all right welcome back all of you to the last session of uh on sound uh on sound on sound um i'm very sorry for any inconveniences with the change of time towards the later time um i know know that there has been a clash with another course, which is now rescheduled. So most of us can be here. Some of us are in time zones where it makes difficult to participate. So yeah. But I hope that we all have a good session anyways,
despite the rescheduling and all that. I've been looking very much forward to this one, although it's the last one. and I have really enjoyed it so far. And I've also had some great feedback from some of you. Today I will give a lecture which I have titled Unheard Relations or How to Vibe with Spiris. And after my lecture, we'll have a discussion based on student presentations of around 10 minutes each. And in my list, I have Sebastian, Dana, Irini, and Catherine for doing presentations and two responses of around five minutes each
by Casio and Luca. If the list is incomplete or wrong, please let me know in the chat. Also, again, if you have any questions during my lecture or any of the presentations, please write them down so we can address them together in the discussion. Good. And because I have the role as the lecturer today, I will also need to juggle the Zoom application. I'll try to do my best. Just a moment, I'll share my screen.
Good. If you have any, like, if you spot any technical issues, then just let me know by sound. I cannot really see the chat while I'm presenting. shout out. Good. So today's lecture titled Unheard Relations or How to Vibe with Spiders. Like a background of this lecture is that I'm currently undertaking my PhD research at the
Berlin University of the Arts in the field of Sound Studies and Sunni Arts. My dissertation addresses what I call the post-human attitude in sonic arts. And I do my research through selected case studies. And in these case studies, I'm interested in how musicians and other artists working with sounds are addressing that what we call post-human. human. So the post-human attitude in sonic arts, as you can see my research has these distinct recurrent terms, the post-human, the attitude and sonic arts, which therefore needs to be clarified.
After clarifying the terms, I want to present three examples of the post-human attitude in sonic arts, and those examples will then serve as basis of today's talk upon which my research is partly built. I understand the artworks and art practices as carriers of inherent theoretical potentials which might lie beyond the traditional way of theorizing or at least shift our perspectives of an already well-described realm namely that of the post-human but first I'll address what I mean when I talk about sonic arts so when I speak about sonic arts I use the term in the
widest sense. Sonic arts ranges from traditional notions of music over sound installations, sound performances, radio plays and listening exercises, but also to the use of sound in other art genres such as visual arts. Therefore, my research is not an analysis of a specific genre on what one might have called post-human sound art. As a matter of fact, I believe that claiming that to be such a genre called post-human sound art would be a delusion, leading to a confused dead end. So instead, what has led me onto my research
is a tendency that can be observed in the arts in general in the recent years, namely that of addressing topics found in post-human theories through the arts. My research then specifically focuses on the role of sound in the arts and how the post-human is addressed through sonic arts. The notion of attitude, though it might be possible to point out aesthetic trends in post-human, of the post-human in the arts in general and in sound arts or sonic arts specifically I'm not claiming an aesthetic theory of post-human sonic arts. What my focus is upon is on what I call
the post-human attitude. So what do I mean when I use the term attitude? I take the notion of attitude from Michel Foucault in his examination of Immanuel Kant's text What is Enlightenment? A text that claims modernity as an epoch, Foucault points out that instead of thinking about modernity as an epoch coming after the pre-modernity and then ending in post-modernity lined up on a linear timeline, one should rather rethink modernity as an attitude. And here I quote Foucault in the text, which he also called What is Enlightenment from
1984. Thinking back on Kant's text, I wonder whether we may not envisage modernity rather as an attitude than as a period of history. And by attitude, I mean a mode of relating to contemporary reality, a voluntary choice made by certain people. In the end, a way of thinking and feeling, a way too of acting and behaving that at one and the same time marks a relation of belonging and presence itself as a task. And I have added the emphasis. So if we contrast the notion of attitude, the mode of
relating to contemporary reality as a voluntary choice made by certain people, with Pucco's more well-known concept of the episteme, which is defined as the epistemological unconscious, or the unquestioned common sense of reality, we see a clear difference in the hierarchies of the concepts. The attitude is the active relationship to the reality, a reality constituted constituted by unconscious awareness, if we can say so, of the contemporary epistem. So where Foucault is addressing the modernist attitude in Kant's essay, What is Enlightenment?
I am addressing the post-human attitude in Sonic Arts. And then the big one, the post-human, What do I mean when I keep mentioning the posthuman? Often when I speak to people, I'm not too acquainted with the term of the posthuman. They have a vague idea of something with robots taking over a dystopian world or living in the matrix as we know it from science fiction movies. Others ward off the term as a mere buzzword. Either reaction is not wrong, but they also show that a clear definition of the post-human is necessary. I understand the post-human through scholars such as N. Catherine Hales,
Rosie Baidati, Donna Haraway, and Carrie Wolfe. One of the most comprehensive definitions of the post-human though is laid out by Francesca Ferrando, who is a professor in philosophy at New York University. So she describes the post-human as an umbrella term, which encompasses several categories. And the three main categories are those of transhumanism, post-humanism, and the non-anthropocentric category. So very briefly, transhumanism derives from the modernist movement of enlightenment and is focusing on enhancement of the human body and mind through science and technology.
Examples hereof are mind upload, cyborgs and immortality. Transhumanism is often that which is connected to science fiction stories such as Frankenstein, 1984, Brave New World, Blade Runner and The Matrix. If we then look at post-humanism, so we have the post-human, we have post-humanism, the ism of the post-human, and we have also this hyphen between post and humanism. So post-humanism derives from the post-structural theories such as critical race theory, post-colonial theory and feminist theory. Post-humanist theory thereby critically
engages with the human as a common notion by deconstructing social and cultural hierarchical dualisms such as gender like men and women, sexuality, heterosexuality over over non-heterosexuality, if we can call it that. Race, where white is contrasted with people of color. In geography, we have dichotomies or dualism between west and east, or maybe now it's more north and south. In religion, we also have dualisms between Christianity and Islam, for example. Ability, like abled and disabled human beings.
Property, rich and poor is also a dualism and so on. So there are a lot of dualism that post-humanism is trying to cope with. So the argument is that despite the fact that the biological species called humans on paper is like some humans are more humans than others. The ideal human is, for example, pictured by Leonardo da Vinci's Vitruvian man, which we were also reading about in the text from Haraway today. So the Vitruvian man would be the white heterosexual abled Western man. Might also add like he would be wealthy to a certain extent, at least educated and so on.
So a human being of power. Therefore, post-humanist theory calls for a new humanism from which before mentioned hierarchical dualist structures and idealism play no or less a big role. And then the last category of the post-human in Ferrandos' perspective is that of the non-anthropocentrism. We can also call that ecological thought. So non-entreprocentrism also addresses dualisms, and that would then be those of human versus animal and culture versus nature.
In non-entreprocentral ecological thought, it is recognized that human is a part of nature from which it therefore cannot be disconnected. The human is interconnected or entangled with the rest of nature, which therefore following Brunel Latour and Haraway has to be understood as a nature culture. As Haraway poetically writes in the text for today, that human genomes can be found in only 10% of the mundane space I call my body.
The other 90% of the cells are filled with genomes of bacteria, fungi, protests and such, some of which play in a symphony necessary to my being alive at all, and some of which are hitching a ride and doing the rest of me or of us no harm. End of quote. So of course these three categories are just scratching the surface of what is encompassed in the post-human. But important is to be aware of that the categories overlap and interconnect on many different levels. A great example of this can be found in Haraway's Cyborg Manifesto.
