Lyn Goeringers Blog

Last night there was a community dinner, and afterwords I facilitated a listening intensive meditation and walk here at the Soil Factory. It was so much fun. I should have taken more pictures of the dinner, but I at least have a picture of the fire in the pizza oven.

The community here is really spectacular and quite special. The Soil Factory has a focus on community development between artists and scientists, working together to further research and art in a collaborative and engaging environment. It was no surprise that there were quite a few artists and scientists present for the dinner and sound walk event afterwards, and it was a real treat to get to speak to everyone and get to know them better.

After dinner, we sat out in the field and meditated together for a little bit, and then we walked independently around the grounds, mostly in the areas that I have been focusing on in my daily treks around the fields. It was very fun to see people gathering and listening. I didn’t want to be too intrusive with my photos for the event, but this might give you something of an idea of how the listening session went:

I should have taken more photos, for sure, but it was such a beautiful night it was hard to not just focus on listening to the soundscape and enjoy the ritual of collective listening.

As I am approaching the end of my residency here, I am left thinking of so many things. First and foremost, the community they have built here at The Soil Factory is unique and truly special. Over the last two weeks, there have been several workshops (Make Mends Meet, a Zine making day, Interviewing Your Loved Ones), and they have each offered really great spaces for people to make art, to talk about their work, to talk about the environment, and to learn. To be in a space where people are genuinely interested in being kind, fostering growth and creating something new, and to experiment is really something else. I’ve learned a lot, not just how to work with cynaotypes! I think that more than any craft I have focused on, I have seen how communities can thrive, and it was so great to see how much genuine mutual respect and care everyone here has for each other, and for community engagement overall. I know last night there were a lot of people who had only been to the Soil Factory a small number of times, but the fact that they came back, stayed for the full event, and want to return for future events, speaks volumes for the work being done here.

My last day will be filled with administrative tasks and cleaning. It’s been such a great place to work, and I would even say that this place taught me so much in a short time. I’ve really enjoyed my time here, and am so thankful that I was able to do this.

Getting to some real mid-summer vibes here at the Soil Factory!

It has been a very productive day so far, with recordings, insect collecting with a community member at the Soil Factory, color-tint tests with cyanotypes, image taking, and preparing for the pot luck and listening session tonight here at The Soil Factory!

Today I took one of the images from yesterday and decided to run color-tests with it. I cut up one of the less successful still images and then cut tiny squares out, and then soaked them in six different solutions

The bottom left has been soaked in a passionflower infused spring water as the base, the one above it was passionflower infusion using tap water. The middle section used oregano for the infusion: the bottom, using spring water for the base, and the top middle used tap water. The column on the right used spearmint, with the bottom being spring water and the top tap water. I’ve left the original image behind it so that you can see how much the color has changed.

You can learn more about the methods I used in Annette Golaz’ book, Cynaotyp Toning: using botanicals to tone blueprints naturally. I admit that I was really rooting for the passionflower tea, but speamint and oregano definitely are having a bigger impact overall!

It was a good morning for still images. I’m still trying to figure out how to capture the grass here in the morning exactly how I want to, but this is definitely getting closer

And of course, it was great fun to go to Ecovillage Ithaca this afternoon and collect a few insects for the project (image for that will come tomorrow). I really enjoyed seeing how the community was laid out, and what a fantastic intentional living space.

One of the things I really enjoyed about walking around the village was the pebble/gravel walkways. When I first moved out on my own to Rhode Island from Colorado when I went to college, one of the things I missed the most was the sound of gravel and dirt under my feet. I still get excited whenever I hear it, because it is something that is so special that you definitely don’t notice until it is no longer there.

I anticipate a late evening, so I’ll post about the potluck and listening session tomorrow instead of doing it after the event tonight!

Today I spent most of the day working on cyanotypes. I decided to try my hand at making digital negatives today, so I took three of my favorite photos from the past week and set them up for printing. It took a couple of times to get the exposure right on the paper, but in the end I think these three worked out pretty okay.

I’ll take a few minutes to take the less successful prints and recycle them into test pieces for tinting, but I am pretty excited about how these turned out.

