- [Anne] If you've been feeling like the world is coming at you too fast, if the urgency and volume of the news is keeping you on edge, this episode of To the Best of Our Knowledge is all about shifting tempos, regaining perspective by taking a much, much longer view.
- [Announcer] Coordinating universal time.
- [Anne] Like eons long. I'm Anne Strainchamps, and we're picking up our Deep Time series today. We'll be talking with contemporary artists at the forefront of imagining new ways to perceive time. Keep listing
- [Announcer] From WPR.
- [Anne] It's To The Best of Our Knowledge. I'm Anne Strainchamps. Technology was supposed to give us more time. Instead, it feels like we have less and less. Markets and information today move at the speed of light. News cycles are frenetic. Attention is fragmented. As a society, we're losing our ability to think long term, and individually, we're losing our connection to the deeper, more natural rhythms of time. At least, that's how it feels to me. So how do we find our way back to something bigger? Meet Katie Paterson. She makes art out of deep time. What's the oldest material you've ever touched or worked with?
- [Katie] Wow. So it was material that I crushed up from a certain kind of meteorite that's older, we believe, not only older than the earth, but it's older than the sun itself.
- [Anne] Oh, my God. Wait, I have to pause and take a... Older than the solar system? Older than Venus and Mars?
- [Katie] Yeah.
- [Anne] Where did it come from? How did you get it?
- [Katie] Well, I knew that I wanted to find the oldest material on earth and I wanted to make an hourglass with it.
- [Anne] An hourglass, one of the oldest forms of timekeeping in the world. You wanna make time more tangible? Try turning cosmic dust into time you can touch. What does the dust look like, what does it feel like? Did you touch it?
- I mean, for me it was unbelievably precious. But yeah, I did touch it, absolutely. It was a kind of stony kind of meteorite, very soft, some of it, and it ended up being a kind of dark brownie color, kind of what you might expect really from a meteorite that's been this fireball that burned through space.
- [Anne] And what does it feel like to hold this hourglass, this time piece literally? Is it light, is it heavy?
- [Katie] For me, it's terrifying because I'm so scared that I'm gonna drop it. But no, in terms of having an experience of it. Actually, we tried making several different sizes of hourglass, and somehow, 15 minutes just felt like the right duration. It's something I think that we're quite familiar with from meditation session, or just, we can hold our concentration perhaps for 15 minutes.
- [Anne] This is what art can do, shift your perception in a moment. Katie's hourglass is a beautiful object, but it also feels sacred, like something that belongs on an altar.
- [Katie] So the first time that we showed that work, it was in Durham Cathedral, in the UK, which was just perfect. It was in this little kind of aperture in one of the ancient walls and it was just flowing. And then it would be turned over and then you'd watch the next 15 minutes. And it's a lovely thing to just watch this ancient, ancient dust kind of drip and flow through the hourglass, and knowing that it's filled with this potential life that expanded since that time. It slows you down, watching time and feeling time.
- [Anne] Welcome to Deep Time. This is episode five, The Art of Time. So I started this series because I wanted to find a different way of living with time, less frantic and more cosmic, and then I met the award-winning Scottish artist, Katie Paterson. She collaborates with scientists and researchers to create work that can give you a visceral sense of the most distant edges of time. Her materials are melting glaciers, dead stars, fossils of ancient insects, and that hand-blown hourglass filled with the dust of a meteorite older than the sun. I find it almost impossible to describe the feeling that this evokes, which is true for me of a lot of your work. It's something about the way the finite and the infinite are held together in a single object. It's just, that object alone seems so powerful, I feel like it should generate a force field.
- [Katie] Oh, I love that.
- [Anne] I can feel my mind kind of stutter and wobble trying to take it in, and I think because your primary material is deep time, which is so hard for us to fathom. Why is deep time, of all the things you could work with, why is deep time so important to you?
- [Katie] It's sort of crept up on me, and then over the years, become more and more fundamental to the artwork that I make. And I think it's quite hard to describe what happened, but I suppose it's through different encounters, and it's through the feeling that I suppose that I can create in myself, and hopefully in others, through making this kind of work that just allows this expansion really, this expansion of, I don't know, like the expansion of taking a breath, or something that allows us to open parts of our mind. And I would say that probably 99 point something of my life, I'm not living in a deep time haze. I wish I was. But it's those little moments actually when you kind of grasp, even for a microsecond, the expansiveness of where we live and how we relate to everything else that's ever been. I just love that. I love the feeling of kind of rootedness that you can get. And I think often people describe deep space and deep time as quite, and they're such complex things, but they can be quite intimidating for some, or they can be too big and scary even. But I've never really had that feeling. For me, deep time is really beautiful.
