If we are in such times where myth itself masquerades as truth, then we have the duty, nay, the joy in deriding it, provoking it, and finding transformation in the cracks and margins.

We are in the Holocene, approximately 12,000 years that should have been one of the most geologically stable periods in human history. However we’ve abused our environment in the last few centuries, to the extent that scientists are warning that the world has entered its sixth mass extinction, an event when a majority of species on Earth die off. It is now suggested by the International Commission on Stratigraphy that we are in the Anthropocene, an epoch where human activity has made a significant impact on the planet’s climate and ecosystems. Regarding earth systems and global socioeconomic trends over the Holocene, it indeed seems likely that we are in a time of accelerating uncertainty and suffering as a species.

The cause is amorphous, but could include the following: Agriculture leading to systems of social stratification and hierarchy(1). Colonialism, with its forced acquisition of land, resources, slavery and oppression of indigenous communities. The Industrial Revolution, with its emphasis on mass production and relentless consumption. The Great Acceleration, accelerating growth on almost all frontiers including energy use, greenhouse gas emissions, and population growth, thrusting the planet into a massive uncontrolled experiment.

The extent that this has affected us depends on where we are on the spectrum of intersectionality, from marginalised groups at the forefront of climate catastrophe to billionaires promising that growth and technology will save us. But for most of us, that is, second nation people, there is opaque understanding that we are collectively doing something wrong, but with no way to change, even as it gets harder to survive in these highly volatile times. This condition could be termed as “collective aphasia”(2), which feels like no accident in a hugely unequal world, but also not entirely conscious either. Either way I put forward the notion that the Great Acceleration is also the Great Hijacking of the Human Psyche, where our relationship with place, each other and ecology diminish, in favour of some sort of trauma bond with hierarchy, colonialism, consumption and growth. As Graeber and Wengrow write “We know now, that we are in the presence of myths”(3), and they are destroying us.

What is astounding to all but maybe the world’s indigenous communities is how deeply these myths perpetuate. It is one thing to understand the need to decolonise, but another thing entirely to understand that our shared reality is shaped by colonial impositions, from money, to culture, to aesthetics, to religion to gender norms, even the language I’m using to write this article - they are all conditioned by colonial legacy. The Great Hijacking of the Human Psyche runs deep; to undo it requires the ability to be a walking hypocrite as we perpetuate the very system we are trying to change.

To illustrate this I’ll write about my journey. I grew up in a British society that still refuses to acknowledge its colonial legacy(4), and allows systemic racism to exist. As a result I unconsciously conditioned myself to act and think white, becoming racist myself, erasing the Sri Lankan and Chinese culture that I came from because was afraid of being bullied. I was raised catholic, believing ideas of heaven and hell, fearing god, bowing to a higher power. I have body dysmorphia from a lifetime of seeing images of “perfect” people in films, advertising and social media. I am forced to compete in a system that pits me against my fellow human, pits me against the planet, and only allows altruism in the cracks when it is satiated. It is only in the last few years that I have realised this, and I am radically deconstructing my conditioning. Any revelation that allows me to recalibrate gives me hope, whilst simultaneously understanding that I am inexorably part of a system that is harming people and planet. What I’m finding in the margins, in the cracks created by rebellion and transformation, is joy.

The reclamation of oneself from The Great Hijacking involves the need to radically question that which seems beyond contention, to destroy, to deconstruct, to rally against our conditioned foundations, possibly to the point of fundamental ambivalence, and find meaning in what remains. What is this process of deconstruction for the sake of our collective ecology? And how does it relate to art, just another thing that has been colonised? Early 20th century Dada rejected war and capitalism for peace and egalitarianism. Black Dada Nihilismus and Black Dada rejects white dominant structures to talk about the future while talking about the past(5). In this form of “Green Dada” or “Eco-Dada”(6), we joyfully reject archaic structures that oppress our collective ecology. We deride norms that endanger our future and open up new abundant space for recalibration. We challenge rationality and sense-making when all it leads to are dead ends. We find joy in challenging mainstream Western conventions whilst uplifting indigenous knowledge and templates for experiencing reality.

While it has always existed(7), we define Eco Dada again here today.

Jamie Perera is an artist. His work explores radical deconstruction, re-imagining and reclamation, whilst challenging the conventions between music, sound and data.

1. Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States by James C. Scott

2. Inspired by Ann Stoler’s Colonial Aphasia: Race and Disabled Histories in France. “It is not a matter of ignorance or absence,” writes Stoler. “Aphasia is a dismembering, a difficulty speaking, a difficulty generating a vocabulary that associates appropriate words and concepts with appropriate things.”

3. “We know now, that we are in the presence of myths” David Graeber & David Wengrow on the conventional account of human history as a saga of material progress. From The Dawn of Everything

4. Lest We Remember How Britain Buried Its History Of Slavery - Gary Younge - The Guardian | Cotton Capital

5. Black Dada Nihilismus: Theorizing a Radical Black Aesthetic by John Gillespie

6. The term Eco-Dada was originally coined describing Jamie Perera’s work with Hanna Haaslahti and refined in conversation with Lucy Wood in October 2020.

7. A few proposed examples of Eco-Dada.

(NB - my knowledge of art history is terrible, and I apologise for neglecting any artists who may obviously fit into this category, especially indigenous artists)

Raoul Hausmann’s Mechanical Head (The Spirit of our Time) (1920) created Mechanical Head (The Spirit of Our Time). The manikin head made from a solid wooden block is a reversal of Hegel’s assertion that “everything is mind.” Hausmann wanted to compose an image that would shatter the mainstream Western conventions that the head is the seat of reason.

Throughout the 1970s, the radical American group Ant Farm cultivated a subversive and underground stance, reproducing contemporary Amercian culture and denouncing its obsession with consumerism.

Wheatfield, a Confrontation - Agnes Denes 1982. With the help of several volunteers, Denes planted a two-acre wheat field in a landfill in Lower Manhattan. The ground was prepared with soil, planted with wheat, and then harvested. The piece survived for three months.

