INTERSPECIES FUSION FREQUENCY (Psychosonic Therapy for Species Loneliness, 2022)
32 channel audio, fog, light, herbal scent
We animals not only live in different spatial scales, but also in different temporal scales. The smaller a creature and the faster its metabolic rate, the slower it perceives light, movement and sound. The installation takes the habitat of a meadow as a starting point to let us shift from human to other perceptions of time.
The playback speed of different animal recordings is globally slowed down, continuously from 100% to 10% and accelerated again to 100%. The signals of the animals repeat continuously and always remain in the same position in space. Due to the varying speed, new frequencies and details of the signals become audible. The cycle lasts 30 minutes. The frequency of the light color is also subtly slowed down and sped up again. The recorded animals are ordinary: birds (gorcrow, blackbird, yellowhammer, great tit), wild bees, grasshoppers, bats, mice, a deer, and a human, as well as a church bell in the distance. The installation offers a psychosonic therapy for "species loneliness"— that "sense of isolation and sadness that comes from human alienation from other species and their extinction" (Robert Macfarlane). The work invites us to experience biodiversity as a multiplicity of being-in-the-world while discovering shared commonalities across species.
The high-resolution field recordings were made on a meadow in my home village of Lobsann (Alsace, France), a meadow in St. Imier (Jura, Switzerland), and isolated archival recordings of other animals from these habitats. The recordings from St. Imier were made during an artist residency at "La Dépendance" in the summer of 2022.
Realized at ZiMMT Leipzig, December 2022
