Elephant Meditations

sound installation
2019

ripstop and oxford fabric, synthetic grass, air blowers, metal plates, sound exciters, contact mics, amplifier, relay-systems, arduinos


A former factory hall gets transformed into a mysterious feedback system »inhabited« by a peculiar (nylon) organism which fills itself up with air only to empty itself once again, in a cycle without pause. A »lab« on the second floor appears to be gathering information that seems to stand in some causal, but yet unfathomable relationship (at least for the beholder) to the rising and falling of the organism in the exhibition space.





exhibition for bonn hoeren´s sonotopia 2019 award

all photos above: Simon Vogel / copyright by the photographer and bonn hoeren

Bonn 2109

elephant meditations*

The life of objects, being alive or inanimate is something I have put my attention in the latest years, or perhaps since I got use of reason, but now I am finally trying to articulate this idea with some theoretical support. From new ways of perceiving contemporary philosophical knowledge production to new ways of transmitting art that deals with a universal environment that could not be anymore. Who knows.
Many examples in literature of objects being the narrative voice of a novel, first person tales from a door, a kettle; or also animals, a cat as a narrator of the life they perceive.

Can non-human entities hear or listen?, they definitely can produce sound, vocalize some kind of standpoint or perspective from their own finitude of aptitudes and their potentials. But, is it not the same with humans? We also have a limited amount of sounds we can produce and that we can practically listen. Maybe other type of intelligence that are not human can arise from the starting point of expanding a sonic knowledge that is not only human. All entities and their own limitations to vocalize and perceive sound.

Elephants, for instance, are a great reference in terms of a being that uses the auditory system in a very complex way, having intricated inputs and outputs of noise compared to many other perceptual apparatus to orientate in a world of only a few known sound realities. Zoological studies have been searching for a proper way of making real sense of animal cognitive experience, and we know more or less how to relate to all these findings but there would be always a real gap where the unknown resides.

Slime molds, in the other hand, are creatures that were considered as fungus not too long ago. Now being considered as one of the many species catalogued in the protista kingdom. The kingdom of all the “others”, not animal, not plant, not fungus and not bacteria.
By ways of a long close study of an ever mutating culture of slime molds, mainly one called Physarum Polysephalum, I could get close to the ways of how this organism develop its many heads in order to get nutrition and the right temperature and moisture to endure life.

There are many experiments where Physarum is analysed to understand how and if they are really listening to its environment. I am not going to show here some of the findings of these experiences. I ll try to vocalize by ways of a sound art installation, a very specific kind of science fictional narrative, where there are no more elephants in the room, rather a healthy unicelular organism with thousands of nuclei:

A yellow organism filled with air fluctuates non-stop in the center of a long abandoned lab.
Several sonic proves seems to be auscultating the state of this non-human being.
Up in a second floor there is a control room where an operator was supposed to be monitoring the changes in growth of the yellow entity, an operator that is indeed long time gone, leaving a scene where surprisingly there is still a symbiotic and functioning working force between electronic and a sort of organic fabric.

Somehow everything is still kept existing on its own, producing sounds that are perhaps markers showing that this whole bio-feedback system is still testing not only its own autonomy, but more over, a sounding collective working environment where all actors have found their own bandwidth in a whole soundscape of the lab.

This is many years in advance from now, an era where the non-linearity of time takes over, questioning the human position in a universe of complex manifold entities living in parallel.

One can question also the fact of knowing what is organic and what artificial, let alone proving animated sound as a being in itself could be having both characteristics at the same time.


Julio Lugon


…

*a very fictional elephant species went extinct from the face of the earth at the time, therefore making impossible for any of its members to inhabit any space or room whatsoever.

Ref. video:

Nuclear Power Plant Abandoned Inside the Control Room POWER STILL ON :
(Youtube: „Exploring with Rachel“ Published on Oct 21, 2016)
14,226 views (30.08.19)

Video description: This multi BILLION dollar plant now sits abandoned for close to 30 years now. The site is huge containing several levels that has pipes snaking throughout it along with other random workings of inside the plant. In some sort of twisted reality it's almost like an alien mothership that's landed and now sits dormant stalled in time...

video: Julio Lugon (microscope) Marc Hönninger (edition)

video: Marc Hönninger