Transposition of the Ear

Katie Clarke Transposition of the Ear

My curiosity for deep listening began after personal correspondence with experimental flutist Dodó Kiss1 … she often contemplated the meaning of a perfect sound in the context of her work…questioning whether perfect sound was something imperfect…for me her response was a metaphor for how listening practices are integral to merging disciplines…one time her producer played back a recording of her fluting…many recordings of her fluting…and as the final output she chose her imperfect sound…she told me that perfectly played notes miss feeling…they are aloof and uninvolved…notes without the discomfort of the tragic comedy in which life blows its horns… without a tenderness that makes a person cry and laugh at the same time…is not music…it is just another note in the multiplicity of vibrations…the notes with the most character are the ones able to move the listener beyond the standards of expectation and sterility…the exact moment she was also playing such a note was the moment she was able to get out of her head and listen with the most intention to the musicians and instruments that played alongside her…not playing louder than the sounds of the band…not pushing notes through the space or gaps that she was presented with…though through deep listening her ears fingers and breath played revolutionary notes…together in a collective formation.

Welcome to this reflection on listening…listening to something which cannot technically be heard… transpose your ears2…take a moment to perceive your exterior…position your ears as though speakers ready to wrap words around sound and around matter…all matters and materials consenting to engage…often ears in complete awareness of their sound-ing environment become overwhelmed… remember these shared networks of sound only mean to surround and support…practice…start

with positioning ears underwater as though again listening through your mother’s womb…close your eyes if it helps…the water overflows with protective measures…ears sense which direction to listen…learning through a mothers memory…practice…move your ears into a position for echoing a dark shadow…the shadow has entered into ears before and wants to resonate in another context… contemplating itself in relation to a darkness a silence…practice…position your ears as though soil pressing sinking beneath your horizontal back…inwardly and outwardly concentrate…how does the soil affiliate to your touch…practice… position your ears inside a static sequoia seed…a serotinous being waiting for a forest fire to burn its shell from the inside out…a core and exterior pulsating in angst ready to let go.

you are lilting sonorous percussive sharp

…you might also want to grab yourself a glass of water and rest in a near to silent space…to position ears transpositionally you must tune in…forward ways of noticing…place the glass of water in front as though it is the audience your ears extend wavelengths towards…what is it in your composition of position that is significant or familiar…deeply immerse in the place that you rest…without a need to distinguish a clarity between elements…

Looking back as she gazed at the small recorder and list of questions that sat before her in a rather dull office-like room at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie ready to record an episode for the Voiceblind 162

podcast…she was drawn to an early memory of a desire for hearing the inside of a tree…my ears felt like they were actually inside the tree she said… somehow entangled inside the organism…they listened to the movements of running water…to the expanding of bark…I was bonding through tone… through intuition…through sense…in her memory… artistic researcher…lecturer…philosopher…practitioner…tree listener…Christina Della Giustina stands with all intention as her ears seem to enter inside an organism who is very static and silent… asking again and again what it was that she hears… wants to hear…and to her it felt unanswerable for some time…and it was a question that needed a framework in which she could actually investigate without having to produce artistic objects…she wanted to enter into a process that was more immaterial in nature…would she ever be able to physically hear what it was she had fantasised about…after putting microphone upon microphone against trunk after trunk her curiosity only grew… she found two engineers to help her build a sort of stethoscopic setup to amplify the inside of a tree… they listened to trees for two years…and then later she hears from this scientific institute3…the experts on trees were looking for a guest artist in their team…and so she went in a residency for one year with the initial idea that they know more about how to direct and amplify the sounds within a tree…a trees voice…her stethoscope setup often caused problems as it heard too much…the water running… every little ant walking…every swoop of wind… every bird…when a bird was landing on the tree… she repeated vividly and loudly as though hearing it at that moment…it was like…like an earthquake… yes it was like an earthquake…and these layers of sound were so entangled that they were hard to separate…so with this idea that the scientists

knew more she was thinking morphologically… what is the specific position in which she must rest her ear to hear more about the anatomy of the tree…she wanted to find answers about where the water actually runs…and then when she was working with the scientists and she found them measuring not sounds but vibration and movement and the metabolic processing of this organism… their measurements were exclusively numeric…all in very precise numbers…she entered into this sort of oscillation between matter…the tree as a material phenomenon…and then the philosophical abstraction of it into numbers…and then back again through her artistic process into something that can be sensed…she created a system for how to read these trees musically.