K Foundation Burn a Million Quid was a work of performance art executed on 23 August 1994 in which the K Foundation burned 1 million pounds sterling.

¡TchKunG!, a band that formed for the radical environmental movement, bringing heir message of environmentalism and deep ecology to untold thousands of young people across the Pacific Northwest and beyond, helping to create an awareness and network that showed itself during the WTO protests in late November of 1999.

In 1996 at the Reclaim The Streets Protests in London, Shepherds Bush, 25 foot tall dancers on stilts in billowing Marie Antoinette costumes hid protesters as they drilled into the tarmac and planted trees, inches away from police lines.

From 2003 Molleindustria has produced artisanal remedies to the idiocy of mainstream entertainment in the form of short experimental games. From satirical business simulations (McDonald’s Video game, Oiligarchy) to meditations on labor and alienation (Every Day the Same Dream, Unmanned), to agitprop games (Democratic Socialism Simulator, Casual Games for Protesters, Phone Story).

Daniel Boyd first rose to prominence with his No Beard series of mocking oil portraits of colonial Australian historical figures, which he started in 2005.

In 2015 at COP21 in Paris, members of the Swarm Soundsystem - a group organised by Grey Filastine - created a walking speaker array that broadcast satirical US audio archive praising oil, alongside whale noises, polar bear roars and ticking clocks.

2017 John Gerrard’s Western Flag (Spindletop, Texas), a video installation in Somerset House’s courtyard. A large screen showed a digitally simulated image of dark smoke making the shape of the American flag, symbolising the oil fields of Texas and the modern world’s dependency on fossil fuels.

June 25th 2022

Anthropocene In C Major | Camera-ready paper | ICAD 2022

Download the full paper at this link

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March 8th 2022

Sound & Decolonisation

Lecture at SAAC for RMIT Melbourne

UK-based artist Jamie Perera makes sonic works that explore radical deconstruction, re-imagining and reclamation, whilst challenging the conventions between music, sound and data.In this audiovisual presentation titled ‘Sound and Decolonisation’, Jamie will discuss his journey through the Anthropocene, and how data led him to a path of awareness, deconstruction and hope within our shared crises. This talk will investigate ecological and systemic grief, awareness and agency, and sound as a portal for decolonisation of the self.

Recorded by David Chesworth

Curated by Joel Stern, David Chesworth and Philip Samartzis

Thanks to Anthony Magen and Alice Eldridge

Jamie Perera · Jamie Perera Talk To SAAC RMIT Melbourne March 8 2022

November 8th 2021

"Listening to Documentary Media" book (Palgrave Macmillan)

Interview with Kim Munro

How would you describe your practice and what underpins it?

Sound is not normally the first thing that one considers when considering documentary media, and I’ve arrived at sonification as a form of documentary almost accidentally through my practice. Working with sound doesn't have the limitations of what you can only see in front of you. You can hear unseen objects in the distance, reverberations of objects through other objects... things are documented, but in a very different way. When you get past the hard line of visual interpretation, sound has a massive potentiality for both the documentarian and the listener. The auditory domain allows for that space within, as a meeting point between object, body and mind. This is especially because we react to sound in a more emotional, less interpretative way as it's part of our limbic, or our primitive system for survival. If we're talking about interpreting sound and auditory data, there's a lot of room for concepts to combine in a way that precedes thought, and perhaps gives us pathways back into our non-conditioned nature.

My practice has gone from just making music to using sound to deconstruct objects in ways that create provoking experiences for listeners. Brief description of sonification. When using sound to represent objects, there will always be an issue to be explored in the object itself. Hopefully, the way I use sound provokes a different kind of understanding in that issue that reveals itself in the ears of the beholder. I feel like I've found a form that allows me to tie together two things that are very important to me. The first is music (or accessible sound), and the second is a way to deconstruct and re-present social issues, including structural problems that are complex, systemic and difficult to express. I've always questioned these structural problems but I didn’t feel I could provide an adequate response to that with just music. The work I make is a way to bring my voice to the conversation and allow me to have agency where I wouldn't otherwise. With sonification I can make a critique of our world leaders, or represent marginalised communities, or shine a light on the rise of protests in the last decade, and I can do it in a way that is direct and supported by data. More recently, it's allowed me to put myself in my work, becoming aware of my own conditioning within a colonised, capitalist system. Reflecting on recent events during the first wave of the pandemic, looking at Black Lives Matter and having revelations about being a person of colour growing up in the UK has been really illuminating.

For me, using sound to represent data from complex issues - or what Timothy Morton calls “hyperobjects" - is a way of unpicking the complexity. And through this, it gives me time to really feel each note and also unpick my conditioned self, so I guess I'm directly benefiting from the act of making audio as documentary in the same way that a filmmaker changes when they expose themselves to what they're filming. Currently, we’re in a crisis of response to these huge objects that are now dominating our lives, and if it’s changing me, then hopefully listening will help others find ways towards meaning and response.

In 2020, Perera made three projects about the pandemic, collectively called the Coronavirus Sonifications. During the Electric Dreams Festival 2020, the work was performed as a durational piece as both an acknowledgement of the effect on each individual, as well as a way to commemorate the loss of lives. The works include over 20 hours of interview material with those most affected as well as a soundscape composed of ambient field recordings and the sonificiation of every death, represented by a short relevant sound. The audio work is edited to scale, meaning that each 30 seconds represents a day starting from the 5th of March when the first death in the UK was recorded. With this, Perera’s work encapsulates both the individual and the collective, as well as the emotive and the factual.

In your work there are ideas of the individual and the collective. Can you tell me about the Coronavirus works?

At the beginning, it was very individual, emerging from my anger at the response of the UK Government. This feeling changed through making the series of works to more of an understanding of how adaptable people are, how resilient the human spirit is, and how much care there is in the community. Eventually, it became more of a platform for people to speak about their experiences in the face of this ever-increasing tally of Coronavirus deaths over time.