Good. So today's lecture will focus on spiders and how they relate to the world through sound. Unlike humans and many non-human animals, spiders do not have ears. Nevertheless, they communicate with each other sonically by absorbing acoustic vibrations through their bodies and their webs. Also, the sounds spiders produce are barely audible to the human ear without special amplification. The sonic relationship spiders have with each other and their surrounding world is used by the artists Maria Fernanda Cardoza,
Thomas Saraceno and Eleanor Morgan as a means towards creating a spider human relationship. So again to borrow a term from Donna Haraway, we can view the artist's practices as practices of becoming with spider. In I'll just have some more. In 1974, the philosopher Thomas Nagel famously asked the question, what does it feel like to be a bad? With this question, he addresses the debate of the body-mind dualism and the notion of the view from nowhere. bear. The question of what it feels like to be a bat is not about our imagination of how it would
feel like to be a bat, as that would still be felt imagined from a human perspective. No, the question has to be taken very literally. What does it feel like to be a bat? In the end, only a real bad and not a human imagining being a bad would be able to know. The question, therefore, might seem redundant, but I would argue the opposite, namely that it is very cleverly asked and, when taken seriously, it functions as a probe for further investigation and critique of the epistemological notion of the view from nowhere. In combination, Thomas Nagel and Donna Haraway thus forms the basic questions I want to address in this lecture.
What does it feel like to be a spider? And what does it mean to become with spider? And thus, the epistemological perspective becomes subject and situated. Here we have to understand the subject situated perspective, not as a counterweight to an objective perspective, that is the view from nowhere. Rather, Haraway's concept of becoming with is arguing for that knowledge is always situated in interaction with other subjects. We could call it a subject-oriented epistemology, or an epistemology of difference, or a relational ontology, or an ecological becoming.
But Haraway goes a bit further. In order to really break down the subject-object dualism, we have to understand all relation as intra-active. This is the term that Haraway borrows from Karen Barad. Interacting, intra-acting, means basically that in the relational act, every part gets mutually affected. And through this affectedness, every part gets mutually transformed. These transformations in the interaction might though not take place on a one-to-one scale, as it depends on the situation and the participation. So I'll now show three examples of artistic interaction between humans and spiders.
The projects are very similar as they address the vibrations of the spiders, how the spiders communicate. Nevertheless, we will see that they are also addressing them with different foci. The first project I'll show is Maria Fernando Cardoso's audiovisual piece on the origins of art one and two. It is concerned about the peacock spiders mating ritual. And the peacock spider does have somewhat well developed visual sensing apparatus.
And as we shall see, it becomes an important factor in attracting the attention of the female. But as we also show here sound is a very important part of the communication Maria Fernando Cardoso observes their behavior by taking the peacock spiders out of their natural environment and placing them on a white disc with a laser vibrometer pointed towards it which make it possible to absorb the vibrations of the spider as they would have been creating them in their spider webs so if you have some headphones please put them on because the the frequencies are a bit
low um the video is a little less than seven minutes and i it it's both uh number one and two of on the origins of art please let me know if the sound is not coming through Mm-hmm.
Yes, and as you noticed here, you have the red dot. I don't know if you see my cursor, but there's red dot in the middle, and that would be the laser beam that is registering the vibrations and make the sound audible. They sound audible. The next example is there. Okay, so Thomas Saraceno, a project he had in 2015 to 16 and in Singapore called Arachnid Orchestra, the Jam Sessions.
So it was this exhibition and performance series that took place at the NTU, the Center for Contemporary Art in Singapore, where the Argentinian artist Tomás Araceno invited musicians, sound artists, sound technicians, philosophers, and last but not least, various species of spiders to engage in musical jam sessions. under the title Arachnid Orchestra Jam Sessions. So much less observing than trying to really interact and engage with the spiders creating this feedback. So in Saraceno's Arachnid Orchestra,
the spiders were sitting in their web in a cubic frame. You can see it in the photo. Their webs were connected to special sensitive contact microphones and also using the laser vibrometers that could pick up the vibrations caused by the spiders movement in the web and their vibrations through their legs. In some of the jam sessions, the contact microphones were connected to a modular synthesizer that was then triggered by the vibrations from the web. In others, certain electronically generated frequencies and rhythmic patterns were directed toward the spiders in order to investigate how to trigger a reaction from spiders
and ideally having a musical feedback loop between the spiders and the humans. In others, again, the vibrations of the web were sonically amplified in order to create an auditory setting for musicians playing acoustic instruments, which the spiders then might perceive through the vibrations of the web. I have two examples. The whole project is released in this book, just titled Arachnid Orchestra of the Jam Sessions. I sent you the PDF of the catalog from the exhibition.
So you have that and this is just like an extended version of that. In the book, if you open it, you have here a USB flash drive with recordings of the Jam Sessions and that's from there that we we will now hear the first one, or actually the seventh one. There are seven recordings in total. The first one we will hear is number seven called Cosmic Suite. Cosmic Suite. And it lasts one minute and 41 seconds. What we'll hear is amplification of several spiders.
The second example that would be number six in the row of seven, which is called Spiders Along Jam Session, Nefila Inaurata and Volkos Phalangiaidus Duet. And that is with the American or New York based artist David Rothenberg, who is often jamming with animals, especially especially nightingales. He's often coming to or every year he's coming to Berlin because we have here in Berlin very
like a lot of nightingales and they're very active in spring and early summer. And they're very sensitive or reactive towards sounds. So he's coming and playing his clarinet with them. And I was very lucky to be able to take part in the, last time he, yeah, had to, or wanted to come to Berlin that was during the lockdown. So he couldn't go, but I was out in a park finding the nightingale and with a loud speaker, I was transferring or playing his sounds directly from New York to the nightingale and then with a microphone,
playing it back to him to New York so he could still do his jam session. So this jam session is then with him on clarinet a hymn on clarinet and spiders on amplified web. I'm not sure if we will listen to all of it though. If we would, it would be four minutes and 23 seconds. !
So I think we got the idea there. The last project I want to present there. that is Elena Morgan serenading spiders. And this is kind of a combination of the two other projects. When the first one we were experiencing how spiders were doing their mating dance, hooking up through sound and visuals.
And the second one, how do we jam like a human spider connection? How do we jam through sound with the spider? I don't know how the spider felt in that jam session with David Rothenberg, but as we shall see, Elena Morgan's project is much more intimate. So Elena Morgan, she's an artist and writer working with printmaking, sculpture, video, drawing and drawing to explore materials and processes of making across species, as her own description of her work.
Her works in general focus on the interaction with or the meeting between the human and the non-human, such as animals or materials. with work titles such as, Squirrel Watching, How to Rub a Fish, rub like in, not rub, steal from it, but rubbing a fish, and The Garden of Spongy Delights. She illustrates how she often brings a playfulness as a means of approaching the radical other, if we can call it like that, the non-human. So in her videotape performance, Serenading Spiders from 2013, Morgan addresses a female spider of the species Arrhenius diadematus.
The spider is placed on a wooden frame on which it has spun its web overnight, preparing for another day in its web. This spider has a fairly bad visual sense, as most spiders do. And she does again not have any hearing organs, such as ears, as we know them from other animals, including the human species. But that doesn't mean that the spider is not an auditory being. So the spider's web is its extension of its body. And it uses the web for communicating and for sensing its surroundings through physical vibration.