…hydrate your ears and take a sip from the glass of water in front…transpose inwardly…the waves from your oesophagus flurry with your pulse…the droplets submerge inside…ears passing through… sip another sip slowly…embodied memories mirroring to a pitch or tone that all species recognise… a reservoir of collective ears inside her womb… underneath her beating heart…arms wrap around legs and heads tilt forward between knees… swaddled…how was it to listen whilst inside this protective bubble…

you are rasping eerie undulate melodious

…allow any new territories for memory growth and reflection from your ears to rise and fall in the place where you rest…we rest…space for an in- 164

between slowness grows…semantics go…ears extend to the shadows…searching for a place where the air is slightly darker…move through these shaded spaces as they themselves move with the ease of the light…

Which questions need to be asked about tuning into non-human forms of life…right…says Anton Kats4…artist…educator…musician…dancer…earth dweller…one of the first questions he says…sitting openly towards the camera wearing a brightly coloured orange hat…staring at me…or the screen… being all too aware of the time as I waffle around the questions…he says…I would love to narrow it down to…and it is kind of a crucial question in general…whether one is asking from a We or from an I perspective…I would love to narrow the question down to…Who Am I…or Who Are You…he continues…this is a crucial question because it will be very easy to find out that…just by experience… humans are not necessarily human…that very often when humans think that they need to attune to non-human forms of life it almost implies a common understanding that…humans are human…and that there is a kind of a common sense of what that is…he says it will be very difficult for anyone to pinpoint actually what this means in their own identity…because once they start extending the… I am… in the beginning of any sentence…I am human… female…male…this and that…it is very difficult to maintain…and just in the development and maintenance of that…there is a process of production of something…and if something is or has to be produced…then there is a trajectory of this something not being there to begin with…it has to be brought into existence…so this idea of being a human is actually a lot of effort…like an extraction fan sucking the air from a room…he gestures with his hands…but who is producing it…go figure…and then from this

perspective…if human animals are not aware of these production mechanisms and are fully or habitually identified with them…this negotiation becomes an escape trajectory…a mode of attuning to non-human forms of life…so it makes sense right…that the very first question would be to check what kind of form of life are you generally…Who Are You…who is attuning here…he speaks now as though speaking to me alone…critical of my question though sensitive to where it comes from… Katie…ask this question to yourself and really dig into it…whether it is through meditation or walking or working through listening…through whatever means it is…really check yourself on how the I Am sentence can be extended and whether any extension of it has any actuality to it…where does the I Am-ness start from…what kind of powers and energy comes into that notion of I…and then just by eventually giving up this kind of form of production that is very…very unsustainable…whether it is your own identity or kind of assumed common identity with others…that are also based on a lot of assumptions of what human or humanism means…then just by giving this up…the question of attunement ceases to pose itself…there is no need for attuning to non-human forms of life…just stop tuning into human forms of life then you will be there immediately.

…forget choreographed ears that dance without intention…perceive with attentive passivity…tuning in through ways yet unknown…unhuman ways… peaks dips and loops resonate…waiting for monkey minds to rest…wavelengths roam freely across the borderless territories that shadows cast…in motion with the Earth’s rotation…peaceful tensions animating through the wind…take notice of the shadows that rest and move with the day effortlessly… 166

you are rasping eerie undulate melodious

…drift above the soil and leave a small space between your ear and the earth…like a door pushed open just ajar by the wind…it’s impossible to hold completely still…backwards and forwards…in tiny vibrations…you move…a vague steadiness…imagine the soil to be a cup on the end of a string…listen with care and find a place to listen…in a weightlessness that the Earth’s crust only understands… earthy skin…the palms of your hands feel the soils warm touch…crumbling between your fingers until skin is soil and soil is skin…ears always guiding…

One way of feeling the flow that a fungal mycelium has inside…said post-media artist…sound maker… researcher…forager…Saša Spačal5…as she sat peacefully in her home in a forest at the edge of Ljubljana and I on a busy street in central Amsterdam…staring at screens…is to translate the vibrations of an organism into something tangible for a human to sense…with one artwork titled Myconnect6…me and my partners Mirjan Švagelj and Anil Podgornik translated fungal responses to the electrical signal of a human heartbeat into vibrations sound and light that traveled back to the human body and changed the rhythm of the original heartbeat…it is a big step forward in understanding and perceiving others…more than words that is… other signals are far more pleasant to describe processes of other species…she told me that with vibrations sound and light it might even be possible to figure out a translation of being between species… from the timeframe of fungi to the timeframe of

humans…then from this translation that is perceptible to a human body…there could be various plant and fungi clocks…all different…she described her imagination of a huge machine with all these speed translations from different beings on the planet…even for bacteria…of course a speculative machine at that…so for example lichens…she went on to tell me…which are the symbionts of fungi algae and cyanobacteria…a composite organism… they need a long time to grow and develop…some lichens can even digest stone and extract nutrients from air which is a very slow process...that means they grow much slower compared to human time… such facts take us to a completely different scale of imagining…this is good because such facts are humbling for the human ego and put our existence in a wider context of things…lichens live in forests… some of them live on wood…they are little structures which for a long time were confusing to scientists because they have many different beings and species in one…they look ancient greenish mint colour or sometimes yellowish…the ones living on rocks especially…they are interesting because they live under very diverse conditions…almost extreme conditions...they can survive in a very dry situation in one moment but also proliferate in extremely humid conditions in the next moment…their resilience comes from the fact that one symbiont may be better adapted to dry conditions and another to humid…in this way it is easier for the whole community that human animals have named lichens… to survive.

