 2016 movie Arrival. The aliens are huge and mysterious and shrouded in mist and communicate to the bewildered humans by displaying these circular forms in the air. What’s interesting is that, compared to animal life here on earth, the heptapod’s uncanniness is quite superficial. They’re very conventional, when it comes down to it; they have a language, a sense of ethics, empathy and most importantly a will to communicate with humans.

From the very beginning there is at least the potential for two-way communication offered, and with it the implicit possibility of mutual understanding. We can imagine, somewhere down the line, the heptapods and the humans developing a deeper rapport and succeeding in inter (-galactic)-cultural understanding, learning about each other’s way of life, appropriating new customs and most importantly, ‘speaking’ , in some form, to each other. This speaking would entail responding to one another. In this sense they’re not so alien.



The perspective that I’m taking for this research project, categorizes terrestrial animals as actually alien, because the are so much more distant than the heptapods in Arrival. We assume that animals lack the ability to engage with humans with the same level of sophistication as the aliens. Can we go a speculative step further and interpret this lack of ability more as a primal lack of will?


Here’s a quote from Jacques Derrida’s The Animal That Therefore I Am. The animal never responds, and it shares this reticence with the reticence of writing.

“According to many philosophers and theoreticians, from Aristotle to Lacan, animals do not respond, and they share that irresponsibility with writing… No matter what question one asks them writings remain silent, keeping a most majestic silence or else always replying in the same terms, which means not replying… it is always as if humans were less interested in emphasising the fact that the animal is deprived of the ability to speak, a zōon alogon, than the fact that it is private and deprives humans of a response.”

— Jacques Derrida, The Animal that Therefore I Am

And perhaps we’re on the right track in interpreting animals’ reticence as privacy. The idea is certainly one I find attractive and fascinating. The implication in the quotation is that we have always expected a response from animals and have always been let down. Perhaps we feel we deserve a response? Is our sense of cognitive, (and therefore ethical…) superiority then, derived from the sting of rejection; from the fact that we are the species rebuffed by all other species? To compensate for this slight, we assume the fault lies with them.

Animals, even when they are facing us, have their backs turned to us because they are occupied with life-worlds that are more alien than most (but not all…) representations of alien life in sci-fi. Animal reticence comes from a sort of fundamental coolness, from the fact that they really do their own thing, like Robert Crumb’s Mr. Natural here… 


Seen in this way humanity’s persistent efforts at ‘understanding’ animals, would be something akin to an indiscreet curiosity, an nosiness where persistence becomes incessance — a dynamic that only says something about humans.

Specimens (ii)

More specimens for the sonic bestiary…

The images got me thinking about the photos of plants by Karl Blossfeldt. He’s another figure whose work chimes with the science-fiction strangeness of non-human life. I pick up echoes of H.R. Giger or Max Ernst in the mood, rather than the pictorial content, of his photos. For the purposes of this project, I’m considering such strangeness suspiciously extravagant … unnecessarily thrilling…

(The waveform to image translation was done in Max/MSP using this patch I found on the Cycling ’74 website. I normally build everything from scratch in Max, but this saved me a lot of time!)

Specimens...

I find working on these sounds surprisingly fascinating. It makes me quite aware of the geometry of LFOs and oscillators. It connects with the Pythagorean character of music making, I suppose, particularly in the digital realm where everything is number… Circles and triangles and squares etc. interacting in cyclically cycling cycles. Stacking them and combining them in different ways leads to some surprisingly non-linear results; surprising because there’s not a lot of use made of random LFO waveforms.

I see them as streamlined, micro-compositions, miniature, non narrative and abstract, with fundamentally very solid structures based on the LFO interactions. It can take a surprisingly long time to find something that strikes me as finished. It’s a pretty intuitive process, but sometimes I have a very vague impression of some imaginary entity that might make such a sound, which is a sign that it’s done.

I’ve always been drawn to the patterns of tree bark, since discovering the music of Morton Feldman years ago, and these irregularly cyclical sound specimens have something of that quality. More to follow…

LFO Excursion

Here’s a quick look at the modular setup I’ve built in Max/MSP to begin the speculative sonic bestiary. I’ve limited it to one audio oscillator with one filter and 5 LFOs. I haven’t implemented any routing functionality yet, so I’m just manually re-patching the modules as I’m experimenting. At the moment I quite like this setup. If I come up with something I like, using one routing combination, I can’t save it, so once I record it and change the routing it’s gone for good. This feels a bit like catching a brief glimpse of some entity, before it disappears again, perhaps for ever, into the digital ether. So the recordings are quick snapshots of these fleeting soundforms.

Here’s a breakdown of the setup so far.

LFO
Waveforms: sine, triangle, rectangle, saw up, saw down, random continuous, and random discontinuous)
There is a range object so I can set the LFO to oscillate between any values between 0 and 1.
CV Amt. - This sets the amount of ‘virtual control voltage’ that will modulate the frequency of the LFO
CV Amt. Mod. - Another LFO signal can modulate the amount of frequency modulation.

Oscillator
The frequency, pulse width and amplitude can be modulated by the LFOs
There are four waveforms that can be added together: sine, triangle, rectangle and sawtooth

The frequency, pulse width and amplitude can be modulated by the LFOs

Filter
A straightforward filter using the svg~ object, with lowpass, highpass, band and notch filters. There’s a range slider here too and the cutoff and Q can be modulated.

Animal Faith...

This year I was very happy to receive a Music Bursary award from the Arts Council of Ireland to research the musical application of bioacoustics. I’ll be studying the recordings of the Animal Sound Archive at the Berlin Natural History Museum as my primary resource, which was kindly made possible by the head of the archive Dr. Karlheinz Frommolt.

I’ve decided to begin a blog to accompany this project. I’ll be documenting the compositional work, so you can follow how that’s developing over the next few months. The main outcome is to find ways to allow bioacoustics to inform my work as a composer and performer. So I’ll be immersing myself in the morphologies of animal sounds, absorbing their character, responding to them in different musical ways.

I’ll also be keeping a record of my own thoughts about the relation between non-humans and humans. I’ll obviously be approaching the topic from the perspective of a composer, rather than a biologist or botanist. So it will be speculative, a little freewheeling I imagine, and will take a lot of its orientation from aesthetics and the humanities. Science-fiction, psychedelia and H.P Lovecraft are my initial starting points, and I’ll be posting links to relevant texts as well as my own musical works along the way…. more on that in future posts…

There is one central point of focus to this project: to de-familiarize non-human life and push to the fore the uncanniness of other beings. There is a tendency to try and bridge the rift between humans and non-humans, to show how similar we are, and base some form of ethics on this. I’m not sure this is the best way to develop a deeper relationship with non-human life. Maybe we should be more sensitive to the fact that we humans share a cosmic living space with strangers, whose life worlds are radically different to ours, on a different plane of being altogether.

So, for this project I don’t want to try to bring human and non-human life closer, quite the opposite; I want to attempt to keep that rift open, point towards it, observe it, wander around its edges, throw sounds into it, record its seismic activity…