- [Anne] How far back can you trace your fascination with time? I mean, does this go back to childhood?
- [Katie] No, I mean it's funny, in that I wasn't at all the kind of child that was into sciences, or even space, or being an astronaut, or lots of stuff. I was certainly a bit of a geek. That hasn't changed. But I was really into the arts. It was always art, art, art, everything. But it did take a while till I had that kind of moment, and that's when I lived in Iceland. It was between art school courses, and I was stationed up in the far north in a tiny, it wasn't even a village, it was like a hamlet. It was through direct experience of landscape and light and the sky, and this feeling of realizing, oh goodness, here we are on a planet that's revolving. I hadn't really had that experience before. So as an adult. It wasn't something as a child. But I've always been a complete daydreamer. I was always that kid that would be like, come on, snap out of it. And I would even put aside time for daydreaming, I remember, at my grandmother's house.
- Oh, really?
- [Katie] Yeah.
- [Anne] Like, "No, mom. It's three o'clock, it's my daydreaming time.
- [Katie] Really, it was a bit like that. And I had a little space that I went and I just daydreamed, 'cause I totally lived in my imagination.
- [Anne] So I was thinking we could, since we're together, we could kind of construct an imaginary gallery together.
- [Katie] Ooh, yeah.
- [Anne] And fill it with some of your work.
- [Katie] Yes, lovely.
- [Anne] The first piece I'm gonna add to this gallery is All the Dead Stars.
- [Katie] So All the Dead Stars was when I was quite a bit younger. This is an artwork that came about through a residency I did at UCL, University College London's Astrophysics Department, and when I was there, I learned about dying stars. What does it mean when a star dies? And I knew that I wanted to make a map of all of them, where they were and how many there were. So that was the spark of a conversation that ended up becoming this big, heavy and laser etched black anodized aluminum map that's quite sculptural. It sits, kind of tilts against the wall. We laser etched what turned out to be around 27,000 pinpoints of all the dead stars of that moment.
- [Anne] 27,000?
- [Katie] Yeah, 27,000. And so, when you're walking through the space, as we are now, you see just this black hole, in a way, black space. But it's only as you get closer and closer, a little bit like a telescope, that then these little dots of light start flickering and the silver starts flickering through a little bit. So it's very, very subtle. Every one of these points refers to a place in the universe where a star has died, where it no longer is, but where it was found exploding or dying off. And there's a few different types of dying stars, supernova type A, and stellar black holes, and gamma ray bursts, and some more. I think the thing that connected with me so much at the time was, if there hadn't been such a thing as stars dying, there would be no earth, because it's through the remnants of stars dying, through all the material that they eject in these enormous explosions that planets are formed. We are the recycled remains of a star at one point.
- [Anne] And isn't it true that every atom in our bodies, we are, as the song says, literally star dust.
- [Katie] Absolutely everything, and the way we breathe and the iron our blood, all of it has come from these stars. We really are the Joni Mitchell, or maybe it's somebody else. Anyway, but yeah, we're made of stardust. I just love this idea that we're all living in a big, long process. Oh, I heard a meow. Hopefully you can--
- [Anne] No, it's good, it's good. Meows are good. That's part of life.
- [Katie] Exactly. That's her just reminding me that she's part of the cycle of--
- [Anne] What's her name?
- [Katie] Missy. This is our cat, Missy, and the other one's Tori.
- [Anne] Okay. So I was thinking that a lot of your pieces do have this kind of elegiac quality, but there's also this life in it, kind of as though you're summoning up the ghosts of the cosmos.
- [Katie] Oh, wow.
- [Anne] Anyway, there was another piece, the one that kills me not to be able to viscerally experience, is called To Burn, Forest, Fire. This is the one where you actually made incense sticks from forests.