To be completely honest, my projects all start with my own agenda. I'm always looking for answers and also for subject matter that will allow me to explore issues in the process of making. And then if they're social issues, it can't help be part of the collective as well. The overall sonification or documentation in audio is something that then people can listen to and have their own takeaways from. In that sense, it also becomes a collective action and a collective way of feeling the emotion that's inherent in the sounds as well as a place to ruminate, meditate, and receive that information in a different way, which is quite a lovely thing.

I’m interested in your intentions to dissolve binaries and boundaries between people in your work. How might sound be able to do that?

We react to sound physiologically, before the mind processes and creates thoughts that may add to the things that divide us. I think the phenomenology of sound is something that can help us dissolve the boundaries between ourselves and nature (which includes other people). I try to stay aware of the need to radically deconstruct these boundaries, and I try to show this in my work. For example, I did some interviews with various people that might be considered to be on the spectrum of conspiracy theories. This included one of the most prominent conspiracy theorists in the UK with regards to 5G, as well as some of my friends that were vaccine hesitant. I used some techniques to reduce their voices to non-words and then had them just float around in this space where everything was mixing together, as if they were underwater. In this work, I wanted to make a space where highly divisive opinions could be reduced to unarticulated sounds, to see if they would still have an effect. Without interpretation there was no potential for disagreement. I wanted to use sound to create a refuge for myself, and show that radical deconstruction of language can create a peaceful space no matter how inflammatory the subject matter.

Can you talk a bit about how you think sound can function in a way that is different from the visual?

There’s an upcoming work I'm going to do which will involve interviewing people that are visually impaired. My own eyesight is quite impaired and I discovered that there's over two billion people in the world that are visually impaired in different ways. I'm interested in how the world is interpreted when sight isn't the predominant sense, and how that shift away from sight can actually help us understand the world better. There are some theories about how we've evolved compared to cetaceans like whales or dolphins. For example, whales have evolved without sight being the dominant sense and they don't visually navigate the oceans. They actually spend a lot of time in darkness so sound is the way that they both interpret and navigate, and it's an incredibly rich world. Whale song has been described as ludicrously complex, and it’s also suggested that cetaceans can project shapes of sounds through the water making communication a bodily felt experience within their species, something that we have no comparison to as sapiens.

There's a story of a whale who became trapped in a cove near a Scandinavian village. The villagers thought the most helpful thing to do would be to kill it, and so they all got their guns and shot at it for an afternoon, before the story’s narrator managed to get them to stop and sent them away. The narrator then took a boat out into the cove to see if it was okay. The whale then reared up in the water, and instead of smashing down on one of its would-be tormentors, it started singing, in a clear effort to communicate. The story marvels at the communication, however, my takeaway was more astonishment that this whale did not attack, did not retaliate, even though it could have easily crushed our narrator. Something in the way that whales have evolved, including sound as their primary sense with which to interact with the world, has led them to a nature that doesn’t dominate, that doesn’t see everything as an enemy to be crushed. I feel that somewhere in our human evolution it was ingrained that everything was to be feared and this has put us on a course where we’ve moved further away from nature, including an adversarial position to other beings. Drawing parallels with the sound world, I feel like there's an element of that whale-nature potentially in us. We have the same early brain as a whale, it’s just that the other parts of the brain like the neocortex then developed in a way that differentiated us, that got us to this toxic relationship we are in now with people and planet.

I feel like a world of interpreted sound is a much more benevolent world. An invitation to listen means so much more when framed in the context of evolution. It is to experience the ecology of the world and what it is saying to us, I feel it's something very precious. Further, when you combine the material of sound with the subject matter and data of real-world events, you’re able to make documentary work that has a primary engagement with the nature of those issues.

July 15th 2021

Wildfire | Wild Alchemy Lab Text

Accompanying text to Wildfire: A Sonification of Civilian Protests by World Region from 2009 - 2019

Viewing climate change on a 12,000- year timescale, it is clear we are in an unprecedented acceleration of Earth system and socioeconomic trends, sending life on our planet hurtling towards uncertainty and suffering, if not extinction. This 12,000-year period — The Holocene — was a gift of rare geological stability that allowed us to create all of our written history, technological revolutions and major civilisations. The gift was then squandered with the industrial exploitation of ourselves and nature, destabilising our ecology to such an extent that in May 2019, the International Commission on Stratigraphy voted in favour of recognising the Anthropocene — described as a time in which many geologically significant conditions and processes have been profoundly altered by human activities — as a formal chrono-stratigraphic unit. We are in the Anthropocene. Our state of collective ecological grief is firmly set at denial. We don’t know how to stop. We don’t know how to move from a parasitic to a symbiotic relationship with ourselves, let alone the planet.

However, in these ominous datasets there is one trend that dares to be hopeful. The world has experienced more political uprisings in the past decade than ever before, with the size and frequency of recent protests far exceeding numbers even from past protest eras such as the late 1960s, late 1980s, and early 1990s. This in Holocene terms — i.e. the amount of protests that have happened in the last 12,000 years — is the equivalent of a wild explosion, ignited by recent transgressions, and fuelled by grass-roots campaigning against decades, sometimes centuries, of inequity.

It is equally significant that through global increases in communications technology, education and perceptions of inequality, protests appear to be challenging our moral bedrock. In the last decade alone, The Arab Spring, Occupy, #Metoo, Black Lives Matter, worldwide climate protests, and movements around the world for gender equality and LGBTQ+ rights have redefined the narrative on what equality and social justice is, even as some movements struggle to achieve sustained change. Phrases such as “the one percent”, “metoo” and “black lives matter’’ are now in our global vocabulary. Localised phrases such as Hong Kong’s “ 香港人, 加油” (“Hongkongers, add oil”), or in Egypt’s Tahrir Square, الخبز والحرية والعدالة الاجتماعية (Arabic for “bread, freedom social justice”), remind us that real victory is about how you set yourself against power, even if you are losing. Things that appeared unspoken and perhaps beyond challenge are now being questioned with greater frequency, leading to an awareness of morality that is not handed down from post-colonial power cultures, nor dictated to by shared myths that are a legacy of the same. This revelation finds itself increasingly on the streets when there is no other recourse, seeking deconstruction, rewilding and transformation, but also when the fire of protest has passed, it finds itself in self-reflection and new shoots of understanding.