I also had a chance to go to artist Sheila Novak’s guided meditation session for her exhibition seeding/seeping today at the Experimental Gallery in Tjaden Hall at Cornell University. The exhibition is fantastic, and incorporates really captivating ceramics with fiber arts/fabric sculpture. The work commands a presence with it, and evokes bodies and nature and so much more. Though the show ends tomorrow, I really recommend checking out her work and going to see it in person the first chance you get.

The guided meditation session was wonderful. The perspectives that she offered in it by inviting the participants to engage in their bodies as a rhizomatic system, engaging simultaneously in decay and growth, had me visualizing my body in a way I had not before. This was interesting to me, particularly as I have a regular meditation practice and have done many visualization practices that engage with sinking into the earth and contemplating decay, but something about become part of a mycelium network really offered a new perspective that I am going to think about, and likely meditation on/with, for a while.

I know I have a few days left, but those last three days here are going to fly by. Tomorrow the Soil Factory is having a community dinner followed by a Listening Intensive that I will be leading, offering everyone a chance to engage in some of the practices I have been working with since I got here, and I still want to get a bit more footage and more audio before the end of my residency on Friday. It’s been so great to be here, and I’m grateful that I still have a few more days to focus on making new work, learning new skills, meeting the wonderful people and artists here in Ithaca, and hopefully get up to a few more adventures before I leave.

Today, the weather cooperated a bit more, and I was able to get some nice mid-day recording done. I was experimenting a bit more with the contact mics on the ground/inside of plant groupings. I am not entirely sure what I am picking up in terms of sounds, but they are pleasant enough. I am suspicious that the ‘crinkle’ type sounds is the sound of the mic or cables resting in the grass, but I also know I am picking up a lot of rustling from wind. But I am also picking up a lot of other sounds as they travel through leaves and soil. Faint sounds of birds, sounds of other things like cars, and, whatever it is that I’ve titled “Mystery Sound in Mugwort” in the sound file below.

Frog? Insect? Weirdness for sure. It’s been tidied up a bit, but not so much that we get a ton of new sounds introduced. edit: pretty sure it’s a northern cricket frog. The way I’m recording it would filter out high end frequencies. Also, I’ve been seeing quite a bit of them hopping between mugwort groupings in the morning.

Tonight I am running experiments with adding various botanical and herbal infusions to cyanotype materials. I’ll share what I learn tomorrow!

When I first went out this morning at 6:45am, there were rain droplets falling. I decided to just do the walk without making any audio recordings, and my plan was to take notes and write about it when I got back to the garage. Something interesting happened, though. When I got back, I felt unfulfilled. I know this is minor, and it is likely not as profound as it felt at the time, but it just felt a little lacking. I had thought that maybe the walks were becoming important and significant to me because I was just getting up and immediately going out into the sun and having a very intentional slow walk. The reality is, though, that the act of making the audio recording, the act of participating in my own artistic practice, was the significant component of these daily walks. About an hour later the sun came out, and it was clearly no longer going to rain. I have been struggling with back pain this week, and I was really unmotivated to go out again with the mic and recorder, but after a short bit I decided that I would do it anyway. The total walk if I don’t pause for long takes about 13 minutes, and that seemed foolish to not push through my mental block and do it anyway. 

What happened next was really important. When I started to record, my focus shifted. I really was focused on listening in the first walk today, but with the audio recording equipment and headphones, my mind focused sharply on the task at hand of ‘making art’. My eyes started to scan the horizon for habitual cues, and my ears also did the same. But this hyper focus, where somewhat habitual at this point, brought about a connection to something deeper in me. My walk went from a meditation practice of soft focus without attachment to a space where my senses were heightened and looking for something very specific. I’m not saying that I was consciously labeling everything I heard, but I definitely was working from what Pierre Schaefer would call ‘close listening’. I was listening very closely, attuned by the microphone and the subsequent encapsulation by the headphones I was wearing. Having followed this ritual daily (often multiple times per day), my ears started to listen for patterns. I walked from the parking lot, sensitive to my footsteps through the mic, and the occasional hand noise and cable noise that seems somewhat unavoidable. I got to the bottom of the first grassy field, and my ears opened up and started to scan the area for sounds that might be of interest. I could hear the birds in the wooded area up the hill on the right, the song sparrows at the top left from where I stood, and I could see insects that my mic could not pick up given the traffic noises behind me. When it felt like it was time, I began to walk up the hill again, and paid attention to how the sounds moved and shifted through space, and of course, the constant sound of my footsteps. When I reached the top of the hill, I paused, and focused on the trees to my right. Until yesterday, I hadn’t really acknowledged them, focusing as I had been on the consciously designed fields on the grounds, but now that I had, I wanted to check in on them. 