…as you continued to listen to the soil your body gave in and pressed too down against it…you lay on your side with your ear planted as though a root looking for water…for sound…earthy red ears… footsteps wander over your body…pressing over… 168

imprinting lightly across your crumbly top…a cow as she goes to feed her calf…a pig as she goes to play in mud…a chicken as she goes to lay her eggs… the weight of another sure not to cause harm or damage…a small trace left behind in the soil beneath their feet…ears trodden upon yet not violated…

you are mellifluous faint gentle unvoiced

…heavy vines smoulder around your shoulders…like limbless bones pushing and pulling between…in trying to swivel from one side to another a burning sensation sets in…you cannot turn left nor right forward nor backwards…blazing hot bark encroaches up the back of your neck…neither looking up nor down is possible…like a red orange shell restricting your arms and legs as you struggle and panic sets in…remember loops of sound surround and support you…find your ears and listen to the vines as they form this cracking shell around your top…

Sitting in the Amstel park in Amsterdam chirping birds chirp as though unknowing of the places they could be residing…I tuned into a video call with Taiwanese artists…researchers…designers…thinkers… scientists…Pei-Ying Lin7 and Yi-Fei Chen…and ventured into a conversation about how to tune back in with nature…on how to distinguish nature’s voice in artistic practices…and more questions arose than answers…as is the way for most artistic re-searchers…because…well…nature…this here is a very Western concept…characterised too often and for too long within Western philosophies as separate to human…human versus nature…and it

is not that Pei and Yi had not been influenced by the Western philosophies and did not grasp the question of tuning into nature…as to some extent Western philosophy had influence over the sciences that they studied…though they never really thought to separate nature the way the Western world does…in Taiwanese literature and culture…some might say even the philosophy…although Taiwanese philosophy is never identified that way because of its multi-cultured history…though it is a philosophy… they have some ambiguity when referring to everything that exists in nature…it is never really clear… sometimes they found themselves standing at a point that they consider nature as just other living things which they are also a part of…sometimes they refer to the nature as Mother Nature…a sort of Gaia…and then sometimes they also refer to nature in terms of resources…more similar to how the Western philosophy considers nature…capitalised for the sake of making them into a resource…right… to find a use for the natural world…though for them at least in the Taiwanese context it was always very mixed…they never have a very clear stand on what nature is…they often find themselves in their art research practices fluctuating between these ideas of nature…in their more early days of practice they were never so much aware of this…though now when they approach an art science project they always begin with consideration to each and every organism involved in their experiment… and approach with care these different systems for thinking that are constantly working in their minds in parallel…

…you are a sequoia seed ready to germinate…bullets of sweat start to drip down your torso as your body retracts and expands with the pressure… time is moving hastily and the heat even more so… 170

the burning gets closer…grasping for somewhere to make a crack…peace comes as the heat travels through the vines to your core…ears inside vines inside vessels looking for a place to open up a whole new direction for a tiny world to sprout…ears sit within as the fire ravages your core…a fire that only means to cultivate its own future.

1 For more info on Dodó Kiss visit ‘kidobo.wixsite. com/dodo 2With contributing speakers Yi-Fei Chen, Christina Della Giustina, Anton Kats, Pei-Ying Lin, and Saša Spačal, from personal correspondence over video chat across Amsterdam, Berlin, and Ljubljana in the year of 2021. Christina Della Giustina did an interview for the ARIAS podcast series named Voiceblind: Matters of Methodology, for with which I was an editor in the interview process. I also interviewed art researchers Yi-Fei Chen, Anton Kats, Pei-Ying Lin, and Saša Spačal following a presentation of their works for an exhibition named Re:Tune at Zone2Source in Amsterdam South, which was, among other things, a key source of inspiration for this text. 3 Christina Della Giustina worked with the LWF project and the research unit Forest Dynamics at WSL Switzerland (the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research):https://www.wsl.ch/en/index.The artistresidency lasted 9 months from March to December 2011, and was organised by Artists in Lab at ZHdK Zürich. 4 For more on Anton Kats visit www.antonkats.net 5 For more on Saša Spačal, visit www.agapea.si 6 Myconnect provides the experience of a symbiotic connection between humans, nature, and technology. The viewers become players by lying down in a capsule equipped with a headset and body sensors that measure their heartbeat. Producer : Kapelica Gallery, Slovenia (2013) / Supported by the Ministry of Culture of Republic of Slovenia, Municipality of Ljubljana – Department for Culture and ŠOU – Ljubljana. 7 For more on Pei-Ying Lin visit www.peiyinglin.net