The explosion of protest over the last decade is a kind of wildfire; a destructive force, but also a natural catalyst for ecological balance. Fossilised charcoal shows evidence of wildfires soon after terrestrial plants appeared 420 million years ago, occurring throughout the history of terrestrial life, suggesting pronounced evolutionary effects on most ecosystems’ flora and fauna. Nature has evolved with fire to clear out dead organic material that would otherwise choke the growth of smaller or new plants, prevent organisms in soil from reaching nutrients or block animals from the soil. Some organisms require fire to reproduce; serotinous pine cones from certain pine tree species are covered in resin, which must be melted by fire for the seeds to be released. The endangered Karner blue butterfly caterpillar requires fire to support an ecosystem balance in which it’s sole food source can thrive. Wildfire is the destruction of matter for ecological renewal. Drawing parallels, rewilding the self renews the human as an entity that claims its fundamental rights.

The action can be instantaneous, a spark igniting tinder in a forest, a breaking point in an individual, or a 10-year flashpoint in the Anthropocene. “The radical act is utmost happiness,” says Arundhati Roy, on the revelations of women who found their power protesting the Narmada Valley Dam, and within this power even made public choices on being gay in India, a country where many women have very limited power to exercise their own will. What is this moment of transformation that no-one, not even the most authoritarian regime, can prevent us from experiencing? What does it feel like?

Sonifying an object to feel its associated information and issues is a practice that can break down aspects of bigger, seemingly impenetrable hyper-objects. If we move between scales, the slow explosion of protest over the last decade can also relate to the instant transformation of the self when insisting on our rights against power. I am aware of my own agency; in expressing this data with sounds of fire, tone and global root causes of unrest, I choose to question my foundations, to deconstruct, to rewild, to create sanctuary in recalibration. There are many parts of my conditioning that no longer serve me because they are a manifestation of a parasitic old world. A decrepit, insane construct that pits human against human, and human against planet. I reject this as dead decaying material that must burn to furnish new growth.

To reveal universal human commonalities we must reject, deconstruct, burn all structures of human division, possibly to the point of fundamental ambivalence, and find meaning in what remains. Early 20th century Dada rejected war and capitalism for peace and egalitarianism. Black Dada Nihilismus and Black Dada reject white dominant structures to talk about the future while talking about the past. In this form of 'Green Dada' or 'Eco-Dada', we reject structures of division for our collective ecology. What can we achieve by reducing our system to its ecological unframed nuances, and what will grow from the ashes?—JP

March 11th 2021

Guest Lecture on Ecology Futures MA

Master Institute of Visual Cultures

With Suzanne Dhaliwal

Summary of talk 11th March 2021

I’m going to talk about my practice, how it made me aware that I was responding to ecological and therefore systemic grief, and how my identity was firstly challenged and then incorporated into my work.

I use sound to represent and deconstruct objects. Here’s a few examples. You’ve got some materials that I’ve provided in the GDrive folder that show you how this has been applied with regards to climate change. I’m going to very quickly play a bit of Oil Coal and Gas for 3 Cellos - a sonification of fossil fuel usage from 1800 to 2017. And now let’s look at the material that shows what the Anthropocene looks like when given the same treatment.

This practice allowed me to become aware of ecological grief. And also realising that my practice was my way to confront, express and experience the issues behind Climate Change, a practice that breaks down aspects of a seemingly impenetrable hyper-object. For the purposes of delving into ecological grief I’m going to put forward the notion of climate change as a hyperobject. Even though I might disagree with some of these properties with interrogation, it’s good because it gives us a framework from which we can start to interrogate ecological grief.

What is a hyper object? It’s an object so big and complex that it is really difficult to perceive. They mess with time. They act non-locally. You can’t escape them, no matter what you do, and yet they are sometimes invisible to us. Lastly they are made of many other objects. A more in depth definition is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Morton

Therefore, with climate change, what is revealed is that whether we see it or not we are all in the stages of ecological grief with inexorable links to consistent, inherited, systemic trauma. We are constantly moving between denial, some are in depression, anger, pain, guilt... also turning points, reconstruction and hope. Climate change is accelerating out of control, so we’re trying our hardest to respond in muddy water that is constantly getting muddier. It’s not like the death of a loved one, because that’s linear, there will be an end point to the grieving, it’s all-encompassing and ever present.

But now the positive. As soon as one becomes truly aware of their own ecological grief it is a catalyst for constructed hope, in a continual process of deconstruction and rewilding of the self. What we’re seeing in the world around us with climate change, all this paralysis, all this non-action, is an unconscious conditioned response. Where we need to be is in the place where we are aware we are insignificant in the face of this behemoth, but at the same time our responses mean that we do have agency within it. Every creative response that you make when you accept that ecological grief is consistently affecting you, is an act of resilience, and an act of learning. Most of all it’s an act of self discovery, of critical reflection.

My recent story through sonifying the Anthropocene:

seeing how our being here was and still is blind luck
listening to the creation of myths - ownership, money, hoarding, extraction, moving towards a colonial explosion that we still are not free of
understanding that to re-sync with the planet and human altruism; we need to flatten the curve of our colonial legacy, and its perpetuated myths
putting myself into my own practice. What this revealed to me. What I’m doing about it.

This last part makes the case that within our responses to ecological grief, it is important to not be separate to our work, but to seek how we actively connect to it. Some of the revelations I’ve had with ecological grief are below.