- [Katie] Oh, I'm so glad you brought that up, because I loved working on it, and I still continue to love smelling it. So the title is actually, To Burn, Forest, Fire, is the Japanese name for incense. And so, we worked with Japanese perfumers and incense makers for a while to try to recreate the scent of the first ever forest on earth, which we calculated at that time was in Cairo, in upstate New York, 385 million years ago, so the first ever trees to make their way through the ground to be a forest. So what I wanted to do by creating the scent, it was like, yeah, bringing the smell of deep time into your body, I guess.
- [Anne] Wow. What are the smells? What do you think, what would it smell like?
- [Katie] We were able to try and reconstruct the air and the atmosphere, and the surroundings of these very fern like trees, a little bit like club moss. It's got a very fungal kind of smell, like humid smell. If I was to put a color on it, it would be kind of earthy color. And then, the second incense stick is what we're calling The Last Forest, which obviously, we pray, is not the last forest, but as a kind of concept, it's the most threatened forest. At the rate that the Amazon rainforest is being lost right now, it could be lost in our lifetime, which is just so horrifying. The amount of life, the biodiversity in the Amazon is greater than anywhere else on earth. So it included animals, it included fizzing, alcoholic smells, and guava plants. Just the most amazing cocktail of things. And then the poor perfumer had to try and put this together into something that we could actually smell, and they did an amazing job. Because, I mean, really, to me, when I first burned the test, we were doing like several tests, but when I first burned it and came in, I went, my god, it's the Amazon.
- [Anne] And this piece feels kind of ceremonial, right? To burn an incense stick, that's a kind of ritual.
- [Katie] It's totally a ritual, it's totally a little ceremony. And it also burns actually 15 minutes each incense stick. And I love the kind of temporary nature of it, and I love how totally flexible it is. So we've been burning the incense all over the place, like inside and out. We've had a ceremony beside this old body tree. And we've burnt it from university halls to outside people's windows and plazas, and churches and chapels, and a crept even. So it's so adaptable to different spaces.
- [Anne] The thing that I'm in love with about your work that feels so important is, it's that quality of the sacred. For centuries, religions provided a vessel for our experience of the sacred through architecture and music, and ritual, poetry. Your work, it really feels to me like the same thing is going on, except you are using science and art together to create this kind of secular planetary mysticism. It is so profound to me.
- [Anne] Oh, my goodness. I can't tell you how happy that makes me to hear say that. Absolutely. I feel like this sacred feeling is, if not totally lost, it's lost for so many, and we really, really crave it, and we really want it, and we need it to move forward in our relationship to nature and the planet. And I think for me, in a way, it's nature that just provides it so clearly. You just look at a flower and think, my God, that's just the most astonishing thing. How did that come into being? A seed, or a wave on the sea, or a star in the sky. And if you just contemplate a little bit longer, then it sort of unlocks this vastness that we're so used to in everyday life, but then occasionally you have this moment of total wonder and awe.
- [Anne] So what you are doing when you grind up cosmic dust and create a work of art that teaches us about stellar graveyards, you're finding a path through science to create that sense of the sacred.
- [Katie] And the thing for me is that, in the sciences, that's where I find the most extraordinary things. You're just flicking through a magazine or going into the astronomy library, it's like this is a kind of cathedral of ideas, and I find it really hard to not be astonished. And I think most people do, children especially, and I think that's why so many of us as children connect really easily to animals and nature and space. But I guess that is where another field can come in and mix it all up a bit.
- [Anne] To me, one of the holiest works of art you've made is a recent piece called Requiem.
- [Katie] Yeah.
- [Anne] Can you tell us about that?
- [Katie] Requiem is a hand-blown glass vessel, like a funeral urn, but clear, and surrounding this glass urn was hundreds of tiny little hand-blown glass vessels, each containing 21 grams of dust, and that's the weight of a soul, supposedly, that was done in some funny old experiment where they were trying to calculate what a soul weighed, and this dust contain materials going through all of time, billions and billions of years of evolution, and then kind of touching on things like the first creatures to develop wings, the first things to see, all different kinds of forms of life. By the end of the artwork, we met the Anthropocene, and that was the moment we thought that we'll use some trinitite.
- [Anne] From the atomic testing side?
- [Katie] Exactly, yeah. Pretty difficult stuff. And what was extremely hard for me to do was to crush these objects, or for us to do collectively, was to crush the objects. But one of my feelings was, by holding these little glass objects in our hands, filled with the tiny bit of dust, it's became so intimate, the experience, that you literally held it right there in your hand, that it felt like, I don't know, I just have the feeling sometimes that it feels like everything's turning to dust. And so, the artwork was this feeling of disillusion and loss, but also trying to hold onto something and try to feel it in our hands.