A spider in its web can thus determine whether prey has been caught, a predator is approaching, or for mating purpose, as we also saw in the former example. Therefore, the communication between the interested male spider and the soon to be seduced female spider takes place through vibrations in the web. This is also how Eleanor Morgan is trying to establish communication with the spider in the frame. Eleanor Morgan connects her neck at the point where her voice is the loudest, that would be here, to the spider's web with a string of spider web.
At first, Morgan is humming some scales. This is in order to try to hit the frequencies that the spider might react to. She is trying to establish a feedback loop between her and the spider. Morgan's voice as a sender and the spider in its web as a receiver. The spider's movement as a sender and Morgan's eyesight as a receiver. Because of Morgan's arachnophobia, she's not just confronted with the spider as an other, other but also her own fear of the otherness represented by the spider. After she has tuned in to the spider she is serenading a human song for the spider. Maybe in order to invite the spider
That's newly sprung in June My heart is like a melody That's weakly played in June So fill out my bonnie lass So deep in love am I That I will be still my dear Till all the seas can dry
So I would like to end this lecture on the unheard relations of spiders by asking, what did the spiders hear? What did we hear? What does it feel like to be a spider? What does it mean to become with spider? And how does it feel to vibe with spiders? Thanks a lot. Good.
Any questions right away? Then please break in. Otherwise we'll go to the presentations. And the first one on my list is, or the lists are Sebastian, Dana, Irini, Catherine, and then afterwards with the responses by Casio and Luca, Sebastian there. I can't really see him on the list. Then Dana.
Okay, I'm going to share my screen. It will just take me one second. Okay, so I'm gonna speak a little bit about an essay by Elizabeth Margulis about intentional silence built into musical notation, particularly in
classical scoring. And so what's interesting about this particular type of silence is that it's silence that has to be created which I think goes against our initial perception of silence which is that it's this thing that's generally existing and then things are built on top of it so musical silence is um is constructed of two elements according to the essay. There's perceived silence and there's acoustic silence. So for example, in this performance of a Beethoven piece,
we see in the beginning the actual silence before the music starts, but then And the two noted rests actually aren't blank space. They have sound within them. There's, you know, this texture on the waveform. So silence is textured, but if we're speaking of silence as sort of this material that you can play with within music for different intentions, then it's changeable by the framing. So, there's a few different types of silence that is outlined that I thought was
worth noting. So the first relates to the fermata, which is this thing in the upper left-hand corner. The fermata tends to indicate a disruption of musical processes that is more substantial than that of simple rest, since the addition of the fermata disrupts not only the ongoing process of pitches and chords, but also the ongoing process of meter. So when a fermata is inserted into a score, the meter is destroyed. In a normal rest, the musician is to continue counting, but this is a complete disruption. This I parallel to the interruptive silence used by Gustav Mahler in particular in the
seventh symphony. There is the use of discordant instruments which come together and clash and immediately following the sensation of the clashing music is a silence that draws attention to the increased heart rate. This is a very modernist tendency. On a surface level, it's done to subvert the cliche of romantic musical scoring and deny it, but on a deeper level, it has its max of existential despair and an interest in pointing to the fallibility of the person that is listening to the music.
I parallel this to the anti-Ericotelian Brechtian approach to theater, where there isn't the gentle cradling of the art form that brings about completion and in particular sort of completion that allows for the passivity of the listener. Cited in the essay is the pianist Sviatsoslav Richter, who outlines how he counts to 30 before playing the opening notes. He says, I create a sense of emptiness within himself, which causes panic in the audience.
What's happening? Is he ill? He says. So the sense of emptiness within himself, he's able to expand outwards and point to and create a sort of condition. That is an unpleasant reflection on the self. This also parallels the mechanistic transparency. that I think that goes with a Bendemean's notion of the incomplete artwork that is necessarily anti-fascist, kind of a rejection of the Gesamtkunstwerk,
which again does not allow us to lose ourselves in the work and creates pores within the narrative in which we can insert ourselves or have to insert ourselves whether or not that's uncomfortable. Another tactic is silence as an approximation of speech and communication. So a continuity between music and speech is that there's gaps and silences within both. This in classical composition kind of incites something called the inner ear which is the imaginative capacity that predicts what the coming musical events, but also evokes the idea that music can fill
in where words are lacking, and in particular in these moments of extreme evocation and extreme feelings. So in the case of Mozart's Don Giovanni, this particular truncation of a main theme implies that Donna Anna, the love interest, can't articulate her feelings. There's also the 18th century genre of compagnonato, in which a violent passion is followed by broken, incomplete phrases. is this sort of implies the traditional structure of sexual intercourse where there is a buildup
and a crescendo and then the silence following and that particular silence is akin to a type of intimacy that's only possible in extreme familiarity. There's also a more cordial familiarity that's attempted through some of these musical cues and through silence. There is the tendency to, for example, in Chopin's Nocturnes, to insert silence where a particular tonic or a musical event was very obvious. And this is kind of a nudge, a friendly nudge within a discipline and within people who are familiar with a certain discipline
and creating sort of a silence as an idiomatic force. And I add the hymn meter here because there's the cliche of like iambic pentameter as something that mirrors heartbeat. and how that's useful in idolatry and devotional music as a way of sort of blending yourself into the music. So then there's, for example, in Debussy, there's the notion that the formula through which silence meets the music
allows for one to blossom in inner worlds so that there's not just the listener being faced with the musical event, but that there's then the opportunity for there to be a blossoming interiority. And then there's mechanism proper. There's just the simple usefulness of silence, which is sort of the cliche and standard use of silence, the non-jarring, non-Mahler sort of silence which exists on the gaps or it exists on the borders and seams um and it's is almost pedagogical it says to the listener that they're about they should um reflect on the past musical event that just occurred and kind of go through the process of memory formation and then that
they should prepare themselves for the musical event that's coming next um So these different methods are all means of control on the part of the musician to speak through silence and use silence as a punctuation which ends up imbuing it with intention and with with a sort of perceptual texture. And I wonder going forward how silence functions within non-traditional types of music
and how it functions within noise music and things that perhaps don't necessarily try to have exactly the structural, the same infallible structure as classical composition. I wonder if silence is still functioning in the settings as punctuation. That's it. Thank you, Dana. Thank you, Dana. Do we have any kind of connections to either my talk or the texts for today?
With the silence? I'm sorry, I didn't know that that was what I was supposed to do. All good, but if you just take from the talk I gave? Yeah. I mean, so there's the implication that when there's silence, there's the opportunity to be listening. And I think there's, you know, as we've seen throughout the course, the notion that there's all of this potential sound with the non-human life that exists around us, such as spiders, such as plants. So I wonder if these sort of structured points of silence can continue to be a way of dismantling some, you know, some anthropocentric tendencies, if the salvation is the silence, if there's this idea that everything has been said or noted.
there's also the idea that musical notation is akin to language so that the notes are speech acts and the silence is parallel to the silence within speech and that all of those are analogous but maybe the way that we connect through music is maybe more akin to the way that non-human animals speak, which is that which is more detached from symbol and whether through that form of communication
we can dismantle anthropocentricism. Yeah. I was also like, I really like your, when you addressed Benjamin about the incomplete artwork as an anti-fascist artwork, like opposing, is it right when I remember it as opposing the Gesamtkunstwerk because of its openness, inviting the audience in. That was very much what I think at least Thomas Salasino and Eleanor Morgan was doing. Really not trying to conduct everything,
saying this is the Gesamtkunstwerk, but okay, this is an openness more than it's a finished work. Now let's see what happens. And of course, like understanding that as a silence, it's pretty amazing. Like that really like says that you have to listen now. It's a humble attitude. Let's go to the next presentation by Irini. Hi, I will start sharing my screen now.