My story is that I've been conditioned. I've grown up in a British society that erased any acknowledgement of it's colonial actions and legacy, allowed institutional racism to exist, and as a result I conditioned myself to be and think white, erasing the Sri Lankan and Chinese culture that I came from because I wanted to fit in. I was raised catholic, believing ideas of heaven and hell, fearing god, bowing to a higher power. I am forced to compete in a system that pits me against my fellow human, pits me against the planet, and only allows altruism in the cracks when it is satiated. All of this is part of my ecological grief. And it’s important to say as well that I’m also aware of massive privileges that this has provided me. I’ve had a great education, capitalism means that the house that my parents bought increased in value, being in London economically served me better than being in many other countries. It’s important to not get into denial about our privileges, because that would put us right back on the denial stage of ecological grief, trapped within our hidden biases. This is self care and allyship in the Anthropocene.

It is with any revelation that allows me to recalibrate my societal awareness, that I find hope in living, and similarly makes me question my foundations further. So I wish to deconstruct, to rewild, to create sanctuary with my work. I sort of call this a form of Eco-dada, the idea of deconstruction for our collective ecology.

This is obviously something that I’m so interested in articulating, and I’m really interested in your viewpoints especially in a place like The Netherlands which, Like the UK has its own legacy to deal with. And I’m so interested in what this means for practice within the ongoing discussion of ecological grief. There is tonnes more to talk about in practical terms, but I hope you don’t mind that I concentrated on exploring ecological grief itself rather than just my work as it felt more important to me to do so.

December 5th 2020

Commonalities. Cern Collide Residency Award.

I didn't get this. BUT it was quite a good opportunity to really put myself into my own practice, and it is a fully realised work in my mind, following the theme of Eco-Dada, to be created at some point in the future. There's also an audio sketch at the bottom that I created for Alistair Alexander's "Anatomy of a Conspiracy" workshop in mid December 2020.

Commonalities

The LHC detectors capture the fundamental constituents of matter - an act that reveals the complexity of particles otherwise transient and invisible in nature. Drawing parallels, I aim to discuss and project the notion of fundamental and transient commonalities within structures of human division.

Objective truth seems to be up for debate, in times where it is needed most. In increasing numbers, people are churning through factually limited information from often unchecked sources and processing new narratives, with a desire for understanding, control, certainty and security. Our drive for a state where everything is self consistent, including a drive to make our beliefs cohere with others, seems to be more important than sensibleness or reasoning. The resulting doubt of science and experts is a part of a structural hijack of our collective psyche.

The creation of fictions that placate fear are nothing new, but impending hyperobjects like pandemics, climate change, and inequality have fuelled interest in a wide spectrum of conspiracy theories. Creation of collective narratives in global periods of high stress and trauma, without answers, seem to reflect a collective uncertainty about our future. So how do we not become paralysed? How do we understand, and navigate through harm to hope and reconstruction? What’s the process of getting to a place where we can unify?

“Commonalities” puts forward a challenge: to reveal universal human commonalities we must reject all structures of human division, possibly to the point of fundamental ambivalence, and see if there is meaning in what remains. What can we achieve by reducing our thoughts and desires to their unframed nuances, and what does the manner in which we witness this output reveal? Early 20th century Dada, with centres in Zurich and the Cabaret Voltaire, rejected war for the sake of peace. In this form of “Ecological Dada” or “Eco-Dada”, we reject division for our collective ecology.

This presents an interesting and at times, light-hearted intention for source material. I will use sound and video derived from interviews and sound walks with CERN and Barcelona scientists, engineers and staff, recording structure but with un-structure in mind. I wish to either capture or derive material such as pauses, considerations, communication without language, and ambiguous real and inner space. Interviews and locations may follow this theme, and therefore be subject to the unexpected, the unplanned and even the illogical, and subject matter may veer from the serious to the ludicrous.

In processing this material I will focus on the interplay between ambivalence, language and the movement of physical matter; isolating and amplifying these moments to create a reductionist idea of our fundamental commonalities. As science provides access to events completely outside the realm of usual human experience; I aim to describe the impact of such phenomena at a social level. Through further research onsite, treatment of audio and video referencing the phenomenology of detected objects in the various CERN colliders, and if a suitable space is available, be represented with one high quality single throw projector and a 5 - 9 speaker array. Algorithmic application of traits will be employed, but emphasis on accuracy will be subject to curatorial and scientific support from CERN and Barcelona scientists. All processes of object representation will be considered and documented rigorously.

The resulting work will be an immersive deconstructed sound and vision piece that will embody our commonalities and provide a space for meditation on division: what is division? What draws us to it, or makes us conform to it? How does rejecting into its structures change us and what kind of society might scrutinise and reject division in such a fundamental way? Someone walking into the space will experience the paradox of a constructed space free from structures of division, however this experience seeks not to be binary, but rather a discourse on ecology, anarchy and the nature of social structures in perpetual transience.

October 20th, 2020

The birth of eco-Dada - a place holder. With Hanna Haaslahti and Lucy Wood.

After sonifying 12,000 years of climate data, it is clear that most of it accelerates to our impending doom as a species. However there was one trend that gave me a thread of hope: we seem to be challenging our moral bedrock at an increasing rate; things that appeared unspoken and perhaps beyond challenge are now being questioned with greater frequency. Occupy, Metoo, BLM, Climate Change are all examples of this. Could this be something to be explored? Why is this data important? Why is this happening now?

Rebecca Solnit writes on "How a decade of disillusion gave way to people power"... "What lay underneath all this disillusionment was a readiness to question foundations that had been portrayed as fixed, inevitable, unquestionable – whether that foundation was gender norms, heterosexuality, patriarchy, white supremacy, the age of fossil fuels or capitalism." Perhaps I want to show how this is happening in sound. And perhaps I want to take the momentum and project this into the future.

Recently I was introduced to the idea of Protopia - 'a state that is better than today than yesterday, although it might be only a little better' - as an alternative to Utopia and Dystopia. I was suddenly triggered by the legacy behind these words. Less so with 'Protopia', but suddenly I wanted to destroy, to deconstruct, to rally against my conditioning with regards to utopia and dystopia, heaven or hell etc. These ideas suddenly no longer served me, and I felt like they no longer served us as a species because they are a manifestation of control, power, part of a colonial legacy and its perpetuated myths.

