MY GARDEN WITHOUT ME by Ana Gnjatović
My garden without me is a project conceptualized and curated by Ana Gnjatović. It is a constructed archive of faked field recordings, imaginary soundscapes and following photo, video, and text-based documentation. Field recordings kept in the archive are created as products of artistic interpretation of found eco-acoustic conditions, combined with futuring techniques and interactive environmental storytelling.
Key words: imaginary archive, soundscape studies, field recordings, acoustic ecology, electronic music, environmental storytelling
Key words: imaginary archive, soundscape studies, field recordings, acoustic ecology, electronic music, environmental storytelling
MY GARDEN WITHOUT ME #4 – TREE BARK RECIPES
A collection of sound works showing befores and afters of insects inhabiting a single littleleaf linden (Tilia cordata).
Each participant receives:
- a short note containing a Latin name of an insect and some basic traits of the species;
- a single-word instruction: BEFORE or AFTER.
The sound work can be almost anything: a spoken story, a recited poem, a single or multi-movement composition, a score, a graphic or verbal instruction for performance , a drawing, a collection of sketches, a video... and is the result of imagining the daily life and culture of the insect before and after the lockdown. There are no restrictions regarding the duration or dimensions of the work, everything uploadable is fine. The BEFORE artist remains unaware of what is happening with the insect’s destiny AFTER and who is responsible for it, and vice versa.
A collection of sound works showing befores and afters of insects inhabiting a single littleleaf linden (Tilia cordata).
Each participant receives:
- a short note containing a Latin name of an insect and some basic traits of the species;
- a single-word instruction: BEFORE or AFTER.
The sound work can be almost anything: a spoken story, a recited poem, a single or multi-movement composition, a score, a graphic or verbal instruction for performance , a drawing, a collection of sketches, a video... and is the result of imagining the daily life and culture of the insect before and after the lockdown. There are no restrictions regarding the duration or dimensions of the work, everything uploadable is fine. The BEFORE artist remains unaware of what is happening with the insect’s destiny AFTER and who is responsible for it, and vice versa.
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Some thoughts while imagining the imaginary archive:
Sound is informative in quite a different way to visual stimuli. We perceive sound in time, as movement, as a momentary event, and our auditory perception is sensitive to a far higher rate of change. At the same time, the amount of sound information our brain receives and processes within a given time unit is significantly greater than the number of photograms that it works with. All this makes us distrustful towards our ears when collecting vital information about the environment. Often, our relationship toward the sound surrounding us is quite passive. Last spring, a lot of people spent most of their time locked in their apartments, and various recordings of silent cities, abandoned crossroads, empty urban spaces emerged... The humans were practicing a new version of narcissism – they were again the main actors of events, this time by being absent. The levels of noise pollution briefly dropped, and yesterday’s polluters perceived it as their own big victory. It became obvious, even more than before, how the Western concept of humanity is completely dislocated from nature. I believe that the perception of the environment and of our effect on it would be quite different if we relied more on the sound information we continually receive. The absence of anthropophonic sound is not making the space soundless, and all the biophonic (made by other living creatures) and geophonic (made by natural elements – rain, wind, earthquakes...) sounds are still present, in constant change. Sound spaces we perceive are never empty, there are only spaces which we are not yet sensitive enough to understand. |