And... So it's about spiders. Unlike insects, spiders do not have antennae. Their abdomens bear appendages that have been modified into spinares that extrude silk from up to six types of glands. Spider webs vary widely in size, shape, and the amount of sticky thread used. Spider-like arachnids with silk-producing spigots appeared in the Devonian period about 386 million years ago, but these animals apparently lacked spinnerets. True spiders have been found in carboniferous rocks from 318 to 299 million years ago and are very similar to the most primitive surviving suborder, the mesotheli.
Spiders' guts are too narrow to take solids, so they liquefy their food by flooding it with digestive enzymes. Spider webs are strategically constructed in order to continue the cycle of catching food and breaking it down in order to create the silk fiber necessary to spin their web once again. To avoid being eaten by the females, which are typically much larger, male spiders identify themselves to potential mates by a variety of complex courtship rituals. Males of most species survive a few matings, limited mainly by their short lifespans.
Females wave silk egg cases, each of which may contain hundreds of eggs. of many species care for their young, for example, by carrying them around or by sharing food with them. A minority of species are social, building communal webs that may house anywhere from a few to 50,000 individuals. An abnormal fear of spiders is called arachnophobia. is an intense and irrational fear of spiders and other arachnids.
love me real Thinking about spiders in urban environments, the first thing that comes to my mind is the deafening silence in an empty house where spider colonies are taking over and creating their own cosmos. As our cities grow, we infringe upon and dominate more and more of the natural environment.
Spiders today are exposed to car horns, construction, slamming doors and telephones. Spider behavior has changed as human noise has entered the spider realm. By exaggerating and controlling this noise, researchers have observed some general trends. Spiders are sensitive to vibration. Spiders rely heavily on their perception of vibrations to compensate for their poor eyesight. Thus, vibrations play an extremely important role in detecting both the presence of prey caught in their webs and the presence of possible mates. Spiders are extremely sensitive to human intervention, as proven by a NASA science
experiment. In the experiment, scientists studied the ways in which different drugs altered the architecture of webspan by a house spider. Scientists were able to observe and statistically analyze spider patterns that became apparent. Specifically, spiders are drawn to the softer vibration of the classical music and have a desire to mate during that time. To juxtapose these, spiders were repelled by the erratic and harsher vibrations of metal music, which seemed more threatening to them.
Spider's canvas features the sonification of a 3D spider web with each strand tuned to a different note. The MIT visiting artist Tomas Saraseno presented at Pareto Tokyo the art exhibit on air. Spider's Canvas, an exploration that sonifies the threads of a spider web,
was designed, constructed, and performed by MIT Center for Art, Science, and Technology, CAST, Faculty Director and Kinan Sahin, distinguished professor Evan Ziborin, Civil Environmental Engineer PhD student Isabel Su, Department Head of McAfee Professor of Engineering, Marcus Buller, MIT Music and Theater Arts lecturer, Ian Hadwick, and composer and video artist, Christine Southwork. Based on the research on spider webs from MIT's laboratory for atomistic and molecular mechanics, Sue, Buller, and Zipporin produced an interactive instrument
that echoes the parallels of music and material science. The project is based on a spider web which was spun by CryptoForec Citricola Spider. Buller, Sue, and Saraceno created the spider web topology using automatic laser scanning and image processing protocols. Spider's Canvas is truly the most collaborative project I've ever been involved in. It's not just interdisciplinary, but literally interspecies. The real first mover was the spider herself. In performance, all four humans have an equal effect on everything that the audience sees and hears, says Zipporin. Spider webs are intricate material systems
that feature hierarchical structures that range from the chemistry of proteins to the complex architecture of filaments in the web, whereas this complexity is built from the simple building blocks, says Buller. Similarly, music sound is generated by the assembly of elementary units to produce complex harmonies and rhythms. In this project, we've demonstrated an intimate connection between these realizations of complex systems. Obscuring the distinction between what is material And what is sound? The spider web instrument allows researchers to interact with and immerse themselves inside the web. To create the sonification of spider webs, the team applies different frequencies of sound to several different lengths of spider web fibers.
Zipporin describes the experience of performing spider's canvas in holistic terms. terms. This piece makes you feel that connection between the physical world and the acoustic world. Your senses are aligned and focused, allowing you to experience it and pay attention to it in your body and in your spirit. it. Okay. Sorry, that's it. I'm trying to stop sharing. Okay. There you go.
Any questions or comments to Irina? She's eating me. And we will go to Cascio, who will be responding. Oh, hello everyone. These are just notes that I took while the presentations were ongoing. I don't know if this is much coherent. This might be naive questions to those who are, unlike me, more acquainted with these kinds of approaches that try to overcome the distinction
between nature and culture, but I write this, I wrote this, the importance of such works, however non-anthropocentric these endeavors might be, is to present ways of integrating the human into a broader, de-centered ecosystem that renders the human as just another point articulated with others. Wouldn't this attitude towards sonic art be capable of producing aesthetic theories as a kind of outcome? Or the lack of conceptual theoretical abilities of non-human beings, such as animals, preclude this move from attitudes to a more systematic account of nature slash
culture? This feedback loop between human and non-human is emphasized by these kinds of works to produce a third thing, the post-human. But this procedure is carried out by first making possible the realization of analogies between human and non-human, animal in this case, experience. The very idea of art cannot be bypassed or taken as a non-conceptual practice with the risk of losing its potency of effectively transform our experience. And in this framework where culture is completely integrated with nature, the conceptual activities that permit us to appreciate, interact or intra-act in this case,
with these kinds of works and ultimately to produce art is taken as just another kind or sets of abilities or it just or it has a prevalence or I don't know some kind of specific place in this in this account. In other words, what is the functional importance of taking something as an artwork where the distinction between nature and culture is suspended? This interaction between us and spiders is from the point of view of attitude it is unilateral or in other words what can spiders learn from vibing with us that's just it thank you
thanks a lot a lot of questions there i would say they are pretty that they are naive they are really good um should we have the the last response before we go into the discussion of it with luca okay yeah now for a really naive question no just kidding uh i was thinking about back to the the Donna Harry text, how she talks about the, looking at an animal, I think she mentioned a cat or is a cat in text, looking at the cat, but not letting the cat look back at you or not wanting to be seen by the cats, right?
And then she talks about the, her experience with a companion dog, right? Or companionship with her dog. And to me, when I ran a taxi, I thought it was very interesting, but it felt very, very, I don't want to say too easy or anything, but it's like, it's definitely easier to have a companion with a dog or a cat than with a spider, right? And then it took me even more back to our second seminar with Leslie Garcia and the thing she does and her lab does with bacteria and is definitely very not like human or I don't know, incompatible maybe or like closer to humans.