I've been conditioned. I've grown up in a British society that erased any acknowledgement of it's colonial actions and legacy, allowed institutional racism to exist, and as a result I conditioned myself to be and think white, erasing the Sri Lankan and Chinese culture that I came from because I wanted to fit in. I was raised catholic, believing ideas of heaven and hell, fearing god, bowing to a higher power. I am forced to compete in a system that pits me against my fellow human, pits me against the planet, and only allows altruism in the cracks when it is satiated.

What is this process of deconstruction for the sake of our collective ecology? The 1st World War gave birth to DADA - Black Arts Movement in the 60´s gave birth to Black Dada Nihilismus - Who invents Green Dada for Today? I guess us?

WE DECLARE THAT GREEN DADA - ECOLOGICAL DADA - ECO DADA - HAS BEEN CREATED TODAY! A way for me to frame this new art direction.

Dada as an art movement that opens up new abundant space for thought, when rationality and sense making has come to the dead end. To reveal universal human commonalities we must reject all structures of human division, possibly to the point of fundamental ambivalence, and see if there is meaning in what remains. What can we achieve by reducing our thoughts and desires to their unframed nuances, and what does the manner in which we witness this output reveal? Early 20th century Dada rejected war and capitalism for peace and egalitarianism. Black Dada Nihilismus and Black Dada rejects white dominant structures to talk about the future while talking about the past. In this form of “Green Dada” or “Eco-Dada”, we reject structures of division for our collective ecology.

February 26th, 2020

Spoken introduction to "Oil, Coal and Gas for Three Cellos" at the We Make Tomorrow Summit

So. I made a thing. An excerpt from the wider Climate Symphony project. "Oil Coal and Gas for Three Cellos" was performed at the We Make Tomorrow Summit by Julie's Bicycle and Serpentine Galleries at the Royal Geographical Society. Shared credit for this particular piece should go to Dan Keen - score creator and orchestrator, Adrian Lewis - sonification programming, performers James Douglas, Roxanna Albayati and Alice Eldridge, and of course CS co-directors Leah Borromeo and Katharine Round, with thanks to Holly Shuttleworth and the Serpentine General Ecology Project team for cultivating and commissioning.

If nothing else, the inclusion in such an event encouraged me to again ask, "why am I sonifying climate data?" It had been a while since I'd asked that question. Katharine and Leah were perfectly capable of articulating their own reasons, but there was something on the edge of perception that I knew I wasn't articulating properly, and so I felt I had to dig within the practice somewhat, to piece together recent thoughts with a few conversations with people that knew better having worked at the forefront of climate activism. Here's the intro.

"Sonifying an object to feel the issues and information within it is a small act in provoking conversation. For us it’s now a way to confront, express and experience the issues behind Climate Change, a practice that breaks down aspects of a seemingly impenetrable hyper-object.

What is revealed is that whether we see it or not we are all somewhere in the early stages of ecological grief with inexorable links to consistent, inherited, systemic trauma. Most of us are in denial, some are in depression, anger, pain, guilt… and so on. We’re also trying our hardest to navigate change through muddy water while it keeps getting muddier, so it’s difficult to know which way to turn. So how do we not become paralysed? How do we get through to hope and reconstruction? What’s the process of getting to a place where we can respond?

So I’d like to share our process with you.. as I said we sonify objects and data within climate change, and then we’ve learned to listen with the goal of experiencing the emotion in the sound whilst contemplating the issues behind the data, so I’d like to encourage you to do that now - I’m very proud to introduce our specially commissioned piece as part of the Serpentine Galleries General Ecology Project - “Oil, Coal and Gas for 3 cellos”. With James Douglas playing the voice of Oil, Roxanna Albayati (in the middle) playing the voice of Coal, and Alice Eldridge playing the voice of Gas. And they are playing a data range of extraction over a period of 820 years from 1800 to near the present day. Thanks for listening".

Further thoughts:

is there a way to show these invisible systemic / climate affects on us as a species? If you could see / hear / feel it, what would it be like?
Is it cumulative? What is the ebb and flow of climate grief and systemic trauma. What is the ebb? What is the flow?
How is ecological grief different from 'normal' grief? Within this I propose that we are grieving trapped within a hyperobject, thus it is:
Consistently acting upon us in a variety of ways. What's more, we can't escape it. We are constantly on the spectrum of ecological grief.
What to actually grieve for is difficult to pin down as climate change exists within our entire system, invisible to us for large periods of time because of its vastness, and its non-local nature.
Where does anger fit in? Where does justice fit in? Where do climate, systemic & racial reparations fit in? How can we feel this?
What is happening to the human? Are we going through this impossible grieving process and consistently being reborn, or are we constantly stuck in shock, disbelief, denial, and anger because it's just too much for us? What is the way forward? Is it compassion or division?

June 15th, 2018

"Same same but different"

Musings on shared realities while working with Anil Seth, Katharine Round and Guerrilla Science on "The Appointment" and "Escape to Reality"