I suppose in many ways, that is what I am doing. Slowly taking my focus outward, and checking in on my friends here. The fields, the wooded area, the various areas of mugwort, the areas that are deeply populated with bees and other pollinators. Slowly, I am dialing into their spaces, listening in to their lives and hopefully not disrupting them too much as I do. As I start to become overfamiliar with what I am hearing and seeing, my focus turning outwards, asking “Who else is there? What am I missing?”

In his essay “The Infra-Ordinary”(1989)  by George Perec, he asks us to ‘question the habitual’. This is important. For many, this site of questioning the habitual may be a call to cease the habitual, to break it up, to leave mundane existence and find something else. However, it can be deeply rewarding to question it in the exact way he asks us to question our spoons. This absurd idea of asking our spoons questions, or asking the why of the spoon, seems to be a space of liberating us from the spoon. But, what if, we use the site of questioning to find something else. When we look into the timed patterns of animals, when I listen to them and see that they have their own habits, and these habits seemingly correspond to times of day in their repetitions, I am finding myself asking questions such as “Why do the song sparrows perch on these two steel fence posts in field two in the morning, and in the evening, I see red winged black birds in the same spot?” Do they have a time-share? What brings these birds to these locations at these various times? Do redwing blackbirds sleep late, what do they get up to in the early morning when they aren’t here? 

I pose these questions here because I think so often we look at the idea of questioning the habitual from the perspective of the Situationist International, and the site of the derive particularly when walking. We want to see how to divert ourselves from the space of habit, to shake things up, to cause disruption and change systems by breaking out of psychogeographic patterns. One of my favorite artists in this type of making is Alex Villar, whose videos of jamming himself into cramped areas, scaling walls, and engaging the world in a very absurdist and non-habitual way helps us to see how space and place can morph, change, and be something else by interrupting it. These moments of interruption tell us about ourselves, about infrastructure. But, when observing and capturing natural phenomenon, that site of disruption is something else, and the destruction it could bring is something very real. In cities, amongst human populations, standing in an obscure corner that architecturally makes little sense to the casual observer creates absurdist humor. A derive that takes you through uninhabited buildings, or into locations that you’ve never seen before, can be invigorating. In natural spaces though, it can bring other problems, and the responsibilities of humans when engaging with certain natural spaces can be quite damaging. 

I grew up in Colorado, and am accustomed to hiking in areas where you really shouldn’t go off trail. Not just because of the risk to your body or ticks or anything like that, but because sometimes when you hike off trail you risk damaging the ecosystem. Hiking in Moab, Utah, you will see many signs that tell you to stay on trail because you will destroy plants and life if you decide to go off trail. In places that seem to have more robust ecosystems it seems like maybe that isn’t as important, and, for the occasional visitor it probably isn’t, but if lots of people go off trail at the same places, you will carve out a new trail and any of the plants and insects who lived there will be displaced and destroyed. We may want to question “why do I have to stay on this path? It’s so beautiful over there!”, but sometimes we really do need to stay on the path, to follow the route others have taken habitually, in an effort to do as little harm as possible. 

Going back to the walks each morning, however, it is wonderful how many little friends I am making, seeing all these same birds and insects each day. I don’t know if they are the same exact ones each time, but I do suspect it is the same sparrows, the same rabbits, the same groundhogs. Of course, this brings me back to the Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram. Connecting to this tiny microcosm of other beings, daily, at the same times of day, I am connecting to something bigger than myself, allowing these other lifeforms to inform my patterns of movement, my patterns of thinking, my patterns of knowledge making. I miss them if they are not where I expect them to be, and I am possibly fooling myself, but it also seems like they are becoming more comfortable with me in their space as well. The sparrows are slower to fly away. I doubt they would ever stop flying away when I got close, but they are no longer leaving immediately when they spot me. 