And I think in the three works you showed, it was, I also had this sort of feeling of, okay, maybe the first one, the Maria Fernanda Cardoso, it felt like, okay, it was definitely less interactive, let's say, or less collaborative between the spiders and her, or the artists and the animals. and and the audience okay we have a little more a little more interaction a little more and yeah it's not really necessarily interactions the point but like this openness to being seen let's say so not necessarily in the the sense of the visual but of
being this relation right of being with this animal or this other whatever the other is and And then this took me to, okay, maybe sound can be, or vibration maybe can be this sort of broader sense of, a broader mode of interaction, of relation that, okay, maybe more, okay, it's easier to relate to a dog, to a cat, but higher to a spider or to other animals that are less close to us. but sound maybe can be this sort of common experience or yeah, more common experience at least. At the same time that it is very, very, and maybe it is the nature of these relations or maybe it's something about the nature of sound,
but it's very fragile maybe, it's very uncertain these relations, right? Like you don't know what the spider is responding, if the spider is responding even, or if this other is responding of what the other is thinking about vibing, or about vibing if it's like, you know, not, if it's actually vibing, if it thinks you are lame, I don't know. So yeah, just very, very also not super coherent thoughts, but relating this back to the Harry text of looking and being looked at and how to establish this being with and this connection through sound maybe, how the sound can change, how it can make it broader, this, the types of connection that we can make.
I think that is it. Thanks a lot. A lot of also really, really good thoughts. So let's begin the discussion between all of us. just write in the chat or unmute yourself and say something. Maybe I'll try to not answer, but maybe give a third perspective on Casio and Lukas. You both mentioned this kind of idealism or goal towards looking at nature as a culture nature
and breaking down the dualisms. And how can we actually do that? I think one point could be as understanding culture, not just as human culture, but also as spider culture. We do look at animal cultures and bacteria cultures. We already have words for that. but maybe try to understand them, not just as cultures and being together, but actually they interact together and also interact to the rest of the ecosystem, which we find here on earth. If we do that, then the human culture
is definitely a culture. And we can also say, okay, We have different tendencies in human culture to maybe monetize stuff. We like to live in houses. We create art, and we have a concept of art. What we experience in Maria Fernando Cardoso's work is her arguing that, okay, we have a non-human art that is in the title, on the origins of art. So she is suggesting, as also, Kasia, you were pointing to us, an aesthetic theory, a non-human
aesthetic theory. So of course spiders cannot think theoretically in the same way as human beings. of course we have one way of thinking and spiders have another way of thinking maybe they don't need an aesthetic theory but in a way they have an aesthetic understanding and what what suits their needs and what we would call aesthetic theory in academia in art history and musicology and so on that is what suits our needs for understanding our worlds and in that way I think we can talk about cultures in nature that is not about human
culture and the nature is the rest so that was one perspective on that looking back at the cat like that's this a thing of Derrida's cat where Dory Dag walks out of the bathroom naked and gets eye contact with the cat and feels uncomfortable and that makes him write books on a human-animal relations. But it is the cat's gaze that he caught and was like, oh, what is that actually thinking now? Might it find it awkward that I'm naked or doesn't it doesn't care like cats often don't care too much about stuff um but what what does
that mean um and i i i totally agree with you look at that that um it's easier to be to befriend a cat than a spider um and that fact that it's easier to befriend a cat or a dog um than a spider shows how difficult it is to give real agency to the beings that are less similar to human beings than dogs and cats. In that way, there is an unnatural hierarchy
between what do we find cute? What do we need to take care of? Is it OK to use the vacuum cleaner to suck up all the spiders? Or should we actually let them sit in the corners? We cannot really relate to a being that has more than two legs or four legs and more than two eyes and doesn't have ears and is creating these webs in the same way as we can relate to a dog that wants to play with a ball. And I think, especially in the last example I gave
with Eleanor Morgan, Serenading Spider, she's trying to create this intimacy of being with the spider, trying really to understand it. She has, I gave you one chapter from this whole book, Go to my Days, where she's really trying to understand what the spiders do, not just from a biologist perspective but also in culture, how are spiders functioning in human culture? How are their webs being used in spider human interactions? And how do they actually communicate together through vibration?
And then trying to do that and bringing herself in it as well of, okay, I'm not trying to sing like a spider. I'm trying to sing like I sang in my youth when I was having my romantic period. I think she said something like that. First trying to tune into the spider and then creating the romantic connection of her wanting to seduce the female spider. I think that's a very poetic, very, very artistic way of trying to go beyond this very scientific way
of doing art with what we call nature or animals, which the other two examples were a bit more on the scientific side of using a lot of theory, of using a lot of measurement equipment, and really trying to establish a scientific relation to the spider, then she is trying to establish an emotional relationship to the spider. And as I also think, maybe I didn't explicate that enough, but I think whenever we, and when we say we,
whenever human beings or, OK, let's say our group, The we always get difficult. But whenever you try to establish a connection to the other, whatever that might be, another human being, a spider, a cat, a tree, whatever, then it's directly a mirror towards yourself. so just in the exercise of establishing this relationship you you're mirroring yourself so how does it feel like to be a bad in asking that question we establish a relational mirror
to the maybe the imaginary bad or all research that has been on bads or There are also a lot of sound artworks dealing with bats. But in that move, you understand yourself a bit better. For example, if you try to understand how bats are listening, they can listen to a much higher frequency spectrum than we as human beings can do. And already there, we see the limits of the human being.
And through these limits, we give space to other entities, other beings that, okay, they are not just a degraded version of the human being. so we are not on on top and then any other species is a degraded or less version of of a of the animal where the the human being is the highest achievement of nature it's just one achievement of nature and we we cope with it as as good as we can and that's not always is the most clever way to cope with being in nature
the way the human population of the Earth is dealing with it. That's evident. Yes. Other comments? Hi. In fact, I also had to be a respondent today. So I will just be very fast and going to Dana's beautiful presentation, I only wanted to add this very obvious example of performative art of Marina Abramovich,
of which artists is present, I thought there was a lot of tension in silence in this artwork and many things that Dana mentioned appeared there, like creativeness in silence and this kind of tension and when like in Irini's presentation there appeared like the idea of art of interspecies. I hope I've said it well. So, during our...
During... While I was reading our material, there is still this open question. I think it's open from... from the work of Joseph Boyce with Coyote. Like, why we do this art that is engaging animals and who profits from it? Like, I think nobody still answered this question properly. And of course, there could be this potential of pedagogy, like that we learn about empathy, probably, but it's very doubtful. So who profits from this kind of art?
Like many animals and many species, they are hiding from us. And we've already understood post-human approach in art. So why we are still doing this? But OK, so these are just some thoughts about the presentations. Thanks, love. I would like to echo a little bit what you said, Jacob and Agatha. And regarding to Maria Fernanda Cordoso's work, I just wrote here some thoughts. It just felt to me that this work, as she calls it,
on the origins of art, it feels to me like an imperialistic perception of human intelligence by imposing our theory of art on these spiders. OK, we have this perception of what is art, why are we imposing that this is art for them? And then similarly to Saraceno's work, yes, humans are willing to interact with the spiders, but we're not always aware how spiders are dealing with that and what happened to them at the aftermath of these artworks. So just some thoughts, as Agata said. yeah so are the spiders or animals used in art are they just there for our sake for our
entertainment yeah exactly i wanted to jump in on the question about what is it like to be a bat um which is fascinating because this is an incredibly long history of human fascination with birds and not in small part because of the bird's ability to fly, which is oftentimes viewed as almost an insult to the human's inability to fly. But something I've been thinking about is that it's what the bat lacks that the bird has is an expression, externalized sound expression, yes, but also one that isn't just monomaniacal or functional. The bird's song is, you know,
outside of the purposes of mating, is kind of just this constant assertion itself. It's just this constant, I am a chickadee. I am a chickadee. I'm here and I'm a chickadee. And that's distinguished from the more functionalistic bird call, which is a warning. So it's like, I'm a chickadee and there's danger. But at both times, there's this constant, you know, I am this thing, which is incredibly important to humans and basically the fundamental art, right? So but but yeah, there's that outside of the fact that the bat just doesn't make any sound that's discernible to us. It doesn't seem to be constantly expressing what it is either. Well, bats, haven't you heard any bats?
