Locus Sonus for FSA.

With funding from Falmouth University I hosted this years Soundcamp at Kestle Barton on the Lizard in Cornwall. I will be setting up a permanent microphone on campus at Woodlane in the coming months. This will become available on the ecological radio platform Locus Sonus Map before September.

Katie Patterson’s The Future Library.

Screen grab from David Mitchell’s page on The Future Library.

The website loads for a little moment, – and by that I mean pieces of data travel through the ether in my office from some untouched fibre optic cable through the physical web of connections that trace us to the physical entity that is the internet – and then there’s a voice, soothing, describing a woodland, a forest in Norway, being planted and maintained, we’re ten years into this work now, it’s timeline set from 2014 to 2114, the trees are growing, manuscripts from authors as revered as Margaret Atwood and Han Kang are being held in trust.

The artwork speaks to our desire for community, for a sense of continuity into the future whilst accepting that such a time may not come to pass, there are plans for these books to be published and housed in a timber library, there are the 90 years to come. The work engages with the inevitable temporality of the times we find ourselves in. Each of us here – and by here I mean in the internet, on one side or the other of a screen whose production necessitates both the toxic emission of sulphur hexafluoride (Citton, 2016: 198) and the subterranean accumulation of Coltan and its affiliated child labour issues in the DRC (Ojewale, 2024) – is in possession of a device that is capable of telling us everything that humanity has ever bothered to record, and therefore we are bound into a temporal conversation that fights for our attention, we are aware of our ability to access the information from the past, aware of the collective problematics facing the future and bound into distraction by an economy that needs us to keep looking away (Bishop, 2024: 26).

The Future Library then, is a beacon of hope, a sprawling prospect that gathers traction over its years and is growing both as an artwork and as a cultural artefact. I download a PDF, written by Margaret Atwood to accompany her deposit made in 2014, who concurs to this hopeful disposition, speaking of the forest enabling her to believe that things like the ‘library’, the ‘forest’ and ‘Norway’ “despite climate change, rising sea levels, forest insect infestations, global pandemics, and all of the other threats, real or not, that trouble our minds today – will still exist.”(Atwood in Patterson, Katie, 2024) It is a place I hope to visit one day, and to hope to visit somewhere is to play the game of having a future to look forward to, which is where, I like to think, our engagement with art resides.  

Screen grabs from the home page of Katie Patterson’s The Future Library. https://www.futurelibrary.no/

Bishop, C. (2024) Disordered Attention: How We Look at Art and Performance Today. Verso Books.

Citton, Y. (2016) The Ecology of Attention. 1st edition. Cambridge Malden, MA: Polity.

Ojewale, O. (2024) Child miners: the dark side of the DRC’s coltan wealth, ISS Africa. Available at: https://issafrica.org/iss-today/child-miners-the-dark-side-of-the-drcs-coltan-wealth (Accessed: 23 July 2024).

Patterson, Katie (no date) Future Library, 2014 – 2114. Available at: https://www.futurelibrary.no (Accessed: 23 July 2024).

Three films about Education made for a job interview at Falmouth University. I am quietly enjoying figuring out how to teach and how to unlearn things in the vicinity of Fine Art, growing comfortable in the uncertain space of not knowing.

Triptych three films about education

Below is a fragment from the opening of a presentation at the Royal Society of Arts, London in November, 2022. A revised version of this paper is to be published in a forthcoming special issue of Landscape Research Journal in 2023.

***

Bibliotherapy For The Anthropocene is a performance in the guise of a reading group: it is a cross between a faux-Quaker meeting, a reconvening of the Dead Poets Society, a space awash with awkward silences, cheap jokes and ways of coping with the end of the world, ways of coping with living in the Anthropocene: it is usually undertaken in a locked room and as such you are not currently a participant in a session of BftA, but merely being invited into a journey through some of its processes and fragments. No prior reading is necessary but I believe there was a brochure and most things are on the internet these days. Bibliotherapy For The Anthropocene tends to happen in a smallish lockable room, with some willing volunteers and some tea and some biscuits, and a dictionary. People come to gather together, everyone in a state of reverence, the sort of reverence one might bring to a church perhaps, everyone is there to listen and think and talk and wonder aloud and in silence at what it is to be alone and together at this time of geological change, transitioning not through choice but by necessity, from one geological epoch to another. I preferred it in the Holocene.

* * *

These are the sorts of things I might say at the beginning of a session of this quaker meeting come reading group come existential climate crisis version of an AA meeting.

After that, we’ll consult a holy fragment of text taken from the utopic writings of Buckminster Fuller who once orated:

I know that I am not a category, a hybrid specialization,

I am not a thing – a noun.

I seem to be a verb – an evolutionary process –

an integral function of the universe, and so are you.

(Image courtesy of Joanna Blundell).

But before we go any further I want to dress this presentation with a perspective taken from the thinking of the artist Shelley Sacks, whose current project at Documenta in Kassel has been seeking to continue the work of her teacher Joseph Beuys. She states that there is a misconception around our conventional understanding of the notion of aesthetics, a misconception that can be easily addressed by considering its forgotten antonym – anaesthetics. To be anaesthetised is to be numbed, to be dead to the world, so that one could rip a tooth out without pain, or repair an injury or so on, to be aesthetised then, to be concerned with aesthetics, is to feel. So try not necessarily, to think it… try to feel this presentation.

***

Below is a slide from David Edwards’ presentation How Artists Influence Landscape Decisions: enriching pathways to impact.

Bibliotherapy for the Anthropocene.

18.15.

Real joy consists of knowing that human wisdom counts less than the shimmer of beeches in a breeze. As certain as weather coming from the west, the things people know for sure will change. There is no knowing for a fact. The only dependable things are humility and looking.

