SoundCamp is an international event that takes place for International Dawn Chorus Day run by these lovely people in London, I run the Cornish leg of the presentation from an off grid sanctuary called End of The World Garden designed and embedded by the artist Paul Chaney.
Fuji Instax images from SoundCamp 2017.
Below is an extract from Being – Listening – Embedding published by SoundCamp.
Full Text as PDF: Being_Listening_Embedding
End of The World Garden was once a field, not so long ago, a meagre 15 years, not even a geological blink, barely perceptible, it was just a field, part of the green desert of anthropocentric industrialised agriculture. It is now a two-acre forest garden and a horticultural facility and its main protagonist and pruner, the artist Paul Chaney states that “no matter how developed the sphere of technology and human cognition becomes, the physical human body still exists within the biotic sphere, nested inside a web of complicity, and irrevocably intertwined with the systems of the planet”(Chaney, 2012). The Garden exists then, to remind us of this, and increasingly to offer audiences, campers, associates and rebels the opportunity to remind themselves of this. To step into the Garden is to step into a world where that great othering phrase Nature has been forcibly abandoned by the exhausting entropic demands of co-existence. Felix Guattari once wrote that “ecology needs to stop being associated with the image of a small nature-loving minority or with qualified specialists” (Guattari, 2005) and the Garden is a place where art, politics and ecology are colliding, colluding and remaking the world out of the ugly horror of human and non-human interactions, it is an anti-romantic place for co-existence and DIY culture, and all the mundanity that entails, whilst simultaneously retaining the capacity to be utterly sublime, a place of irrefutable everyday beauty.
SoundCamp opens the Garden to the world, and the world to the Garden. For three years now, the artist Bram Thomas Arnold has hosted an overnight event, quietly opening the gates to the garden ever wider each year for 24 hours of being, listening, embedding and attempts at live streaming that are intermittently successful. In the same way the garden is forever a work in progress, live streaming a global dawn from a hundred different global locations is not an exact science. It is a story, a dream, a process of myth making, and an act of romantic conceptualism, which Jorg Heiser categorises as a given form that, by “using particularly few aesthetic interventions or conceptual instructions, a particularly large number of possibilities for thinking beyond this choice [can emerge]” (Heiser, 2007).
Some tapes were made of SoundCamp’s 2020 dawn chorus available through the #ArtistSupportPledge on my Instagram