like they they are audible that's true they have the the squawking sound i guess it's just the the failure of that being musical at all yeah it's maybe less musical than than bird sounds to us maybe to them that's fantastic music they have like a very distinctive um rhythm to when like in the in the supersonic the frequency like when they are sending out their vibrations to to to navigate and spot prey so that's very rhythmical i could remind us of like electronic music in a way
where a lot of classical music is mimicking bird songs in a way oh yeah i was i was thinking when you were talking about bird songs um it has been proven that that bird songs are of course like similar to the same species or the same kinds of birds but they also have dialects so you can find the same kind of bird around the world and they sing differently. Some kinds of birds, it's stronger than in others. But in that way, we can also talk about bird culture and non-human culture and breaking down
this human... Yeah, maybe that's a good point of your question, that it's not human culture or this human culture versus nature that has been breaking down. I have also thought about the idea of nature and art and what is kind of the idea of if it benefits from, if you're doing this just for own benefits or art. I think just listening to the, for example, the spiders and that video in the origin of art, thinking about the silence, like for example, Adana's presentation, I can think about that this kind of this proposition, this idea can give us an awareness that there has been
a whole different kind of perceptual history along what we are perceived throughout the history. And that might create some kind of awareness for us to live, to share like all the space or the planet in a less barbaric way that we have been so far through understanding those type of sounds maybe like the idea of the silence for me is very much about the idea of active silence like i love i love that video because it's not about like expressive silence it's just about actually a silence that is colored right that is not so much depends on the history, sorry, on the space and tension within the space, but it's
just a silence that is just colored. And just that was, I don't know what you think about this. Yeah, I really like this example example that I gave with the with the silence. And how it's also connected to deafness. Like silence is not just the absence of sound. It can also be the absence of hearing. And that's an important distinction, I think. Because hearing is, so sound is not just going into our ear
and then it's in our mind. We have a huge filter in our brain that is selecting what we are hearing all the time and comparing it to what we have heard before. So we are always selecting what we want to hear. And maybe not that conscious level, but it goes on automatically all the time. So we are also very deaf towards sounds that are actually there. Like a good example is that there's a humming noise, for example, from a refrigerator going on. In the beginning, if it's a new refrigerator,
you will notice it. Then after some time, maybe a few weeks, you don't hear it anymore. And that's because of your brain is listening as much as the ears listening. if you're not tuned towards listening to animals or nature or anything like that, then you will also not hear it. So if you take, for example, many of you might know Paulina her deep listening exercises like go out a somewhere in in in in the bushes in the forest and on the coast somewhere and be there for three five seven hours and just be silent it's kind of very
meditative exercises she's doing and that is her idea is that this kind of deep listening meditation where you just focus on your listening all the time that is then opening up your ear and your brain towards all those sounds which are there already but you are not attuned into Doesn't make sense. Go ahead. Sorry. Sorry.
I'm all right. Yeah, I have a question. I think it's really stupid and I'm just trying to be provocative or something. But I don't know. There's like this notion of vibing or a vibe that seems to be like that was kind of the title of your presentation. I'm just like wondering what is a vibe? Cause I'm not really sure. And it seems like it's quite a vague concept and there's like, and I'm not saying that all concepts have to be like really, I mean, maybe I'm saying that I don't know, but I don't always recognize when there's a vibe in the room. So I'm like kind of not sure how to deal with the whole like notion of a vibe and maybe this is like part of what's going on with like when I have some issues with some of this stuff it maybe comes down to this. Because maybe there seems to be a thing where I can understand maybe there's a play when you're showing us the vibrational stuff.
But then I think with Dana's presentation on silence, I think it seems to me that that's also apt for, you can say that there's a vibe when it's silent. So there's no, I don't know, it's like, I don't know what this thing is. And it's confusing. and like I want to know somebody tell me yes like that was actually a very spontaneous decision to give the title that extra part the first like it was just unheard relations in the beginning and then it was like how to
how to wipe with spiders and what is it vibing like could be like a bit hippie-esque right sitting down feeling the vibes um i think it's trying i'm trying to open up questions like i think it worked with you it's i don't want to be provocative in in in that sense but it's kind of also a bit tongue-in-cheek tongue-in-cheek, how do we vibe with spiders? What is a vibe? Of course it's meant as vibration, but as Beach Boy said, good vibrations, what is that? So it's also a feeling and it's connection. So how to connect through vibration with spiders?
that was what I wanted to kind of provoke of thoughts. And also for me, it's also a bit like how to hang out with spiders. Yeah. Did it produce any other thoughts from other people? Enda, what do you think about this? How do you think about vibe as in line with the concept of resonance? like resonance as something that is after myself a sound or an event how long it takes how it fades you know how what is the behavior of that resonance and how we perceive it or react to it
it just came to my mind maybe that's how well that's a good perspective i think um what is resonance that is this like you have an object you have a cup and if you vibrate it at a different at a certain frequency it resonates so it's amplifying amplifying those frequencies so you can feel it haptically and resonance is also a very scientific concept and i think i wanted to avoid that in in the title um so there's five much more ambiguous and much more social in a way where like we can resonate with each with each other but it's almost
like we can reason with it with each other um so on a very intellectual level where vibing that is confusing that is or or just like being there connecting. I also have a thought about that too in the context of the presentation. It seemed maybe that vibe also has this connection to improvisation like when I was listening to that sort of the improv. the improv, I forget what it was called, but like the sort of freestyle between the clarinet and the spiders. There's a sense that the clarinet in a way is like sort of anticipating what might be responded from the spiders movements. And I feel like if you want to kind of read the vibe
through the presentation, it is sort of like what's there when there's no score or when the score is absent, what might prompt you to engage. And I feel like you could say, well, in that freestyle, the clarinet is sort of imputing the vibe to the spiders or something but I have the sense that maybe it serves as this like condition of entrance into like the musical setting that's being created. Yeah that's kind of the idea with jam sessions right like how do you jam? of course you can jam over a theme or you have like an unfinished score or something or you can just like go together as musicians and see what happens and I think that's the beauty of that work
by Saraseno and David Rothenberg in this case what happens in this interaction through a jam session. I guess very used musical term. Do you have any musicians around? Nima, you're a musician. Do you jam? No, I hate jamming. Why? Just kidding. But here is like the problem is that for me, especially with the case of the clarinet player and the birds is that when you play a melody or you put two sounds together you're producing specific aesthetic codes right that's connected to language certain type of syntax
certain kind of styles of music and communicating through those aesthetic codes with even human beings is difficult let alone to birds right so that's why i think that i didn't hear any i didn't hear any birds responding to that clarinet thing, I think that was probably why, because they just don't understand like what is the sound that is coming through this, right? I have tried to, I mean I have played, just I've been playing for example music and then I hear an animal like a bird or squirrel or something coming and reacting, right? But again the idea is that I think Edna may talk about that, the idea of translation, how you translate, it was like, I think it was Edna, in one of the first meetings we had in the senior, you raised the question of how do you trust
this form of translation of these sounds from human to non-human, especially when it is very much related to these aesthetic codes. So that's a problem when you want, for me at least, that's a problem when you want to communicate even with other human beings later on like non-humans. So I prefer much the idea of working with some kind of sounds that don't have so many signifiers, basically. So what is David Rothenberg trying
to do here is is he imposing a musical code towards the the spiders is that what you are trying to is that your problem with it uh actually i was mostly talking about the birds the one the clarinet and the bears i think that you did in berlin yeah the same guy yeah yeah but that kind of i can i can talk a bit about that so so what he's doing is that of course he's playing on his clarinet and the clarinet in its sound is much more similar to a the nightingale than the the spider because the spider sound there was more like tapping on on a on a plate or whip
um so what he figured out is that nightingales they do listen they do listen to sound and they do want to react and they just they don't just react with uh their nightingale a melody they they they're trying to react interactively with whatever they they hear not like parrots like They're not really repeating it, but there's something between, somewhere between like an autonomous bird melody and the parrot of mimicking. So in that way, it sounds like a musical jam session.
