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.