It’s 11:13am on Sunday 15th July 2018. I’m currently sitting in a hotel in Cairo high above Tahrir Square, procrastinating. There’s been constant beeping of all kinds of vehicles wafting up from the streets since about six this morning. These are very different beeps to London beeps. I’m thinking that most of those horns are communicating much more than just “get out of my way”. There’s long beeps, short rhythmic beeps, percussive woodpecker like flurries. I’m hearing “hey I’m behind you”, “coming through”, even “hello! I can’t stop right now but I’ll catch up with you later”. I’m in a slightly liminal state that accompanies my state of inaction, where the sound has been intrusive, but over time has become stochastic as well as musical, and a resulting sleepy belief that I can discern the language of car horns around Tahrir Square and therefore gain insight into the people of Egypt. I’ve been in Cairo a week, and this notion feels like western muppetry of the highest order. However it’s true that throughout this trip there’ve been moments where I’ve been taking in much more detail, attempting to consider the stories behind people I meet, as well as having the usual reactions from people at face value. Like the brothers who gave me a lift and then hung out with me at their home when I couldn’t find public transport from the airport, and who then argued aggressively about feminism. Like a taxi driver being insulted by my insistence that I wear my seatbelt, and finally also wearing his own in some kind of protest (mine left an orange dust stripe on my teeshirt that told me a lot about seatbelts in Cairo), the work colleague I met for the first time on this trip who was a body builder from Iraq, with what turned out to be a fear of horses. This goes the same for objects, groups of people, and now car horns. And it’s all the fault of Guerrilla Science and Anil “Mr. I’m going to blow your mind” Seth. I’ll explain. And by the way, I’m not ungrateful :)

Before my trip to Egypt (wholly unrelated btw, I was training our afore-mentioned body builder to assess sound in spaces), I had been working with Guerrilla Science exploring the idea of a “Sonic Tour of Consciousness”. My take on this theme was an idea where you could experience what it was to be in someone else’s head, a sort of “Being John Malkovich” scenario, to show that everyone has a different experience of reality dependent on past conditioning and present variables. Maybe a scenario where the environment that you physically stepped into would somehow infer who you were, and what your reality was like. For example, a simple walk to the shops would involve slowness, and fear of people, if you were in the head of a pensioner that had been mugged in the past... or the same walk would involve staring at the sky and marvelling at tree branches if you were in the head of someone tripping on LSD. On discussion with Anil, it seemed that this was viable in theory, however in practice (and with a lot of shaping by GS) it became clear that the best way to do this was to create a set of films that somehow showed that a shared reality could be different depending on who you were. The same film should somehow have different treatments to place the viewer in different realities. Simple right?

Cue the entrance of filmmaker and long-term collaborator Katharine Round, creator of documentary “The Divide”, a fantastic exploration of the detrimental effects of wealth inequality. Katharine had long been thinking along similar ideas for a film and so jumped on the project with an enthusiasm I can only describe as voracious. Our test film series “The Appointment” used exactly the same film with different visual and sonic treatments to try and confer two different realities on the viewer. The first reality was of an older person, possibly suffering from dementia, being gently told by a health professional that they were going to be moved to an assisted living environment. The second was the reality of a naughty child at school being told off by a teacher. Although the film and words spoken by the main character were the same, we recorded different versions of the speech and used different post effects to change how this character was perceived, and therefore create different questions about the “I” of the viewer. When testing in Open Senses event, although two different realities were definitely created, perhaps it did this a bit too viscerally, with some viewers having strong emotional responses based on their own experiences. It’s not nice to be talked down to, or patronised, which our films did. So we became more dreamlike as opposed to nightmare-like. Our second film series “Escape to Reality” was a little smoother, and seems to have been a success at its inauguration at FutureFest 2018. Hopefully everyone reading this will have an opportunity to see the films in a few different places and comment for themselves.

When we were presenting at FutureFest, a question to one of the neuroscientists on our team was “why are you doing this?”. Good question. For me, I would have initially said “because I want to mess with peoples’ minds”. Now I think: Before this project, I had a vague sense that people have different perspectives, but now I have a more comprehensive understanding that everyone is creating and experiencing their/our reality differently. This is when you are sitting in a coffee shop looking around at people. This is when you are wondering why Dave in accounting is being so tetchy this week. This is when you are trying to reason with your parents that you shouldn’t believe everything you read in the papers. This is when you are arguing with your partner over well, anything(!) This is even when your cat keeps leading you to the sitting room only to just to look mawkishly at you from under the coffee table.

Understanding that our shared reality is different preaches tolerance and empathy for the people around us, it leads us to look behind the emotion in a social interaction instead of just reacting to it with our immediate interpretation of reality.

It helps me to seek connection with the reality of people in Egypt in all encounters on my trip. And somehow it helps me to understand that the car horns I’m still hearing outside the window are not just one message, they are many. A friend in helping me write this, observed that possibly the car horns also point beyond the idea of individual differences in perception, towards a shared signalling, shared/collective cultural experience that doesn’t always rest in one person. What a wonderful notion, important to consider in the selfish post-colonial structures we find ourselves living in. All this, at the very least, makes life much more interesting.

PS: I have since learned that car horns in Egypt DO represent words and phrases; everything from "Open your eyes" to "I love you" and many insulting phrases in between. More on this here.

February 2017

"Narrative of Simple Forms". Painting in sound through time and space, is it still a painting?

I was in a symposium event called "Out Of Control" at the Wellcome Trust. I wasn't too sure how I ended up there, but have spent some time digging through emails and now realise I was actually on a date. That's nice, a day long romantic excursion on how much control we exercise over our thoughts and actions, and the limits of self-control and individual agency.

In one of the talks I had one of those "Eureka!" moments. I could suddenly imagine what painting in sound would be like. And then the consideration of such a thing led to some questions about perception, recognition and emotional content when creating forms in sound. In this case it turned out to be nothing more complicated than a few basic shapes, but it was thought provoking exercise nonetheless.

The talk was by an artist called Duncan Marcus, and among other things he was talking about writer Henri Michaux calling painting a “localised death”: a putting to sleep of one part of the mind, which I get, sort of, after all there are many other senses that get put into the background, like er, sound, when concentrating on what's in front of the eyes (Note: This is NOT what Michaux is talking about). And accordingly there was a sudden trigger when he mentioned the journey of the paintbrush through time. Instantly I saw the brushstrokes being made through the air landing on the canvas and thought, I wonder what that would that sound like, and then got very excited.

I wondered if I could recreate the story of the painting, but with sounds. And I remember I wanted to try and recreate a Van Gough - so much texture to play with! And then way after that there was the broad questions of, well, is this a painting? What is this?