- [Anne] My sense from it was this feeling of tenderness, protectiveness. I kept remembering what it felt like to hold my children as infants. I don't know if that makes any sense, but it was this feeling of love.
- [Katie] Yeah, love. I think if I was to sum up the approach actually to the project, even though it was through this destructive method, it was absolutely done through love. And actually, I'm telling a bit of a secret here, but it was something I kept to myself at the time, but maybe I can say it now. Before I, or we crushed the objects, I said a kind of blessing to all of them, and I don't even know what it was, and it didn't follow any particular faith or what, but I just knew that I had to do something. Some of them were full of energies, and so, I had to do something to kind of apologize for what I was about to do, but in the best faith.
- [Anne] I was thinking there's a concept, I think you've used it and it's such a wonderful phrase, cathedral thinking.
- [Katie] Yes, I love that phrase. I first learned it through, I think it was Stephen Hawking. I've noticed it coming into vocabularies a little bit more, and I love that idea. And I think it originally came from the way that people in centuries gone by would plant trees to then become the beams of a cathedral. And yeah, I love that idea of being able to expand our time horizons to reach our future ancestors, really.
- [Anne] Yeah. The last piece I should ask you about then. We've led straight up to the piece that has moved so many people, the Future Library project.
- [Katie] Yeah. Well, I'm just back from Oslo, and I'm always so happy to work on that project. So Future Library is a kind of cathedral thinking. It's, we're planting trees, these trees are gonna become a book in a hundred years that's written by a hundred authors, one every year during this time. So we were so happy this weekend. Margaret Atwood, who wrote first text for Future Library, came back to Oslo. She came to the room to see her manuscript, and it was just the best experience. And what you see is this room that's made of the wood that we cut when we were first harvesting in the forest and planting the trees. And so, you walk inside. It's very small, but it's quite comforting small, I would say, and then these drawers that light up that have got cast glass and they've got the author's name on the glass, and you can just catch a glimpse of their text.
- [Anne] Can you read any words?
- [Katie] No words whatsoever. No words at all.
- [Anne] And so, nobody's gonna read these for a hundred years. The authors will be dead. You will be dead. I will be dead. Maybe your children will be alive.
- [Katie] Hopefully. Exactly. My son is seven, and he's very much being trained up to try and take over Future Library, and most of us won't be alive. But we will hit a point in the coming 90 years where people will be alive and where the authors will be alive, and more and more people will be alive to read it. So it's kind of interesting, this concertina of time that happens from us, the most distant ancestors of the project, to those that, like the 99th author, I wonder who that'll be.
- [Anne] Well, and at a time when so much of the narrative that we take in is about the problems that we're leaving to our children and grandchildren, to feel in the midst of that, to have the opportunity to also leave them a gift, because that's what these books are. It's a gift for the future.
- [Katie] Yeah. And envisaging this first reader, whoever they are, whoever you are, who's going to open the page in a very different landscape, we imagine, than we live in right now. And I think it's something that's both hard to comprehend and also not so hard. Oh, here comes a cat again. When we think about in terms of family, in terms of grandparents or grandchildren, it's not so far away, but yet it's such an important time horizon to think on.
- [Anne] Yeah. Katie, thank you so much. It's just been such an honor and privilege to talk with you.
- [Katie] Oh, I've been so happy. I've really enjoyed the conversation. Thank you so much.
- [Anne] Katie Paterson's work has been exhibited at the Turner Contemporary, Tate Britain, the Guggenheim, and the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. Writers who've contributed to her Future Library project include Margaret Atwood, Karl Ove Knausgard, Tommy Orange, and others. Their work will be read for the first time in the year 2114. So, how else might we think about time? That depends on whose time you're keeping.
- [Jonathon] I started to think about the flow of time in very literal terms, taking this cliche and asking, what if? What if the flow of time were calibrated by the flow of a river?