And somehow, listening through my headset helps me to see this, to think through this, to be a part of this. When I left this morning for the first walk without. My gear, these are all the things I missed. Sure, the animals were there, but as I was no longer able to hyper focus without the aid of the microphone, I did not engage quite as deeply, quite as strongly. The extended ear of the microphone allowed me to hear more clearly, even though I could isolate their sounds without any troubles without the microphone before. 

Today I spent a little time in the dark room experimenting with cyanotypes and adding in a spearmint infusion to see how it impacted the color. I should have been more scientific, and created a test strip before going all in, but I was a little too excited and just decided to go for it. I suspect by Monday I will be ready to be more methodical so that I can have reproducible results. I created two small images, still using contact methods.

For my method, I prepped the paper first with a classic style cynaotype mixture. After it dried, I painted over it with a spearmint infusion. I should have just made it in the lab using the scale, but it was roughly 1 tablespoon of dried spearmint leaves to 1/4 cup boiling water. I then steeped it for approximately 1 hour, and strained it out. In the contact prints below, you will see the paper prepped with both before exposing it to light with the objects over it. The yellow-green color is the base for the cyanotype, and the grey/green/pinkish wash is where I painted/brushed the spearmint infusion on the top. I did one at a diagonal line to illustrate a stark difference, and the second, I played with the spearmint infusion in a similar way to how I use paint, by creating simple lines with larger starting points, and then dry brushing over that. In the image on the right, with the diagonal, you’ll notice two stark white patches. That is from sloppy taping and then accidentally peeling up the top layer of the paper when removing tape. Since this is just an experiment, I let it stay that way.

Then, I set it up with the objects for the contact print, and exposed it for 15 minutes in the UV light bed.

After exposure and developing, this is the result after sitting for a bit. It’s so blue already because I added a splash of hydrogen peroxide to one of the rinse cycles. It will be interesting to see how this looks tomorrow after it has the full time to sit.

I don’t know enough about the process yet to know if I stained it and altered it, or if this just bleached it. Either way, it’s still pretty exciting that it did something. I look forward to seeing what other combinations I can get together over the next few days!

And, more video and sound to come.

Happy Summer Solstice!

Pardon the blurry cell phone photo, but the sun was gorgeous this morning when I was heading out to make my first set of recordings for the day, I just wanted to share it.

Tonight, I have two excerpts from my morning walk on the grounds. the first, “Golden light”, is a moment where I describe what I am seeing as birds are perching on a structure in the field. The second, “Marshy Garden, Difference in Sound”, I am sharing because there is always such a distinct difference in the quality of sounds as soon as you walk into the Marshy garden. The area is a little reset, and it is next to a bank of trees that shield the traffic sounds as they pass. It always surprises me, even after so many trips into the space.

I decided to take some time and explore the Cornell botanical gardens after that. I spent some time in the herb garden, because I do love them so much. One of the delightful things I found in this section was Scarlett Pimpernel. I have never seen it in person before, and had only literary and film references for it. Who knew it looked so dainty?

Last night I also tried my hand at cyanotype during the darkroom workshop. This is so much fun, and I am definitely going to be doing more of it during the rest of my time here. I took a couple of photos this morning that I think will work very nicely with this, and I plan to play with adding different botanicals to change the colors, and will probably layer some gouache on top as well. This is my first attempt, which was a contact print

Definitely a fun time in the Darkroom!

I continued to work on the video and music today, and, did a little more work on the rainstick. Tomorrow I’ll get back into the darkroom now that I have a conceptual plan to work from, so expect more cyanotype images soon.

Well, it has definitely been a hot day here at the Soil Factory! This morning there was a lovely covering of dew all over the grounds when I went out to record. It was so beautiful!

In addition to my morning walk around the land here, complete with photographs and field recordings, I’ve been working this afternoon on the video project I started yesterday. As I cull through the footage and audio that I currently have, I think that I am really starting to get a lot of ideas and possibilities going.

