Epiphanies

From human conductors
to electrical ones,
Douglas Kahn has alightbulb moment when
considering theconnections between
manmade and earth
energy sources
Shu Lea Cheang and Martin Howse, Composting The City. Composting The Net

Recently, in Riga, I attended Composting The City.
Composting The Net, a performance by Shu Lea
Cheang and Martin Howse. As I remember it, Cheang
generated visuals projected along the length of
the floor while a synthesized voice read throughartists’ mailing list archives. She looped the lastsentences of the posted materials in the top half ofthe projection in both sight and in sound, repeating
and recycling them until they seemed to succumb to
the weight of the mute archives waiting above them,and were then finally released to fall to the bottomof the frame. The way the letters scattered and felllooked like something between Guillaume Apollinaire’s
graphic poem It’s Raining (1918) and silt drifting
down in cascading layers. Virtual plants sprouted
and grew where they settled on the ground. It was anever evolving picture of composted posts, a fadingcollective past regenerating new forms.
Martin Howse stood at a long table of electronics
and open circuits, upon which he heaped handfuls ofcompost, vegetables and other scraps decomposing
into soil, changing the sound. He was composing
composting, cycling circuits through earth-information. After a pile had built up, he put on a glovethat had small bayonet contacts on the fingers wired
into the system. In the past, when musicians donned
such a glove, it was to generate sound and music by
gauging proximity to the body and movement of thehand, much in the same way that theremin performers
re-enacted the gestures of an orchestral conductor.
But Howse used the thermal dampness of the compost
as a conductor of electricity, an earth circuit throughwhich signals were fed.
Traditional conductors scroll through the textof a notated score in an effort to reactivate deadcomposers, whereas Howse wrote his code to work
underground like microbes and worms feeding
off different forms of detritus. There is a politicalmotivation for Howse, having extended Situationist
psychogeography to engage a psychogeophysics.
When he raised his hand and dug it into the soil, into
the earth, a whole new battery of sounds were heard.
It was phenomenal. Electricity always seeks a ground;he had grounded electronic music. It was more than agesture; it was an epiphany.
As a historian, I don’t get out as much as I should, atleast not to places where these things happen. Muchof my time is spent getting to know dead strangers,
106 | The Wire | Epiphanies

attending events uninvited years too late, and staring
backwards through the lifelong glints of the living.
It is a lifestyle in a faded and fading past that ideallyregenerates dead things like compost.
I have little interest in the religiosity of the Christianepiphany and other forms of fandom because they
deny, hasten or celebrate death rather than let it
enfold like silt. But both terms did grow in a rich fieldof words with the same root: -phane, to appear or
to render visible to the mind. Of the others in thefield – phantom, phantasm, fantasy, fancy, sycophant,profane, etc – I prefer phenomena and epiphenomena
because they suggest a remove from personal likes
and dislikes, which I like.
More mundanely my epiphanies, if that is what theyare, proceed from and to confusion, a non-revelation.
Grounded in routine labour and garden variety
realisations, if something flashes with revelatory
brilliance it illuminates a vast field of questioning,
requiring even more work. The flash never indelibly
fixes a single image in high resolution, but produces aproductive confusion.
Two such quasi-epiphanies motivated my recent
book, Earth Sound Earth Signal. The first was aconcept that occurred to the US composer Alvin
Lucier in reference to his works from the mid-1960s
involving brainwaves and natural radio: naturalelectromagnetic sound. It appeared to me to be atonce apt and oxymoronic. Although I had been hisstudent, it left me a bit lost. How could such sounds benatural when they required technological mediation to
be heard, especially given the gulf between nature andtechnology?
This gulf becomes bridged, however, with a focus
on the energies that flow between and among
things, as well as being independent of things.
Too often the optic remains fixed upon engineered
objects and perceiving subjects rather than, say,how energies transform from one state to another.
Lucier’s concept of natural electromagnetic soundencapsulated the trade of the two major energy forms
in classical physics – mechanics (acoustics) andelectromagnetism – or sound and signal. While others
were feeding an impulse into a synthesizer, having it
run through the circuit until it came out of a speakeras sound, Lucier in effect broke open the circuit to
let in air, and brought the surrounding space into
technological circuit as a modulator among others.

These energies, ubiquitous in nature, have been at
the basis of telecommunications technologies andscientific instrumentation since the 19th century,
when nature itself began to be brought into thevarious circuits of media. Now that most music iselectronic music, the nature of sparking and vibrating
is everywhere, including in what we imagine to be pure
expressions of technology.
The second quasi-epiphany was a statement by
the Australian artist Joyce Hinterding that humans
have the conceit “they have authored electricity”.
Clear enough. That conceit can’t keep happening, but
how did that happen and keep happening in the firstplace? Her statement was not limited to electricalgeneration, electrical motors and grids, but extended
also to the technological control of electromagnetism
in telecommunications. Thus, naturally occurring
control and accidents posed copyright issues forhuman authorship of media networks before humans
began staking property claims among one another.
She was not looking to rewind to the past to un-write
anything, but insisted instead upon ecopolitical andpoetical turns situated among larger spheres ofenergy coursing through and modulating bodies andthe environment.
Artists responsive to contemporary conditions
often require reconfigured histories, ones writtenfrom the grassroots up; they suffer when they areweighed down by histories already written fromreceived Olympian complacencies; they are buried
prematurely by the dead. Histories of electronic music
have been parades of technological control devices,with no regard to the energies they controlled. John
Cage opened music to sound from the perspective ofthe listener, but sound needs to be opened to otherenergies. In an ecopolitics that resists channelling all
phenomena through human criteria, sound becomes
one energy among others, and hearing becomes one
transductive moment among others. One can listen
without being a perceiving subject summoning sensate
dominion. And rather than godly incarnations of oldschool epiphanies, we should worm our way throughthe spent and dead in an attempt to regenerate newlife. That electronic music and sound perform an
important role may be counterintuitive, but all the morebrilliant as a result.  Douglas Kahn’s Earth Sound
Earth Signal: Energies And Earth Magnitudes In TheArts is published by University Of California Press