- [Anne] Philosopher artist, Jonathon Keats imagines a cross-species democracy of time, next on To the Best of Our Knowledge from Wisconsin Public Radio, and PRX. As someone who does a lot of interviews with guests who are in a lot of different places, I am very aware of just how much we depend on standardized time. Our world runs on linear, globally synchronized atomic time, thank goodness. Well, conceptual artist and experimental philosopher, Jonathan Keats, thinks it's a rut, and he would like to break us out of our temporal monoculture. So he's created a series of large scale alternative clocks, engineered to run on previously unheard of time standards, like bristle cone pine time, and river time. So you were looking to like un-standardize time to make it more variable.
- Yes, exactly. To make it more pluralistic, to envision a chrono diversity, to envision all of these different time standards. The river is already living on river time. It's already keeping time in a way that we can observe. So it was a matter really of thinking about how to look at the river as a clock and calendar. Initially, I thought about what would happen if I were to set a water wheel into a river, and the water wheel, as I envisioned it, being connected to clockwork, and the clockwork having a calendar mechanism so that time, as we are familiar with it, would be de-familiarized and we would have this alternative clock that we could look at.
- [Anne] You built a couple of these, right? So there's one you did in Anchorage, Alaska. How does that one actually work?
- [Jonathon] Well, I guess the first rule is, don't build a water wheel in Alaska. At least, not if you expect it to run for very long. So the US Geological Survey has gauging stations throughout the US to measure flow rate, and there are records going back, in the case of Alaska, approximately 60 years. So what we did, and I was working with the Anchorage Museum on this, was we took the 60 year average, in terms of the flow rate, and then took the USGS signal, which refreshes approximately every 30 minutes. Not river time, but ordinary time. And the idea was to use that ratio as a basis for running a clock that turned into a projection onto the museum, so that it became a municipal clock. When we started in 2020, we had it synced with the atomic clock. So if you look at it now, it's many months ahead of where we are at present. The river has been flowing more quickly, and this is to do with global warming. The clock is much slower in the winter than in the summer. Day to night, the cycle also changes. There are so many other factors that come into play.
- [Anne] You did at one point, I think, suggest, well, people could adopt river time as like a legal time standard. What if we scheduled football games by river time, or what if people celebrated their birthdays on river time?
- [Jonathon] I think that there are instances where that would be worth doing. Setting municipal bonds on river time, that's another proposition that I've made. But I do think that the idea that the school year, for instance, would take not only river time, but would take all of these other signals, temporarily speaking, or that the workday would do so, that perhaps we can find some sort of time signal that might be preferable to atomic time, to standard time. Imagine that we were able to tap into all of these different life forms and living systems, all living alongside us, and we were to aggregate that in a way that essentially is what is happening within the biosphere, that coordination of all these different tempos. What if we were to do that in some way that we could legally mandate it as our standard.
- [Anne] I'm imagining a kind of biological symphony made up of crashing waves, and cicada wings, and heartbeats, and river flows.
- [Jonathon] I love the symphonic imagery. I think that that's a really good way to think about it.
- [Jonathon] I mean, you're also talking about authority. Why does the atomic clock have the ultimate authority to determine time, to say yes, this is how long a second is, versus, I don't know, a tree?
- [Jonathon] Well, so first of all, to say a little bit about this question of authority, I think that it's one of the most central questions because I think that time has been used as a way in which to impose authority, first of all, as a matter of colonial expansion, to impose the power of the empire through the symbolism of the clock, and to obey that clock is to submit to the empire. So there is a real and ugly history to time as an imposition.
- [Anne] You could also think about the way we all experience from the time we're young, we learn you have to get up at a certain time, you have to go to school, and then you have to go to work. I mean, we're not even aware of it anymore.
- [Jonathon] Time is discipline, and I think that it begins with self-discipline in terms of how we are raised, the denial of circadian rhythms, the denial of the body. Within each of us we have a microbiome, and each and every one of the microbes has not one but multiple internal clocks. It becomes scaler.
- [Anne] I mean, in some ways it seems like you're talking about returning to embodied time, but paying attention to the bodies of all the other species on the planet.
- [Jonathon] And that becomes the crucial philosophical move, using that term body as a body politic, not simply involving humans, but all life on earth.
- [Anne] That's really beautiful. You're kind of talking about taking down the, I mean, we were talking about authority. It's like pushing back against the idea that there should be a master clock. What if we didn't have a master clock, what if it was a democracy?