One of the video projects is an installation piece for single monitor video. It will feature jittery highly processed video taken on site, in vivid colors with sound recordings that will more realistic to what I hear on site. Here is an excerpt of what I am working on

The audio from this was recorded this morning, and was taken in/near field 2. The video is from the top of what I’ve been calling field one, in the top left corner, facing the marshy garden below. This will go through a few different permutations before it is done, and I anticipate the full loop lasting about 3-5 minutes.

The second project will be an experimental short film. In this excerpt, we are looking at highly processed footage from The Marshy Garden, with very processed field recordings from the past four days.

This evening I will be partaking in the Darkroom time, and learning a bit about working with Cyanotype! Really looking forward to that.

An update on the rainstick: I may not get the tubing for the rainstick on time, but I am still taking insects! This will definitely be finished this summer, and I am hoping to exhibit it this coming fall in Baltimore, and it would be great to bring it up here so you can enjoy it as well. I will continue to keep everyone posted on how it ends up, and where it goes.

It has been a hot day here at the Soil Factory!

I did my usual audio recording rounds early today, and was out on the land early so that I could try to beat the heat. The humidity has been quite high today, so not a great day to take gear out. I went for a quick audio walk, and then went out again with a camera to take some pictures.

Since I needed to divert plans due to heat, I switched gears a bit. This afternoon I started working an audio and video project that uses the sounds and images I’ve taken here, and I hope to share some excerpts soon once it gets a little farther in. So, with this in mind, I don’t have any audio to share today but I will have some listening materials soon.

In between projects today I’ve been reading the book The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human-World (1997) by David Abram. It pairs nicely with the work I am doing here as well as my work more broadly in thinking about space, place, and the mythopoetic. I’ve been shocked at how much I’ve been growing just doing a simple practice over and over. Waking up, walking through the fields, intentionally changing sensory focus— this is really helping me focus and ground here. Quite early on I felt the need to keep doing it, going out into the field and just repeating the work, observing little shifts and documenting what catches my ears and eyes. Taking that work and then translating it into a medium so that others can engage with it is challenging. There is a conflict in my mind: do I just show what it is, because frankly, it won’t get more profound than what is already there, or do I adapt, construct, and interpret the experiences into something else. Musicians, artists, composers, writers, all of us are mediums in our own right. We have to take raw materials and translate them into something else, maybe something that is coherent and holds meaning (though not required). I’ve decided to do that, though honestly, I see nothing wrong with simply sharing raw materials. I hear Hollis Frampton’s voice at the end of his film Nostalgia(1971) declaring “Look at it! Do you see what I see?”

But, much like Nostalgia, it is likely that the listener or viewer won’t. I need to pull out the essential bits from the raw materials, reframe it, recontextualize it so that someone else can extract something, maybe something I even mean them to, from the materials themselves. That’s the task I started on today. How to I take these raw materials and transform them so that others may find useful things in them as well.

As I’ve been collecting the images I’ve been thinking a lot about intimacy. I brought a macro lens to use, and it has been great at helping me isolate individual objects or small groups into something that feels more candid. I don’t know if it will be like that for others, but in many ways that doesn’t matter. The language I’m building from can be my own, but this space of intimacy is really at the heart of the entire project. I am here so that I can connect with this land, with this place, drawing my attention in and out of it, and using cameras and microphones to hone my focus. I came expecting to dwell on insects, and I am now here drawn into what else is here too, the entire environment. The insects are there of course, but I am also surrounded by plants (so many plants, especially my beloved favorite mugwort— so much mugwort!), by birds, deer, woodchucks, chipmunks, deer. This list could go and on. And so my mind drifts to The Spell of the Sensuous, where Abram explores a different type of phenomenology, one where there is much more connection between human and non-human beings, and I can’t help but extract that this space of connection is not just one of the shaman and healer, but one that artists must have as well. Or at least, we can, if we wanted to work with it.

I will have audio to share tomorrow. I’ll keep recording my audio walks when I can but the weather will determine what I can document. But regardless of recordings, new or not, I will have some new music /sounds to share soon.

There were two stand out excerpts this morning from my 7am sound walk that I wanted to share. The birds have a particular rhythm that I anticipate impacting my music over the next two months, and yes, another close mic of a bee!

