Aristotle´s Jungle (product of Sounds Not Invented Here: And Understanding of Sound Art Informed by Speculative Realism)
An installation of:
Sounds Not Invented Here: an understanding of Sound Art informed by Speculative Realism
(JL Master Thesis research project)
Sound Studies Master Exhibition 2018
Aristotle´s Jungle
(plants, electric fans, electronics, light and sound)
Predict the voice of a tropical rainforest back in 200 BC.
Non-western philosophy... then.
How to detect a precarious reality in a futural sound material.
A translation device connected to a plant gives signal switching on/off 8 prepared sounding electric fans.
The plant gives a signal to a sort of lie detection electromagnetic mechanism triggering the open-source program that would normally convert the bio-resistance signals into MIDI messages in a previously determined musical scale, but instead activates -following the structure of the musical notes until these get updated with a new MIDI message- a series of electromagnetic relays operating with an "off" and an "on" position and give the hectic and seemingly untimely starting and finishing point where the electric fans are waiting for motion.
If this seems technically uncomfortable to read and follow, let´s do a bit of a regeneration of the conceptual conditions that informed the making of decision and sense through the ideation and production process of Aristotle´s Jungle: The piece should have done the exercise of approaching a conscious reference to an understanding of the Anthropocene, and try to imagine a line of thought that regain a method of knowledge-making without necessarily doing the privileged perspective from an anthropocentric field. Talking about fighting back correlationism.
More over, if the last paragraph was so entangled that, if something, it just added some more disorientation to the text, well, the solution is not to go back and try to cover the error, but use a kind of a well used jazz technique, which is playing some lines of music changing the conception of the offbeat we just were witnesses of.
There is still hope; let´s not concentrate in a traditional way of perceiving the finals. Let´s celebrate life as a long process of learning how to die, in the best ways possible. Loving wisdom and fighting against bullshit (in Harry Frankfurt´s style).
All this seems to be invented somewhere else, all these notions, perhaps not so well articulated in text, perhaps we could go back to 200 BC and try to predict how a jungle in the middle of Africa operated their knowledge production centers, if you will, or perhaps how a Mayan wisdom-practitioner entangled with its environment and the sound application of a truly horizontal coexistence with non-human persons grow very sweet and vitaminic abundance in the spectrum of what we call now health.
Consider a poem written back in 200 BC. What has changed with poetry and poets? We could not now, yet. Technological advances give us a clue on how perhaps we cannot only invent better futures, (but) also better pasts, to state that we do not know, yet.
The extinction of animals, plants and human civilizations is limited in today´s view. I would like to speculate historically that very advanced ways of understanding life, or what we call technology, inhabited the earth with materials and forms today completely covered with distortion and control of interests. Again, the hope is not in expecting to regenerate the world back to its pristine paradisiac time, while this romantic idea is never pristine, and is dark, and ferocious. The jungle is a hard space to survive. Nature does not operate in these conditions. Nature let you know how little you are. Gives you the ultimatum of finally acknowledging that human is nature. It is what we produce and what we make. So, what we call nature is just some obscure outside-ness withdrawing from our precise view, and does not really care about our human tantrum. When you think about this, you are already emancipating the idea of detachment towards the holist manifestation of universal contingency.
Julio Lugon - February 2018.
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2087