- [Jonathon] Right. I see this work as being very much related to work that I'm doing at the Berggruen Institute on multi-species democracy. How do we enfranchise other species in democratic decision making processes? How do we think about politics at the level of other species contributing to the decisions that we make as equals?
- [Anne] I would imagine that standing in front of the river time clock that's not moving at the regular pace that we've come to expect, tick, tick, tick, I would imagine it would be at first very uncomfortable. What kind of emotions come up, do you think?
- [Jonathon] Many people initially think that it must be broken, and that's kind of interesting. I guess that we really need to think about what actually is broken. There is an impatience with the philosopher coming in and trying to make things more complicated than they need to be, where I would argue that actually, they're not as complicated or as complex as they actually are. I mean, one of the really interesting things about the river clock is that it syncopates, or it is not regular from second to second. That makes it all the more troubling. Until I think we reach that state of recognizing that everything all around us and we ourselves are erratic in the sense of measuring ourselves against the precision of the mechanical or the digital clock. And if we simply reverse it and we say that the clock itself, the digital clock is erratic, that that's the nature of time, that becomes, I think, ultimately really comforting.
- [Anne] It's interesting. I think one of the hardest things for me in trying to imagine my way into the view of time that you're describing is that you're asking me to imagine time as variable, and I think of the nature of time as predictable, precise, because I don't think of time itself as variable. Maybe what you're suggesting is that it is.
- [Jonathon] I'm not proposing an alternative model for physics. The time that is modeled physically is real, but that doesn't mean that it is realistic, because for that to be the case, all other species would need to subscribe to it as well, and they don't. It isn't to belittle physics, to deny what physics can tell us about the world, about the universe, but rather to say there's something other than the endless quest that we've been on so far to make time more regular.
- [Anne] Thank you.
- [Jonathon] Likewise. Well, I really appreciate your interest and your time.
- [Anne] Yours too. Oh, do you have a flight?
- [Jonathon] I do. I'm leaving for Washington DC in a few hours actually.
- [Anne] Oh my gosh. And are you doing time related things in DC?
- [Jonathon] It's a conference that is with the City Institute where I'm an artist in residence, and with NASA, where we're looking at past and future of earth in relation to other planets. So I guess, yes, everything turns out to be about time, doesn't it?
- [Anne] It does, it does. Jonathon Keats is a conceptual artist and experimental philosopher who's worked with NASA, CERN, and the SETI Institute. He's based in the US and Europe, so he does a lot of traveling. It's To the Best of Our Knowledge. I'm Anne Strainchamps, and you're listening to our series on Deep Time, from Wisconsin Public Radio and PRX. I'm an audio producer, so I'm always trying to translate ideas into sounds, and I was wondering how to convey sonically the multitude of time signatures on this planet, and then I heard this, the dawn chorus, recorded at Iowa's Kettlehole State Preserve at that transition in time when the night ends and the sun begins to rise, starts slowly, builds subtly, and then breaks into full symphonic splendor just as day fully breaks. Acoustic ecologist and sound artist Alex Braidwood recorded this particular dawn chorus and many, many others all over the world. During the height of the COVID pandemic, he used his recordings to conduct a weekly online Sunday mass, which he called a baptism in sound. On his album, Serotinous Repose, he turns the dawn chorus into music. So producer Charles Monroe-Kane fell in love with his stuff and he asked Alex about the first time he recorded a dawn chorus.
- [Alex] I just went outside in one of my camping trips, and just woke up early and set up my microphones and made a recording. It wasn't great, but it was the first time I really had a chance to be in that time of day when things are transitioning from still to active.
- [Charles] How long is that transition? I've been listening to a lot of stuff you've sent me and they're long. You're sending me long files. How long is it from the transition from still to active, and how long is it, I guess, from night to day? Like what is that, three hours, an hour and a half? What is the dawn chorus length?
- [Alex] The dawn choruses that I record tend to be in the 45 minutes to an hour range, but the reason why those recordings end up more like 90 minutes to two hours is because I wanna make sure I'm getting the microphone set up before it's even starting.
- [Charles] Sure. Right.
