31 May 2017 12:07

you're listening to the chickens pecking and calling on the roof by the open microphones at Loughborough Junction. it's a warm overcast day. flies pass the microphone. aircraft are flying over. starlings are gathering in the trees above, coming and going in groups. the calls of the juveniles are changing from high calls for food to a wider range. the chickens' hard feet can be heard on the roof where the woodchips have been raked off. up close to far. you think of the conversation about the open microphone in Kolkata, the fragility of that link; on the other hand: the evocation of closeness that can arise. Sukanta was talking about the fisher communities who live on floating islands of biomass in India's largest fresh water lake. you wake up and your coordinates have shifted completely, he said. the passage of an insect close by your ear is what some listeners (P) like best, when listening to a live stream from a remote location: the boxes within which we are taught to distribute distance fall in on themselves. a helicopter goes over. or they fall open. it s not spectacular. a chicken flies up on the roof. the cuckoo maran, you think. the other chicken will be sitting brooding in the coop. rough boxes, like sketchup boxes, define the spaces from here in the upper part of this house to the back yard, and to the microphone location in Chittaranjan Colony, Kolkata, where Sukanta Majumdar operates his microphone, where his microphone, that microphone is located. as a bird passing through spaces seems at once to open and close perspectives like a fan opening, so an insect passing by your ear can furl and unfurl those old dusty boxes, sometimes poring through them, and their contents, you think, their dusty contents – sometimes eg crushing them gleefully by jumping or in desperation. whether in desperation or in exhilaration, the faces of the boxes are all distorted and pressed against each other, creating layers, laminates, juxtapositions like a Serres handkerchief, on which a timeline has been sketched then stuffed into a waiting pocket [*]. the pleats and whorls of those spatial and temporal folds are famously always becoming more convoluted, fiendishly implicated and messed up – here: immensely dense – here airy there is no consistency among them at this time of year, young animals inhabit the branches. if you were away, [ ], the sight of these young animals approaching through the leaves and out along the thin branches, feeling their way, full of fur with sharp glinting eyes – would captivate you – you would look for somebody to point them out to – motioning carefully to not disturb and frighten them back into the vegetation. as when Kaoru Saito, Ayako Toko and Daisuké Shimotomu came to visit, and kept taking pictures of squirrels in Ruskin Park. the live streams seem to give access to exotic locations, you were saying with Sukanta, in the event with Studio 21 in Kolkata, and in some ways they do. but they also make you a stranger in your own home: you listen as a stranger to the sounds of your own home – its contents and inhabitants. you hear the different elements in an unweighted field, with your personal selections [part] suspended. think of the openings created by John Cage. think of the late entries in the journals of Henry David Thoreau. it is as if you rose and left, perhaps, in the way you would leave the recorder running in the forest near Mambo – later [to] hear your footsteps moving away on the brittle leaves, the long wet grasses, until out of earshot another plane comes over. the passengers in that plane, you think, look down as they pass over Loughborough Junction on the final approach to Heathrow International airport


vlc-record-2017-05-31-12h01m08s-http___locus.creacast.com_9001_london_camberwell.ogg.mp3

Credits / References

[*]   "If you take a handkerchief and spread it out in order to iron it, you can see in it certain fixed distances and proximities. If you sketch a circle in one area, you can mark out nearby points and measure far-off distances. Then take the same handkerchief and crumple it, by putting it in your pocket. Two distant points suddenly are close, even superimposed. If, further, you tear it in certain places, two points that were close can become very distant. This science of nearness and rifts is called topology, while the science of stable and well-defined distances is called metrical geometry. Classical time is related to geometry, having nothing to do with space, as Bergson pointed out all too briefly, but with metrics. On the contrary, take your inspiration from topology, and perhaps you will discover the rigidity of those proximities and distances you consider arbitrary. And their simplicity, in the literal sense of the word pli [fold]: it's simply the difference between topology (the handkerchief is folded, crumpled, shredded) and geometry (the same fabric is ironed out flat).

[…]

"Sketch on the handkerchief some perpendicular networks, like Cartesian coordinates, and you will define the distances. But, if you fold it, the distance from Madrid to Paris could suddenly be wiped out, while, on the other hand, the distance from Vincennes to Colombes could become infinite.”

Serres, Michel (1995). Conversations on science, culture, and time. Michel Serres with Bruno Latour. Translated by Roxanne Lapidus. University of Michigan Press p60–61.