Condensations

Samuel Hertz

Excerpt of score from GUNSLINGER | Image by Samuel Hertz

Anthropo-sonic Sensuality

Taking up the challenge provided by the term Anthropocene demands new approaches to sensing and engaging with complex ecosystems at non-human scales. From the expansion of automated industries to the detonations of nuclear weapons and increased instances of catastrophic weather events, the Anthropocene is an epoch of new vibrations and planetary resonances precipitated by human influence.

As the capacity for understanding sounds of the Anthropocene increases, so too does the chance to further our identification with - and engender sensuality towards - this volatile Earth. Not to aestheticise anthropo-sonics, but to understand to a greater degree the trajectories and relationships that they render audible.

This volatility however, as well as the term ‘Anthropocene’ in general, does not uniquely apply to the scale of the planetary; as important as it is to explore these distortions at ’Earth Magnitude’, we can similarly understand the immensity and intensity of environmental transformation at smaller scales. Seemingly insignificant changes that elude attention or notice - not acute changes ending with a bang, but a slow fade to black.

{sensuality

: distinguished from sensibility and sensing

: the making-intimate of sense perceptions across vast spaces and scales

: between ears, organs, atmospheres, seismic motion, and chirps}

A recognition of sensuality allows us to bind - in some capacity - to scales and forces, beyond that with which we might usually interact and would not normally consider. In some sense, the development of this type of sensuality could be understood as extension, but I prefer instead to think of it as reconciliation. Which is to say, what good is an ever-increasing amount of data if there is no developed mechanism for making sense of and internalising the conditions of the data in the first place?

I consider that the sounding/listening practices developed below can be used both as a literal and conceptual medium through which to explore the complex and nuanced stratifications that require our attention for tackling serious ecological issues.

Samuel Hertz: Aero-Acoustics Workshop at Palais de Tokyo | Image by Samuel Hertz

Planetary Sound & Meeting Points

Scholars such as Gallagher, Kanngieser and Prior[1] explore the notion of an expanded ’geo-technological listening’ which they argue is necessary for initiating responses to global environmental change, planetary subjectivity (sensuality), and aesthetic and political approaches to listening. This type of listening/feeling offers a more nuanced and personal understanding of timelines and magnitudes of change - not only acclimatising us (humans) to a ‘deeper’ time, but also attempting to build geologic common ground. It is through these new magnitudes of listening, sensing, and feeling that sonic affinities towards largescale events at ‘“Earth Magnitude”’[2] might be encouraged and better understood. Or to put in another way: to discuss the marker of a geologic era from the perspective of sound

requires geologic-scaled listening strategies.

My work with infrasound - sound that is below the frequency of the “normal limit” of human hearing - articulates an aspect of sound on a planetary scale. Produced by powerful artificial and natural sources, infrasonic signals offer pressurised illustrations of large magnitude forces at work across the globe. An intriguing class of sounds, pressures, and vibrations in their own right, yet simultaneously meaningful as a spectrum through which to understand the tremblings of a changing planet, alongside our own sympathetic vibrations.

The behaviour of infrasonic signals in the atmosphere - floating between and among atmospheric layers - also functions as a metaphor for the types of energetic and material crossings exhibited by Anthropocene problematics: collapsing, condensing, creating meeting points between disparate objects at different times. “You’re hearing the past, of sound that you made; you’re continuing it, possibly, so you’re right in the present, and you’re anticipating the future, which is coming at you from the past.”[3]

Pauline Oliveros’ articulation of the swampy, sticky nature of time means that we can understand compositional space as existing in that same messy nexus created by the spatio-temporal condensing properties of anthropogenic climate change. A prompt to understand the complexity of its entangledness. My piece body split and hand remained untouched with the exception of itself offers this same approach to past/ present/future by attempting to trace the flow of infrasound among atmospheric layers, all the while maintaining that transference of forces and pressures also carry the weight of memories (place, affect, sensuality, origin……).

Scalar Sound & Meeting Points

Meanwhile, researchers from sound studies and geography such as Smith[4] and LaBelle[5] detail the function of sound not as an object but as a processual medium amplifying and articulating relationships among landscapes, atmospheres, and biomasses. Sound is not a self-referential phenomenon: the behaviour of sound illustrates and details complex interactions between different actors, sources, and forces by virtue of its ability to operate at different scales and portray connections between these problematised spheres.

Sonic profiles of environments — as well as sound production — become vectors for understanding spaces of transformation. The scaling challenges of political, ecologic, economic, and aesthetic landscapes posed by the term Anthropocene require languages and practices that can amplify their complex interactions and intersections. Therefore, dealing with scales of sound allows us to examine the multiple and overlapping strata at which sonic indicators of climate change can occur: we can easily account for the critical and large sonic events indicative of a changing earth (e.g. the sounds of glacial melts), but if we shift focus onto smaller pockets of life, we can see more nuanced and subtle changes, such as minute variations in animal mating calls due to changing habitats, or the steadily decreasing hum of insect populations.