- [Alex] That's one of the things about sound, is it's happening whether you're recording it or not. And so, I always wanna make sure that I've got the gear up and running. And if I can get it up and running when all that's happening is maybe some bugs and some frogs, and then you start hearing the first vocalizations of birds, you start to hear critters moving around, and then things sort of continue to wake up from there. So yeah, as far as the length of time, the recordings are in that 90 minute to two hour range to try to capture all of it, because you can definitely feel this peak that happens around the 45 minute to one hour mark. Everything's there. There's like this crescendo, and then it sort of settles into place for how it's gonna be, and it's that moment of energy, that sort of like peak crescendo that I'm the most interested in and passionate about getting the buildup to.
- [Charles] Yeah. So this morning I said, okay, I'm gonna sit down for an hour and I'm just gonna shut up and I'm gonna listen, before I come into work, to one. I've been awake in the morning, I've done stuff, I've gone camping, but with my eyes closed with a headphone on, listening to one of your dawn choruses, I was like, oh, there's a lot going on. At first, there's nothing. There's the night sound, the frogs, and we just recognize it as night. This is what night sounds like. And then I'm like, oh, the sun's coming up, okay, and then I started feeling it. Were you surprised the first time you heard that?
- [Alex] A hundred percent. The first time I experienced one sitting with the recorder with headphones on, because the microphones are not discerning, microphones hear everything. Our minds sort of filter and focus and adjust, but the microphones just hear everything that's going on. So the first time that I actually sat near the microphones with the headphones on and listened to it in real time, that was one that just sort of blew me away. But then similarly, sitting back and experiencing them at different times, but still having those same feelings of how the environment is waking up, how the elements are falling into place with the vocalizations and the different frequency ranges that they operate within and things like that, it was sort of like you said, it was like a rush. It was something that I felt connected to in a way that I maybe couldn't totally explain because of how often we are not immersed in nature in that same kind of way.
- [Charles] Right.
- [Alex] There's an element of mindfulness that goes along with this. And so, thinking about this as like a meditative practice, that applies to different folks in different ways. What I call meditation, somebody else might call prayer, but it's still about that sense of acknowledging that you're part of something larger, while reflecting internally on the ways in which you can engage with the things around you, and that's where this idea of deep listening or embodied listening really becomes effective, because it is about presence, it's about being present in the place where you are. However you come to this in those acknowledgements, that is what's the most important thing.
- [Charles] I have a question about Serotinous Repose, because I was just listening to that recently as well, that album. I'm a very big electronic music fan. I used to go to the raves in Europe and all that kind of stuff. And my question is, electronic music has a specific way that it builds, either at a rave or just on an album, that it builds these blocks, it tends to build upon itself. That's how the dawn chorus builds. I mean, you've been in both worlds. Are they similar, are they the same?
- [Alex] That is the essential concept behind that album, is as an album, it is modeled after the energy levels of a dawn chorus. If you were to take the energy levels of one of these two-hour dawn chorus recordings, it essentially maps onto the beats per minute, the energy level, the complexity, the lack of or addition of structure, over the course of all those tracks on that album. To your question, I do think there is something there that we identify with. Same as like in the early days of raves and electronic music, you would hear all these things about 120 beats per minute, fetal heartbeat, connection to waves throughout the... You hear all these different sort of frequency connections and things like that, and I think there is something to these natural systems that we identify with and that we connect in ways that, again, maybe we can't always put into words.
- [Charles] For me, I remember, again, going back to the raves, I'm living in Prague, I'm going to really hardcore high BPMs, lots of drugs, with everybody around me, just that kinda really intense scene. You can imagine the Manchester DJs with tattoos on their foreheads. And you're going to these raves and they're super, super fun. But outside the raves, pretty far away outside the music of the raves would be a tent normally, and that tent was your chill out space. And in there, they're gonna be playing ambient music. And I would go in there just to get away from the chaos. And you lay down, you shut your eyes, you listen to the ambient techno, kinda calm down a little bit, and it always struck me when I went in those tents that I was listening to a beginning, a middle, an end, there were characters, there were sword fighting, people fell in love. I felt like I was listening to a story, and it wasn't the same story every time. And more and more, I would go less and less to the rave and more to the ambient thing 'cause I was quite curious about what I thought was an inherent storytelling without words through music. I'm kind of feeling that in one of the dawn choruses I heard as well. I'm like, oh, these two lovers are cross, you know what I mean? Is there a story here?