And for sure, the birds are reacting to it. it um i was in this in this park it was midnight they are very active at midnight and um and we found this nightingale we were a small group of people and walked towards it and and stood there and okay now we set up the equipment the the loudspeaker the the the microphone and the camera We were also filming it. I can also find a link for it if you want to look at it afterwards. And we didn't want to scare the nightingale away. So we were quiet and not walking too close. But as David was beginning playing,
it was clear that the nightingale was listening and actually coming towards us. Suddenly it was much louder. we couldn't really see it in there quite small and it was pretty dark um but there clearly was an interest build up attention build up so it was not just a human being interacting or trying to like interact um with a bird there was there was this common interest like because we created a situation there um and that that's what i find very fascinating about his work if it translates to spiders then i don't know if if if it if it does but i like it as a conceptual work um and i think i think he's mostly mimicking the spiders spiders tapping around so
So he's mimicking tapping the, what are they called, those on the clarinet. Look, something that's really interesting for me here is that the idea that making a sound is a historical performance by nature. You make a sound, especially on an instrument. It's a historical thing. It is connected to the first sound that is made in a cable, wherever right but what is interesting for me let's say by with the idea of like spiders is that we don't need to make sound anymore right we just they're making sound we're listening to them and the idea of like bringing sound and trying to interact with the spiders through that sound
for me personally is a kind of distraction from what they are doing like i just want to listen to the sound like it's amazing that we have tools to make those what they are doing audible right but like the moment that we bring another sound that is made through an instrument that we make we have made that has a specific frequency specific overtone series that we can hear all of that and of course that is also it has its own history it brings kind of a dissonance to the sounds that they are making. I don't know if that makes sense or not. It's just a talk. That's why I just can't, I thought that I can listen to the spider moving like for another hour and it was just it was really joyful for me to just do that. Yeah. Like as long as I didn't hear the sound of
clarinet, you know. Well maybe that is actually what I mean about the post-human attitude in the sonic arts that in that way of addressing or doing art, there's something special there that you have you want to create that relation. So what you are asking for is much more romantic in a way. I just want to listen to nature. It's beautiful enough in itself. It's the sublime right or am i a bit provoking here i don't say that you're that nature is not even that i think it's because it's it's not about the
idea of sub-bomb it's about this idea in our deep world that now it is our deep world you know it's just about going trying to listen to something that we have never been able to listen to probably It's not because of, I don't know, it's not coming from joy or meditation or things like that. But you might be right. You might be right, yes. I think it's funny because I agree with, like, my sentiment is also the same of, okay, I just want to hear the goddamn spiders, right? Stop playing this stupid instrument that we made. I've heard it enough. but I think it's maybe looking in this from this position of again not interaction
but this maybe interaction of cultures and not to maybe this position that we go so easily to and it's our first reaction is a sort of not being open to have our culture question not to put the the what we make or how we perceive things are our categories in i actually put in this relation maybe like try to keep clear because when i hear the the especially the the the spider one the the david rottenberg rosenberg uh jamming with the spider i hear the sort of of of questioning a bit of what he's doing and what we can do,
not just him, to put it singularly. That, I don't know, the year I heard it, it was like, okay, he played a little ascending phrase and it was very melodious and it was pretty and everything. And the first, I don't know, 10 seconds and the only response to this part was like a low tone and it was very like unaffected that i at least i heard that way by what he played and then he tried to shift it around what he played and played some octaves and played some more like droning sounds and like trying to to bring the same frequency as that spider and i heard that okay that that is like a bit a bit like i don't know how to describe it but that is a bit a bit like yeah no but to me it really like questions a bit okay what can we really do in this in this sort of
instrumental melodical and musical vocabulary like what really there is to interact there and sometimes i think this position of okay no i just want to hear i don't want to put myself there it's a bit of uh uh not wanting to to make ourselves and our categories be fragile or make it it actually put them into question and put them into the display. And yeah, I don't know. Some, something I was thinking about also in this relation was in relation to the practice field recording and how we can a lot of time come into context or contact or make audible, not only these non-human sounds, but also non-alive sounds, or non-alive sounds, right? The sounds of phenomena that are geological or they are astronomical or they are much,
an order that is very, maybe more order, even more order than a live but not human sound. sound. But in this practice, I feel a lot of the same thing. Okay, we maybe on the very nature of it, okay, we can, we can only listen, right? And we can only maybe this is a sublime position that can be we can only we can we can interact with this, or it's very hard to put ourselves in actual context with in actual relation to these sounds beyond just this. I don't want to say passive, but more more contemplative maybe hearing position or listening position that maybe reinforces this looking at but not being looked at right that don't harry mentions of I don't know rambled a bit about it but maybe there's some coherence there.
Any other comments on that? I just posted two videos in the chat from the jam session with Nightingales this summer on May. There are tons of other jam sessions to be found with David Rothenberg. He also wrote a book on the nightingales in Berlin. I think Miss Young also wrote a book about that. He notated almost all the birds of Europe
as far as I know. Yeah, Miss Young, yeah, that's right. And that is what I mean when it's really not relational. Like, Miss Jan, he was very fascinated by birds and made beautiful pieces, really listening and notating down how the melodies were. But it was not trying to re-relate to the birds. I'm aware of a German scientist, Athenius Kirscher from when was that in the 16th of the century I think so he was doing kind of the
same transcribing bird songs for organ like the score for organ but he was also doing the other way around so let's say that that could be kind of one of the very early post-human musical works because he was writing organ music for birds in the way that he was thinking, okay, how can I try to teach the birds these melodies and play them for the birds? And like, obviously there are now examples of birds sounding like cell phones. So he was not totally wrong, but he was actively trying to do it as in the examples of Thomas Salaseno and Elena Morgan,
connecting through sound to the other, to the spider, to the birds. So I think that's a very important distinction. So it's not just a finding sound out there. It is also connecting through sound or connecting through something something that is what I propose as the posthuman attitude, an attitude as lack of a better term actually. Instead of an aesthetic, I don't really call for an aesthetic. Maybe there might be some kind of aesthetic, but it's more like this move that you do towards
that which is not you or which is not human. I would also say that inter-human relations can be post-human in that way. Like understanding the other, not thinking that you are the center, so de-centering yourself, if it's between you and other human beings or you and your environment you're living in or or or animals and so on i think that's like the core of of of how i see um that we can be post-human in a fruitful way at least and that's also how i see it in a lot of
artworks i have two cities that are recordings of humans in villages trying to communicate with their animals and it's just not because of anything cultural or art because they have to live with these animals in that space you know so whether there are the ships like there are birds around maybe there is a wolf you know two or three from there like that they're scared of and they're all different kind of stuff so it's like an incredible collection of sounds that humans make to communicate with their animals or the animals that are supposed to eat their animals or the birds or eagles and all those sorts of animals.
