This weekend my sister and I recorded some narration for the video sequence. I asked her to just work with the script I wrote a little while ago on Rangitoto so we could get an idea of the tone and pace to match the video sequence. Am feeling very grateful for her help, and to have access to a quiet space and good microphone. I had no idea I'd have to learn about audio recording on top everything else I've picked up this year, but here we are! Will upload once I've pieced each part together.
I may re-write some new parts for recording this coming week depending on how everything fits together once I'm back at my computer, depending on whether I want a more documentary-like style, poetic vibe, etc... There is some reference to Mars and geological ages mixed in to things, with the bulk focusing on Rangitoto and its lichens; some of this might need to be omitted for clarity, but in my minds eye I can see parts working with certain points in the point cloud sequences....
If necessary, I also have some ambient sound recorded on Rangitoto to tie the narration together or act as a subtle background noise. Will have a play around with this this week.
EDIT: after putting the pieces together, I'm not sure it matches the point cloud sequence... I think it's a little too narrational(?). What is interesting is it does seem to fit with the more object-like sequences I've made in the past (the lava cave walk through, orchid shapes, etc.); and the narrated audio does fit well with the ambient footsteps and sound I recorded on the island if not accompanied by any video footage... I think perhaps the balance between the abstracted point cloud and style of the narration is off. I'm going to see if I can put together something more ambient for the point clouds this week, and keep playing with the idea of the script. For now, the main priority is finishing the video sequences though.
Experiment video below - please note the point cloud footage is just a place holder for now while I finish the full sequence (unfortunately I can't only upload audio here, hence why it's included in the file).
Combination of narration + footsteps/ambient noise (video is another placeholder for now to test the audio)
EDIT 2: after sleeping on things, I think I'm leaning more towards this particular audio version being its own thing; I don't think it fits with the point cloud, and while I'll probably do a couple more reworkings of the narration just to double check, I think ambient sound might work a little better. I've found some free to use ethereal-without-being-overly-cheesy-or-cinematic tracks online, which I'll test out this week... Also, while the video sequence above was thrown together as a place holder, I do kind of like it as an artefact in itself (and if anything was going to fit with the narration, perhaps something more subtle like it would be the way to go). Priority now is just finishing off the other point cloud segments so that I can finish the montage!
Research findings:
(don't worry, I'm not adding anything new into the mix this close to the end of the year; am just eternally curious about all this!)
Right: snippet from a geological paper studying the rock composition of coastal and island structures on the East coast of New Zealand's North Island. Findings showed that Motutapu is part of a particular kind of rock that became landmass around the time Gondwanaland separated, which puts it at roughly the same geological age as the Three Kings Islands. It's neighbour Rangitoto is only 600 years old in comparison, which is pretty fascinating to think about...
Passages and ideas from Harriet Fidkin's "Matter Poetics, Melange and the Lichenised Posthuman - How Artists and Writers Present Visions of an Interconnected Life Between Man and Non-Human Others in the Age of the Anthropocene."
the work reflects on the impact of Covid-19 on the world as a microscopic organism; makes reference to Frank Herbert's Dune and its mind-altering spice Melange in discussion of the perception of human individuality in an increasingly visibly interconnected world; references post-human theory and the science fiction film Annihilation...
"The notion of getting closer to nature is ridiculous. We already are nature. What must happen next is the acknowledgement of our pre-existing interconnectivity."
“We know nothing about a body until we know what it can do, in other words, what its affects are, how they can or cannot enter into composition with other affects, with the effects of another body, either to destroy that body or to be destroyed by it, either to exchange actions and passions with it or to join with it in composing a more powerful body.” Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (1987).
Dune's character "Jessica is a multispecies composite– a conscious mote, a speck of dust simultaneously human and other. She becomes super-human; bettered by her use of a naturally occurring drug. Herbert uses her transformation to show the power of a life that is interconnected and aware of its Matter: she has become an extension of the perceived self- more than just “one”."
"The term “symbiosis” was coined in 1877, to describe the interspecies collaboration that is a lichen. Made up of a photosynthetic algae, a fungus, and a kind of yeast, the convergence of such symbionts upsets outdated taxonomic categorisation...lichen is neither this nor that, yet still categorised as its own entity."
"Binary taxonomical categories now seem to be much messier than we once thought. As humans, we have been taught to view existence in this binary manner, and to be fearful of “foreign bodies” entering our own. Drew Milne’s “Lichen Poetics” use the endosymbiont as a framework for queering the way we look at life; particularly through the arts- Lichen bears witness to “ecological trauma and extinction anxieties”."
"There is no “individual organism” within a “species” – life is a “microbial collective posing as sealed vessels.”
"Covid-19 has only made humanity more aware of our porosity. An organism invisible to the naked eye, entering our bodies unseen has revealed the fragility of seemingly stable structures – the human body and its body politics, the economic and social have all been thrown off kilter in 2020. What we thought we knew is changing; we are coming closer to admitting that we do not have the control over ourselves and the natural world that we presume we do."
holobiont - an assemblage of a host and the many other species living in or around it, which together form an ecological unit through symbiosis
"I believe the intelligence of the vegetal world is presently entirely incomprehensible – just as Music of the Spheres sings the universal hum transcending time and space, the beings that are responsible for all conditions on earth vibrate at a frequency we are foolish to imagine we could ever match or understand. Vegetal and fungal symbionts encapsulate what I mean when I say “Matter Poetics”- others possessing “minds” impenetrable to the limited spectrum of human intelligence."
"Realising that humans are made of the same matter as others, be that bacteria, fungi, plants or animals, shocks and terrifies, reminding us of our own mortality and insignificance."