- [Alex] I mean, in a way, yeah, in that, I guess... Actually I just wanted to similarly identify growing up in Detroit in the mid to late 90s, not growing up, but coming up in Detroit in the mid to late 90s was when I was in college, and being in that scene and love in the ambient rooms, that is definitely where part of this comes from, is this idea of how these tones and these structures and these compositions can kind of get inside you and encourage you to slow down and to be a bit more mindful about how we're moving through the world. But there definitely is something, and I am definitely interested in the story that comes from how these elements come together. So there are series of like, there's fire sounds and there's water sounds, having fire and rain in the same track and feeling how those things interact. And then one track is almost all woodland birds, and then the next one is going to be largely captured from the prairie, in thinking about how these biomes shift from one to another as you move across the landscape or as you move through time. All of those elements coming together definitely play a role in those compositions.
- [Charles] I mean, let's go back specific to dawn chorus for a second. We're talking about storytelling here. We're really destroying the planet, and I'm wondering if in some of the dawn choruses for you over the years, is nature trying to tell us something?
- [Alex] Yeah, I don't know that they're giving us any tips or tricks on what to do, but they're definitely telling us what's going on, and that's one of the things that you can hear by recording in similar locations over multiple years, is you can hear where things are missing that would be there or had been there before. With this climate crisis, the migratory patterns and the migratory times are all over the place. And so, just because of the academic schedule I'm tied to, I tend to be in these locations around the same time of year and I'm hearing a huge difference. I'm hearing birds that are there too early, or some years I'm hearing birds that haven't even come through yet. Right now, everything's happening in the extremes. It's not just that it's like hotter or colder. When it's hot, it's hotter, and when it's colder, it's colder for longer. And it's either like we're flooded or we're in drought, things like this. And so, these extremes are definitely reflected in the recordings, in what species are there and how many are there, how they're vocalizing, things like that.
- [Charles] I was thinking about time, and I listened to one of your pieces all the way through, eyes shut, headset on, I think it was an hour and 10 minutes. That's not the time I experienced. I didn't experience time in that way this morning. It was different than the actual given time. Are you experiencing time differently? And maybe more importantly, when people are listening to your work, are they experiencing time differently?
- [Alex] I don't know if they are, but I can say for sure that I experience time differently, especially if I'm getting into like a creative flow. So when I think about a performance, there's this push and pull of how time is required for sound to occur, in that there's no such thing as a freeze frame for audio. But at the same time, it's so easy to get lost in it and just completely lose track of how other things are moving. And my takeaway from that is, this recognition of how much time is dependent on our own perception, as opposed to it being this even constant that we can quickly mark without tools and things like that.
- [Charles] What are these dawn choruses trying to say to us? Are they just saying, Hey, you need to be the wise one that sits down and listens? Or are they trying to say something else in a metaphorical sense?
- [Alex] Well, I don't know if I can personify them too directly, but I think one of the more important takeaways from those experiences, if I were to think about one of the things that I feel they're communicating, is that we're supposed to remember that we are part of nature, we are part of this. We're not separate from it. No matter how many things we design, no matter how much we try to bring engineering and architecture, and different facets of design into the equation to separate us from it, to protect us from it, we're still part of it, and it impacts us just the same as it impacts anything else. We're maybe able to stave some things off. We're maybe able to decide how we're operating within it at different times. But really, I think that's the biggest thing, is that at some level, we're in this together whether we wanna think about it that way or not.
- [Charles] Thank you very much. I love what you've been recording. I really appreciate it.
- [Alex] Yeah, thanks so much. Thanks for listening to 'em too. I really appreciate that.
- [Charles] No problem.
- [Anne] Alex Braidwood talking with Charles Monroe-Kane. Alex is a sound artist, acoustic ecologist, and president of the World Listing Project. To hear his album, Serotinous Repose, go to our website at dtbook.org. And hey, while you're there, sign up for our newsletter. It'll give you a weekly behind the scenes look at the show. Our Deep Time series is produced in partnership with the Center for Humans and Nature, and with support from the Kalliopeia Foundation. Wisconsin Public Radio is our home studio, and our producers are Angelo Bautista, Shannon Henry Kleiber, and Charles Monroe-Kane. Our technical director is Joe Hardtke, with help from Sarah Hopefl. Additional music this week from Xylo-Ziko, Glass Boy, and Alex Braidwood. The executive producer of To the Best of our Knowledge is Steve Paulson, and I'm Anne Strainchamps. Thanks for spending your time with us.
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