The practice of waking up, and then going out to circumambulate the land at The Soil Factory while listening intensely to the landscape, is a really powerful and intense experience. As an artist/researcher, it immediately brings to mind the work of Pauline Oliveros, Hildegard Westerkamp, and R. Murray Shafer. With Pauline, her work on deep listening is so pervasive in the field that one really cannot engage in a listening practice without her coming to mind as we owe so much to her in this regard. She was one of the faculty in residence at Bard when I was working on my MFA, and I remember so many of my peers talking about her and her meditation offerings she gave them, and listening to her talk about listening was a real treat. Walking and listening were two of Pauline’s biggest ‘prescriptions’ it seemed in her lessons with others (I never personally experienced this, so this is very much anecdotal second hand information). I know zen buddhism influenced her practice a lot, and it has influenced my practice as well. So as I walk and listen, she is omnipresent as I move through the land here.

I think on a craft level, I keep coming back to the work of Hildegard Westerkamp as I do my walking. In particular, I keep coming back to her piece Kits Beach Soundwalk.

I teach this piece a lot, as I always start out my introduction to electronic music courses with this piece, usually around the the practice of sound walking. In this piece, she introduces the site she is visiting, and gives us a really fantastic treat of listening to the sounds, then a deep dive into micro sound and processing out the outside interference. It’s a great way of showcasing how we can manipulate recordings to get what we want out of them, while also allowing us to sink into a location as both a non-fiction and fictional space. It might be strange to frame the manipulated sound as fiction, but it is a fantasy of what we want to hear, even though we receive it as actual rather than constructed sound. This space of hyper manipulation is always fictional to my minds ear. I don’t mind it, because I don’t think that fiction doesn’t mean we can’t learn from it and observe important things. But it keeps coming up for me as I do not have the tools on hand to remove the constant freeway and wind noise from my recordings here. I may not be able to, because it is so present it might just have to stay there. So as I walk I wonder: is it best to represent what is, or to focus in only on what we want to hear, on what we want to preserve in the moment?

After writing this, I went outside and took some recordings using contact microphones. Basically, I just put the mics on the ground, or amongst the plants at the surface, and hit record. I tried to get ants, but was unsuccessful. I did, however, make several unusual recordings in areas where I did not know what the outcome might be. One is recorded in the marshy garden, where I placed contact mics under rocks on the dirt directly. This one has been denoised, in a very ‘kits beach’ way, or at least, as well as I can with the tools I have here. The second, recorded directly on grass with contact mics, has been unaltered. You will notice there is a slight hum in it which is from the recording device.

I have fewer things to say about Shafer here. His writings on acoustic ecology were foundational to my early thinking in listening and field recordings, and he is a part of the fabric of listening and thinking about the world we live in. His book “The Soundscape: The Tuning of The World” is a foundation text in environmental listening, and I definitely recommend it to anyone wanting to go deeper in this. 

There is something really powerful about spending time observing a landscape from an intentional sonic and visual perspective. In some ways my method might seem odd, as I am bifurcating them a bit. I go out with my audio recorder and make my field recordings, and then I go out again with the camera to look and observe by looking. This doesn’t mean that when I am walking around I am not looking at things. I’m doing both, but I have made the conscious decision to not take images while recording, at least for now. This has two reasons: on a practical level, I don’t want to be carrying all the things, having to shuffle about and make more noise problems for myself to deal with later. The audio recorder I use has a terrible problem with EMF interference, so if I pick up my camera or my cell phone while using it, it records them turning on and off with weird little crackles and whines. But on a more personal/artistic level, I find that allowing myself to really focus on being present through sound is a more enriching practice. I’m able to be present, to observe what I am experiencing, and not have to shuffle between phenomenological modalities. When I am out with my camera. I am hyper focused on what I am seeing in a way that I begin to exclude my ears. I am no longer hearing outside of my eyesight, and that would make sound too hard to contemplate in a meaningful way. It makes for a complicated juxtaposition, though, because sometimes I have better lighting when listening than I do when using my camera. This means I might miss a good shot, but in the end it is worth it. I am not too worried, because I am repeating this process regularly, so I am likely to get something else or similar that is satisfying.