Contributors’ Notes

C D C O M P A N I O N zyxwvutsrqponmlk Contributors’Notes zyxw W S P O E S Sherre DeLys, 23 Burnie Street, Clovelly,NSW 2031, Australia. Transpoesis a digital stereo sketch of Australian mimicry and an auditive allusion to-not a recorded documentation of-zyxwvu two site-specificinstallationscreated in collaboration with Joan Grounds: Transpoes,which was exhibited as part of the Experimenta exhibition in Melbourne (1994),and Ceci n’est pas unepipe (1995),which was part of the Sound in Space events at the Museum of ContemporaryArt, Sydney.The former was installed within a small nineteenth-century glasshouse (greenhouse) within Melbourne’s Royal Botanic Gardens , and the latter in the glasshousesof the Tropical Centre of the Sydney Royal Botanic Gardens. It would be presumptuous to attempt to reproduce the simple elements of experiencing the installations-the often humid, aromatic plants and soils, the intense surroundings, the changing temperatures and lights from the sky on the skin, the sounds heard behind what is caught out of the corner of the eye. The best one can hope is that an experience can be savored-not saved-through reproduction. Along the lines of Magritte’s Ceci n’estpas unepipe (ThisIs Not a Pipe), not everything in the installationswas as it a p peared to be, assumingit appeared at all. We tried to be nonintrusive, which made it quite possible that the installations could go unnoticed. The visual saturation of the glasshouses themselveswould, in any case, subdue singular artifacts and heighten the workingsof sound. If noticed, the objectsand sounds would not impose themselvesupon the surroundings. Constructed from organic materials, the objects blended into their lush surroundings, and the sounds sculpted the air like so many leaf edges.To be nonintrusive, we employedmimicry. The sounding objects,which housed small speakers,were camouflaged among the plants much in the way that exotic blooms and fruits are, becoming visible only after some searching. In this case, the search could be aided by followinga sound to its source. The bird sounds one heard were made neither by birds nor by recordings of birds, but by recordings of people mimickingbirds. Glasshouses themselvesare yet other instances of mimicry.Busy invoking distant patches of nature, they are little hothouses of artifice perfect for our own plays of deceit: the action of one thing in another is so easy as to become second nature. This is why our work is a not-a-Magritte.Magritte’snot-apipe involves questions of representation that are themselves based upon separation, whereasour installationsare involved with a mimicry based upon integration. The audio version on this CD is not simply a representation separated from an original-mediated across a gap-but is instead caught up in a gradient of overlapping layers of mimesis within a larger project of embodiment (contrary,we hope, to the prevailingrhetoric of disembodiment).The act of mimicking another animal carries the potential of gaining a greater understanding of that animal than mere listening can produce: I other myself. I breathe in the voice of another creature, and its ecstaticbuzz resonates from deep inside . Listening to an animal mimicked by another person sets up an additional order of empathy,for here we are halfway to communication. Indeed, some visitors to the installations heard their reflections and echoed back with their own bird calls. In the same respect, while it may be possible that the voice of an animal in one’sown voice may spark hidden parts of oneself as a creature, the artifice involved will nevertheless frustrate internalizing a romance of interspecies communication . Very few people have what could be called communicative interspecies relationships;most are more at home in the play of mimesis. Since there is no sex with nature, I pucker up zyxwvu ...and whistle. When nothing returns my call, I leave and go to the garden that calls me: the glasshouse,where all play is consensuallynurtured in complete transparency. Safe within the transpoes, the transpositionsnever rest. Mediations resolve themselvesonly amidst potencies, forms of poesy transplanted; they could lead to critiquesof representation that travel back outside to communication, orjust as easily staywhere they are and pulse through the veins of plants and animals.These transpositionsmust be cultivated, of...