An extract from Strata 18 of Bibliotherapy for the Anthropocene, performed at Assembly for Gustav Metzger at Kestle Barton, June 2022. Taken from The Overstory, by Richard Powers.

***

On Agri/culture 2.0 and Indigeneity.

Everything at the moment is cut through the half dazed state of toddler mornings and baby logistics and this weekend, at Kestle Barton, participating in the excellently choreographed Assembly was no different. It was a shame to not be at Glastonbury, it was a shame not to be at Loveland in nearby Penryn, but by the time Mat Osmond, lecturer, XR activist, illustrator and philosopher poet had finished talking, the heavens opening on the billowing tent in the meadow, I felt certain that I was in the right place. Sat on some straw bales a few miles from the most southerly tip of England with a small gathering of artists, activists, academics and human beings who were all looking for ways to belong, and perhaps also just longing to be.

Paul Chaney and I presented fragments from our practice as a shared history of how we arrived at the ideas we are developing with Kestle Barton under the moniker Agri/culture 2.0, an artists collective comprised of artists, chefs, botanists and academics.

“Do you eat?

Where does the money come from?

1. a) Private funds
2. b) State funds
3. c) Sale of work
4. d) Through being employed

Does it matter where your money comes from?

Do you feel responsible towards society?

1. a) Are you doing anything about it or not?

If so, what is it that you are doing?

1. b) Do you plan to affect society at some time in your future?

If so, will it be in the field of arts?”

The above taken from a flier for a Gustav Metzger talk at Slade School of Art in 1972. He was a radical, gentle but a radical, not one to shy away from subject matters of discomfort, not one to not do something because he was told not to do it… And these questions are still painfully, and increasingly relevant today, the grain silos of Ukraine are filling up, Russian ships blockade the black sea and as Africa begins to starve whilst also beginning to become an open waste site for our electronic waste that we, I, you, me, us are bound up in this. The war with Russia is another war fought on the grounds of global resources, behind the cloak of belonging and ideology. And so at this time of unfurling cliff edges, rolling chaos and socio-ecological collapse we spent some time in a tent asking:

Can artistic practice effect or trigger a slow transition to re-indigeneity?

Agri/Culture 2.0 will, in the summer of 2021, present to the public a report Kestle Barton commissioned in 2020 to examine ways of reintegrating the 56 hectares of farmland at Kestle Barton into an experimental site for artists, agro-ecologists, academics, farmers, writers and the local community to work to together on new forms of experimental and creative land management.

We are having a launch event on Saturday the 7^th August, from 11am – 11pm with artists talks, orchard tours and workshops; in the evening I will be hosting a presentation of my performance/reading group Bibliotherapy for the Anthropocene followed by an off grid disco hosted by Robin Mackay of the philosophy publishing house Urbanomic. Some camping spaces are available if you are that way inclined – please get in touch if so. Further info below and via this link.

7^th August Launch event from 11am – 11pm.

7^th – 13^th Interactive Display on show in the Studio at Kestle Barton during opening hours.

Featuring: Paul Chaney, Bram Thomas Arnold, Urbanomic, Kathrin Bohm (MyVillages), William Arnold, James Fergusson, Andrew Ormerod.

The original report was coordinated by Kestle Barton’s associate artist Paul Chaney in collaboration with a team of Cornish and International artists, agroecologists, foresters and chefs including Kathrin Bohm (MyVillages), Dom Bailey (CAST café), Dr. Bram Thomas Arnold, James Fergusson, William Arnold, Mollie Goldstrom and artist duo Food Sketz. For the launch event members of the team will be present to introduce the possibilities of Agri/Culture 2.0 in collaboration with audience members and participants from the local community.

A Belgian Transect was a series of Field Broadcasts produced by Eleanor Wynne Davis and myself in 2012 as part Sideways Festival⁴. Over the period of a month commissioned artists and members of the public traversed a 400km line from West to East across Belgium. The thirteen broadcasts were the first time this technology had been used over a given period in this manner. This field report aims to introduce what we learnt through that process, and through this set out the technologies potential to arts practices that are of an ecological disposition.

Davis and I met whilst studying for an MA in Arts & Ecology run collaboratively by Dartington College of Arts and Schumacher School of Holistic Science⁵. In his work The three ecologies Guatarri (2005) expands the scope of ecology to encompass the whole breadth of human endeavor, and so by ecological in the above paragraph I do not intend to refer to arts that deal with the ‘land & environment’ as set out by Kastner&Wallis (1998), but to practice that is open to the notion “no discourse is truly objective” (Morton 2013, 4). Here the term “ecology must stop being associated with the image of a small nature-loving minority or with qualified specialists” (Guattari 2005, 52), for here I intend ecology to be “a vast, sprawling mesh of interconnection without a definite center [sp] or edge” of which we are all a part (Morton 2012, 8). Ecology is the study of a natural system and what is humanity but a natural system fuelled by hidden connections, immense in its complexity. It is from traditional ecology however, that I have built upon the notion of a transect, where ‘transect’ is taken to mean: “A line used […] to provide a means of measuring and representing graphically the distribution of organisms” (Allaby 2004, 409). In this paper, the scale of the line is expanded to that of a distance walked across a given area, in this case Belgium, the samples then taken in this transect measure a culture and the interplay between two selves, Davis and I, within that culture. Thereby constructing a transect, a line “in a sense that is more visionary or metaphysical” than the physical presence of a length of string across a field in as in ecology fieldwork (Ingold 2007, 47). It is a line drawn first on a map, then walked, talked and performed into being by, in this case, the participants, coordinators and audience members of Sideways festival.