The dictionary definition of painting "is the practice of applying paint, pigment, colour or other medium to a solid surface (called the "matrix" or "support")."

So I propose that our "other medium" is sound, and our solid surface is the eardrum. It's viable. Let's explore further.

When an artist has completed a painting, the paper displays an end point on a two dimensional surface. Viewers experience the entirety of the strokes, and see and feel the work's completion as a given without ever experiencing its journey onto the paper.
Sound, due to its temporal nature, seems to want to tell the story of the strokes as they happen.
What does this journey look like as a narrative? Does it have expression of its own? In sound it does.
What are the elements that can bring this expression to life, and what feelings can / should they evoke?
When painting with sound, not only do the brush strokes convey emotion, not only can the story of the painting be a more temporal process*, but the canvas itself is also responsive, due to the relationship between the eardrum and the brain. What is that like?

*temporal in this interpretation; there could be another where we work with the finished painting's brush stokes lifting off the canvas in unison, a single chord)

I set out to create a sound work that would bring the narrative of a painting's journey onto the canvas, while interrogating these questions. And as almost a proof of concept (and because it was less complicated), I chose the narrative of the three most basic shapes we know - a triangle, a square and a circle, and so Narrative of Simple Forms had its name.

The proposed installation was to have two rooms separated by a screen:

Note that there is a choice here. One can hear the painting and choose to leave without seeing the visual of what the sound is representing, or one can go through and see what they hear. More questions here - we know that there is a form being drawn, but is it enough to just hear it? The choice to exit without going into Room Two is affirmation that this is enough - possibly even a rebellion against knowing, however Room Two is the temptation towards external confirmation, to succumb to our longing for order (authority even?) - to confirm with our eyes instead of being happy with the form in a more fluid state - or something like that. I'm going to present Room Two as a kind of Pandora's box - "A present which seems valuable but which in reality is a curse". To open it is to enter, and with the confirmation of our eyes we lose the fluidity of the dream and all the possibilities within it.

There were a few curveballs to consider:

In order to create something that was a consistent sound, everything loops. It means that my painting never finishes. It's always being made, moving from one simple form to another. What does that say about the painting that's being created? Painting is taking place, but there is no final image.
The sound element carries with it an emotional conference of its own. This means the act of creation is me proposing interpretations of narrative, so I'll propose a few. Probably at its most basic:
saw wave | Triangle
square wave | Square
sine wave | Circle
x axis | panning
y axis pitch

In summation this is the blurb for the piece (to be refined as I get better at writing):

Narrative of Simple Forms challenges and deconstructs the idea of a painting by transforming it and its processes into journeys in sound. There is no conventional mark-maker, no discernible canvas, and no final image, but painting is taking place. The work provides a meditation on the missing narrative of paintings, making this narrative audible, and questioning the interpretation of the narrative as well as the response from a "dynamic canvas" in the mind of the listener. Sound is the medium of expression, linked intrinsically to the idea of painting on a 2D surface, but now also exploring form, time and emotion as added dimensions.

The space provides a discourse on the idea of knowing. Sound is heard on two sides of a partition. One with a blank canvas, the other with a visual representation of the sound projected on a screen. Listeners have the opportunity to exit without seeing what they have heard, therefore affirming that the 'painting' is sufficient in this form and with this narrative, and possibly a rebellion against conventional 'knowing'. The side of the room with the visualisation is presented as a Pandora's box - "A present which seems valuable but which in reality is a curse". To enter the room is to open the box, and with the confirmation of our eyes we lose the fluidity of the dream and all the possibilities within it; to not enter is to never be able to confirm the form that has been created in one's mind, but to be satisfied with a non-tangible, ever moving dream of the form. In this way we observe parallels between knowing and subjugation, and unknowing and freedom.

Here's the sound and visual below. Use headphones and try closing your eyes first. And if you are happy with what you hear there is no need to look. Just close the page.

August 2017

Notes on Sonification

Why sonify anything?

Well, it’s multifaceted, but generally sight is a very interpreted sense - it goes straight to the visual cortex, the frontal lobes of the brain. Hearing and smell are much more to the limbic part of the brain - they affect us very deeply because they are very primitive systems for survival, there’s more non-conscious element in those senses. So it is less interpreted and has a stronger effect on the emotions. And sometimes creating a informational forum where emotion is more salient can be fun or important in putting a point across.

Within this sound affects us in 4 main ways:

- physiologically - bodies

- psychologically - feelings

- cognitively - thinking

- behaviourally - actions

(from work with The Sound Agency UK)

Base rules of sonification

There is an an object to be considered (points in space, data, people etc)
There is an interpretation of the object’s movement over time and space
This interpretation should be algorithmic “a rule that precisely defines an operation”.
This interpretation should make a sound

(created for Little Atoms podcast with Marcus Du Sautoy)

Issues around "good" sonification.

Presenting the SONIFICATION ISSUE SANDWICH :)

Sonification issues or "the sonification issue sandwich"

- These all affect each other, imagine the best and most balanced ingredients needed to make an awesome sandwich.

- They must all play a part for “good” sonification to happen.

Accessibility

How much do we want to engage people? Where does that end? How much do we sacrifice accuracy for accessibility? (E.g. notes on the scale vs actual frequency)

Narrative

What is the story we are telling? What is the story that is NOT being told? How important is that story? What are the objects we are representing saying?

Accuracy

How accurately does the object have to be represented to ‘count’? How much do you keep to an algorithm once it is introduced? When do you break your own rules and why?

Art

Where is the meaning for you? What makes this art? When does art supersede other aspects of sonification? When does art give way to these same aspects?

Agenda

What is the data's agenda? What is the bias of the data source? What is your agenda as creator? How can we acknowledge this?

(created for Climate Symphony Labs London / Newcastle)

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Spoken introduction to "Oil, Coal and Gas for Three Cellos" at the We Make Tomorrow Summit

February 2017

"Narrative of Simple Forms". Painting in sound through time and space, is it still a painting?