It is, however, not simply the ability to hear at drastically different scales that is — in itself — a practice or strategy. Certainly, I play with concepts that deal with hearing at different scales individually, but this is never the end-goal. Rather, it is the ability to reconcile timescales of glacial melts and nuclear detonations on the one hand — with those of animal mating calls on the other — that provides a path forward. By placing these two scales (for example) in proximity to each other, we can then begin to tease out the interstitial relationships that tie these soundscapes together. To begin to extrapolate (in a tentacular fashion) the extensions and dimensions of each scale in particular, as well as with what other -scales and -scapes it comes into contact, affects, cancels out, or amplifies.

Two Exercises In Scale, Both Featuring Guitars

DECADENT FRUITING BODY

performed by Layton Lachman / Mara Poliak / Abby Crain (Swimming Pool where

timescales start to slip, the water keeps getting in y/our eyes

and

our collective imaginations become material and felt

Three performers converge to form a make-shift doom metal band, performing a dirge expanding outwards in time. An Infinite Reverb….

Decadent Fruiting Body | Image by Chani Bockwinkel

GUNSLINGER

performed by Wilfred Amis / Kieran Blyth where

water droplets from an ice cliff are re-synthesised into a score for two guitars

which

lasts for anywhere from 40 minutes to 500 hours

As the droplets begin to run together, a picture is slowly formed of a process that can’t be explained by any individual droplet; only by slowing listening patterns can we sense the long event unfolding before us.

GUNSLINGER | Image by Opera North

‘The collection of forces that have brought about the Anthropocene are... sticky, enmeshed, and nested issues.’

Distant History & Overwhelming Presentness

Reconciling my artistic practice within the Anthropocene means developing a material approach to time and space scalings — an attempt to understand the force of the Anthropocene marker that has suddenly collapsed ‘distant’ history into an overwhelming present-ness. Texts such as Bruno Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern make clear that “[the] horizons, the stakes, the time frames, the actors — none of these is commensurable, yet there they are, caught up in the same story”.

The collection of forces that have brought about the Anthropocene are not causes that are equally and easily quantified, but sticky, enmeshed, and nested issues. They are at once inseparable from — and out-of-scale with — each other.

This designated title of a relatively recent period of human history forces us to consider a much broader engagement of past, present, and future. Part of this practice is admittedly imaginative. And yet, as Karen Barad makes clear, imagination has material weight[6]. While the literal/technological aim of bringing the sounds of large and small worlds into closer focus remains a part of my inquiry, I believe it is equally important to amplify and detail the material properties of listening practices that trace entangled histories, timelines, and forces.

[1] Gallagher, M., Kanngieser, A., & Prior, J. 2016. ‘Listening geographies: Landscape, affect and geotechnologies’ Progress in Human Geography DOI: 0309132516652952.

[2] Kahn, D. 2013. Earth Sound Earth Signal: energies and earth magnitude in the arts. Los Angeles: University of California Press.

[3] Toop, D. 1995. Ocean of Sound: aether talk, ambient sound and imaginary worlds. London: Serpent’s Tail. 248.

[4] Smith, S. J. 2000. ‘Performing the (sound)world Environment and Planning D’ Society and Space 18. 615-637.

[5] LaBelle, B. 2010. ‘Acoustic Territories’ Sound Culture and Everyday Life. NY: Continuum.

[6] Barad, K. 2015. ‘Transmaterialities: Trans*/ Matter/Realities and Queer Political Imaginings’ GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 21.2-3. 387-422.

SAMUEL HERTZ

Samuel Hertz is a Berlin-based composer, researcher, and sound artist working at the intersection of Earth-based sound, sonic sensualities, and climate change. Often crossing genres, his previous work has taken form through composed music, multi-media electronics performances, large-scale speaker installations, IMAX and standalone films, performative installations, and more.

As the first winner of the DARE Prize for Radical Interdisciplinary (UK), Sam researches environmental and artificial infrasound alongside climate scientists, music psychologists, and paranormal investigators.

Sam’s research and works are supported and presented by Studio Tomás Saraceno (DE), Temporary Art Review (DE/US), Centre for GeoHumanities (UK), Opera North (UK), Palais de Tokyo (FR), Macerata Opera Festival (IT), and the National Science and Media Museum (UK).

Alongside artist Carmelo Pampillonio, their Librations project commences in summer 2019 working between Wave Farm and Pioneer Works (US) within an Earth-Moon-Earth signal array.