"The natural world is conscious; we do not yet know if artificial intelligence will ever reach the same level of consciousness...However, I believe we have already merged, and are constantly remerging. The bacteria and fungi that compose most of us, our existence as holobionts and chimeras, and our symbiosis with psychedelic teachers is all really happening, and always has been. Maybe attempting to understand who “we” are, and how and why we got here is accepting that we never will."
"Lichens can teach us ways of seeing and being unlike any other creature, due to their abilities as extremophiles –they are able to survive in some of the most extreme environments on Earth, such as “hot arid and semi-arid deserts and the cold polar regions”... with many scientists believing they could survive on Mars after finding “lichen-like”... and “fungal-like”... structures on its surface from images captured by various Martian missions... As our climate changes and conditions on Earth become more and more inhospitable, like lichens, humans yearn to flourish in lands ravaged by desertification, an ice age or the various post-industrial wastelands we will inevitably leave in our wake... Eventually we may be left with no choice but to seek renewed existence elsewhere. Seeing ourselves as different physiologies may be the first step in living the sci-fi dream of planetary migration."
"All life on Earth is connected to human life because of our functioning as a holobiont. Holding on to an anthropocentric vision of the future is senseless; when we all begin viewing Matter as “the abstract machine”, endless possibilities for our future on the planet, or even elsewhere are unlocked. Colonising another heavenly body is beginning to seem less fictitious. If we are all lichens, maybe we already have."
Notes from Erica Gies' "The Meaning of Lichens"
"Lichens are both ubiquitous and fascinating. Perhaps more than 500 million years old, they occur on every continent and can thrive in some of the most inhospitable places on earth. They even survived for a year and a half in space, fully exposed to cosmic radiation, ultraviolet irradiation and vacuum conditions."
"For centuries people thought they were plants (and then fungi). Then, in the 1860s, Swiss botanist Simon Schwendener discovered that they were a partnership between a fungus (an organism classified in its own kingdom because, unlike plants, it cannot make its own food) and an alga, an organism that feeds itself with photosynthesis but lacks the roots and stems of plants. The fungus apparently provided the structure of the lichen, and the alga provided food for the fungus via photosynthesis. (Later it was discovered that in some lichens, a cyanobacterium provided the food—and a handful of species contained both an alga and a cyanobacterium, along with the fungus.) Schwendener’s discovery, at first resisted by the scientific community, ultimately made lichens the poster children for symbiosis, a mutually beneficial interaction among organisms."
Science over the past two centuries has largely viewed molecules, cells and species as individuals. Symbiosis challenges that notion. “Within a lichen...algal cells and fungal cells may experience each other as individuals, but together they form a lichen that the feeding caribou sees as an individual: tasty.” Natural selection happens on both scales simultaneously. Just as light is both a wave and a particle, the fungus and alga are both individuals and parts of a whole. Science’s reductionist focus has made it nearly impossible to fully understand symbiosis, Spribille says. “Ecology was supposed to be the science of natural process and synthesis, but its backbone is severely strained under the mathematics of individuality."
"In July 2016 Spribille and his co-authors took a major step forward in that understanding. Their big reveal in Science: many lichens have a second fungus in the house...In 2009 he proposed that lichens are formed not by the shape of their fungal partner but by a series of decisions made during the developmental dance between fungus and alga. One lichen can look different from another that is composed of the same partners because it took different turns during development. Goward suggested that the difference between the two species of Bryoria might stem from each of them having a different relationship with a third lifeform, a bacterium... After five years of work in the lab, Spribille and his colleagues discovered that both Bryoria s pecies did include a third partner. But it was not a bacterium; it was another fungus, known as a basidiomycete yeast."
"The finding dramatically expanded the world’s understanding of lichens, opening the door to other insights. “Only now are we beginning to see that lichens really have pulled off a rare feat in evolution: a large multicellular organism but built entirely of microbes—and here’s the amazing thing—without a scaffold...Self-assembling, self-replicating, generation after symbiotic generation.”
"The unit of life may not be an individual but a network, whether among the organisms making up a lichen or the microbes of the human microbiome. we’re discovering,” Haskell explains. And while instruments are important to help scientists understand the world, “our bodies come preinstalled with all these amazing apps, and they connect directly into our consciousness,” he says. “Through literally coming back to our senses, we can learn so much about the world.”
"What you think lichens are might depend on your perspective. Because lichens have the scientific names of their fungi, that can create an implicit bias that the fungus is in charge, a limited perspective that Goward admits to having once upon a time. Today he sees lichens as a kind of koan. “The lichen by its very nature exists at a portal, a doorway,” he says. “If you look in one direction, it’s an organism. If you look in the other direction, it’s an ecosystem.” Goward’s essays argue for seeing lichens not as their fungal or algal parts or even as ecosystems or organisms. Rather they are all these things, biological systems encapsulated in a membrane: lichens as emergent property. After all, the lichens that were sent into space survived when their algae alone did not. Thinking of lichens as systems fits with a larger shift in biology from viewing the fundamental unit of life as the individual to that of community or partnerships. “Whether it is the microbiome within the human body or trees interacting with fungal partners belowground or lichens … we’re seeing that networked relationships are more fundamental and persist longer within biological systems than individuals do,” Haskell says. To Goward, lichens are the organisms that are most obviously about relationships. As such, they provide insights into all of life. “Lichens are my window,” he says, “but it’s the act of looking at the world that’s the interesting thing.” Systems only hold together in the long term if the parts consider themselves integral to the whole and if the whole protects the parts, as lichens do. “That’s what’s going wrong with us,” he says. “As individuals, we’re not concerned with the whole.”
Video on Penelope Cain's residency focusing on lichen, urbanisation and architecture
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