Along a Duration of Time: Extending Human Involvement to Remote Regions of the Earth

Abstract

The author discusses extending human involvement to remote regions of the earth, initiating a method of contact with nature via philosophy and new media art.

In “After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency,” Quentin Meillassoux states, “the waves which we hear in the morning are heard against the backdrop of our not-hearing of the waves from the night before” [1]. Uninhabited environments are predominantly unwitnessed by us. In this paper I propose to increase a witnessing of otherwise “unwitnessed” phenomena in order to bring the natural environment to the foreground of our attention.

Method of Contact

Implementing technology in relation to field-based practices necessitates seeking, entering and inaugurating a target through which to enter the world. Striving to represent remote environments within cultural space-time formations, one may notice that a plethora of “digital eyes are launched above the regular view, fighting for a clear perspective, surrounding and optically hugging the target” [2].

A field recording affords an experience of a particular location, orienting human perception toward a temporal reach in space. Three years ago I had the opportunity to spend extended periods of time in the Sonian Forest. A few years later while living in New York I recorded sounds at the periphery of nature and civilization. This drew me closer to places such as Coney Island, and the natural reserve at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. In approaching recordings as field-based research, I got a chance to approach uninhabited regions as the eventful and turbulent environments that they oftentimes are. Since then, my compositions have included increasing amounts of soundscape material.

My audio-visual composition Reliving and All Falling features a fixed single-channel video perspective of the Coney Island shoreline a few days prior to Hurricane Sandy. The recorded material contains two events: a sunny day at Coney Island and the turmoil of Hurricane Sandy that followed shortly after. A component within the electroacoustic composition is a sound excerpt of wind. As wind travels, “the air gradually absorbs the high frequencies, so that only the low frequencies reach great distances” [3]. The spectrogram in Fig. 1 shows a predominance of low-frequency soundwaves in an excerpt of wind recorded during the storm. Soundwaves of phenomena such as wind can accumulate in regions of uninhabited space, reaching urban centers in a state of low-frequency accumulation as a result of having traversed long distances before entering the urban continuum.

Theoretical Framework

Contact with remote environments may be viewed according to Andrei Tarkovsky’s conceptual framework, “The Zone” [4], as contact with territories of absence. Werner Herzog notably implemented representations of uninhabited environments within audio-visual media in “Fata Morgana,” in which durational shots of the Sahara desert demarcate a sense of absence.

Representations of uninhabited environments have been implemented in a range of audio-visual installation work. A notable example is the work of Bill Viola, who demonstrates his early attraction to “the teachings of non-Western traditional cultures, which regard life as a continuum lived in its reference to nature” [5]. Viola’s installations are sculpted in space-time formations. For instance, in Room for St. John of the Cross, a video projection featuring mountain scenery establishes a sense of an uninhabited environment. In contrast, the habitation of St. John of the Cross is present as a demarcated space, evoking a sense of relation, or lack thereof, between the natural environment of the mountain and the life of St. John of the Cross.

Fig. 1.

Anastasya Koshkin, spectrogram of an audio excerpt from Reliving and All Falling, which features sounds of wind captured during Hurricane Sandy. (© Anastasya Koshkin)

Soundscape Studies

Soundscape studies is an emerging field of research that explores our relation to remote environments and strives to comprehend our changing relation to the natural environment. Bernie Krause’s sound recordings of the Lincoln Meadow, for example, reflect a trajectory of a changing environment [6]. Krause’s recordings, taken over the course of 1 year, signal the degradation of Lincoln...