And it's interesting that perhaps like this is a practice that is it's not limited to what we have been doing or we're thinking about. Maybe it's like an old thing because already people had to do. And it's like interesting that they actually literally tried to imitate the voice of the animals in order to direct them to certain specific pathways or things like that. It's not amazing how they actually imitate those sounds. I use that in some of my classes to copy this sound exactly the way it sounds. Like they have all these variations with amplitude. And the variation of the phrase is not about how it developed, but it's what is the amplitude of the sound.
Yeah, and that's that also I haven't talked about that. But also one one point of my my dissertation is that though we are talking about post human and there's a tendency that post that is something that comes after, like in a in a linear timeline. that's not how I look at it. That's not my perspective on it. It's more like the post-human can be happening at any time. So if that's an old tradition between shepherds or whatever people who have to be able to talk with animals, then I would say that's a post-human attitude because it's like reaching beyond the human
in the way of communicating. Yeah, so kind of non-linear perspective of the post-human. So Dana has a comment in the chat. Maybe for a human, the vibe is a selective attunement, whereas the organisms subjugated under us of a certain level of sentience however problematic this description might be, are perhaps forced into a droning ongoing attunement to us. Or to our effects and to vibe together
is a human-incited attempt to find a more central egalitarian point on this wavelength. Basically, for humans, vibe probably needs to be surfaced through framing. I'm not sure why vibe as we are talking about it can be mind independent, but maybe I'm misunderstanding what you mean by that. Do you want to elaborate a bit on that, Dana? I don't really know how to elaborate on that. responding to endos. I mean, I think that bringing up the question of what is vibing
is actually really interesting, even though I hate the word generally, because, yeah, it plays into this wavelength visualization and this potential of a continuity. And also just, I think something that's worth noting is the vibe built into kind of the colloquial understanding of a vibe, besides its relation to vibration, is this idea that it has this like the polarities of good and bad vibing so that like perhaps we're already vibing all the time with our environment and the things that are more connected to the environment and that we maybe need to shift into like a better end of a more positive end of the vibe we play well i'm very happy that i chose the term um yeah and and i said i wasn't
i wasn't thinking too much about it it just seemed right at at the point when i was writing the title i mean i was i was typing out a response to dennis comment but actually maybe i'll just say it because i think it is still a useful i mean it is it is uh i think you that you did capture something there right and like people do talk about this and it's kind of like a cultural uh artifact or something right so uh i guess my question is like i'm and i'm i'm i kind of agree i don't really like the word vibe but uh just because it maybe just because it kind of uh goes across different contexts and it gets really confusing because you know i think i think there is something uh you know people do make reports of having some, you know, meaningful and effective relationships with non-human animals
in a way that likes, you know, I don't want to like discredit that in a way because I think that the way that they report on it seems very sincere and I guess my question is more like how do we gain a sort of handle on that and describe that in a way that makes kind of sense and doesn't just kind of get mixed up in all this other stuff around, you know, how do we precisely understand this phenomenon in a way that then, I don't know, means that it doesn't just get like like misused and applied in different contexts where it doesn't seem appropriate. And the problem always feels like there's no way to kind of validate when, like Nima was saying, there's
no way to kind of uh there's no sort of validation that you normally have in the space of language of you know giving and asking for reasons or whatever you want to uh whatever sort of yeah where you want to think of that but um this isn't really like a good response it's just me being even more confused yeah but it's interesting because like you're asking for for a reasoning a reasoning with a spider i'm not sure we can do that because our human reasoning and the spider's reasoning are so different that maybe we need a vague concept of vibing um sure but we we don't have reasoning with the spider but we nonetheless have reasoning where we would say that certain
things to do would be cruel and other things not cruel or you know and then and then even it doesn't I don't think we have a good vocabulary of how do we positively treat spiders. We just think that to be non-cruel is to be good or something. And I don't know, these are just random errant thoughts. But at the same time, it's like, yeah. Yeah, no, I don't have anything. All good. I think maybe not a response to that, but the first step to that maybe in this point
of view, I don't know, but maybe it would be to actually try to relate to the spider, right? To actually come into contact with it. So actually, because it's kind of like from our position, it's, we can use our concepts of of addicts i don't know to to say okay we can do that to a spider or not and that well what actually happens okay we we can do that for a human or not and then we kind of expand right okay we can that is cruel to do to a dog because dogs are cute and close to us but okay we can do that to a i don't know a bug whatever right well and then i can expand that okay no now cows are are are also cruel to that cause we have to be vegan, I don't know, and okay now we can explain even more
on that and but that is not to go against veganism or anything but I'd say this is not true to what the animal abuse that happens to these animals but this kind of doesn't, it always goes from the human position right to what we, to our categories and to the water and and and when you try to apply that to something that isn't so clear as okay we killed very very very cruel man animal that is very obviously not good to the animal but it's like okay what is reason to an animal on what is vibing to an animal that is not so clear that is tries that is very more much more difficult to formulate from a uniquely human perspective to try to translate
it. So maybe it is a question of not trying to translate it, but to formulate these concepts from this relation, from this being with, from this, which I think, Alissa, and I'm not very, not very knowledgeable in this field or very, I don't know, attuned to it. I wouldn't say it's very hard or very, very uncertain, right? Okay, we can never solidly ground, okay, this is me and my spider friend came up with this precise definition. But yeah, maybe that is the first step or maybe being attuned to it. Because I think going back to the question of, okay, what is this sort of attitude doing? If it is imperialistic, if it is this sort of thing,
or if it is actually there is a value in that. I think it comes back to your point about this filtering of the listening. Okay, when we don't want to hear about, to hear something, we just filter it out and we pretend it doesn't exist. But it also happens not only to listen, but to our concepts and to our ideology maybe is a word for it. Okay, like we don't consider it, we don't consider the suffering of animals don't consider anything and then just go over it and say okay the human is the human we can we can't have any contact with that we can have any relation so we just don't don't do anything about it and maybe maybe a positive value of the these artworks okay these things exist these things relate to us they react to us they are affected by us so
we have to consider it maybe maybe that is the message maybe that is we can't just try to pretend that we don't kill a bunch of animals every meal we have or we just don't don't do these things these animals exist these others are our others right and they but not beyond the threshold that we can just put don't consider them i'm again rambling but maybe that is totally spot on that's also what Haraway is trying to say with the concept of becoming with or making kin like kinship so yeah staying with the trouble that's another book she wrote where she's talking about kinship
with other non-human animals on that note I think I will I will want to go to the last part of today, which is kind of a feedback round. Like we have six minutes. So if you have any feedback on the course as a whole, you are welcome to do it now, or you can write me an email. I'll also send you a link so you can do it anonymously, because if you want to say something bad, and you might want to be anonymous, it's also fine. and I also want to listen to it. So if you have something to say now,