We gladly present our 5th issue of Field Notes that across 5 articles (with two accompanying audio works) explore the vast sound world of the Anthropocene. Starting with the collection “Meters” by Angus Carlyle who measures with heightened poetic senses through 20 years of his recordings in the field. Adam Diller augments his project “28 Outfalls” – an internationally exhibited short film about New York City’s sewer overflows – by an illustrated article and a 4-track audio work that is hereby published for the first time. With “United Detachment: Recording Spaces in the Anthropocene” we extend our unconventional trip through New York City by accompanying author cory ryan kasprzyk who reflects on ...

Boids is an artificial life program, developed by Craig Reynolds in 1986, which simulates the flocking behavior of birds. The name “boid” corresponds to a shortened version of “bird-oid object,” which refers to a bird-like object. Taking the position of the bird-like object, how do other creatures sound like? The limitation of labelling computer-generated species after preexisting ones complicates our relation to the former. Digitally sythesized -oids lost in the deep sea, later found and played back in 2x speed. A group of dead -oids scattered along the timeline. It’s our choice to hear an -oid.

What does it mean to possess a deep understanding of the material world around us? When so many of us spend countless waking hours engrossed in screens, “material intelligence” feels hard to come by these days. The most recent champion of the term, craft scholar Glenn Adamson, demands nothing short of a literal call to arms to “recover our literacy in the ways of the physical world”: do things with your hands, farm, weave, build furniture, construct a house! In Adamson’s historical thinking, our practical detachment from the environment is implicated in an ongoing denigration of manual skills and trades ...

Miguel Prado and fellow Guild navigator (and co-host for today’s episode) Sonia de Jager meet Diana Walsh Pasulka: professor of philosophy and religion at UNCW and author of American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, and Technology. We discuss what do we mean by agnostic when we want to be challenged by new knowledge, the UFO phenomena as a new form of religion, recent Congress’ public hearing into “unidentified aerial phenomena”, how ancient aliens could have handed technology to humanity and much more!

Amidst a climate of uncertainty and social distancing due to COVID-19, writer and e-flux journal contributing editor Elvia Wilk and artist Anicka Yi discuss various changing global ecologies, viral and otherwise. Their original in-person conversation was planned on the occasion of Tate Modern’s selection of Yi for the annual Hyundai / Turbine Hall commission. A symbiotic organism in its own right, Anicka Yi’s work fuses multi-sensory experience with synthetic and evolutionary biology to form lush bio-fictional landscapes. Utilizing a “biopolitics of the senses,” Yi challenges traditional approaches to the human sensorium, emphasizing olfaction as well as microbial and embodied intelligence. Through her research ...

Descartes famously believed that animals were living machines; he was said to beat, torture, and vivisect dogs simply to demonstrate that they had no feelings. He interpreted the sounds emerging from the dog’s mouth as mere physical reactions, just the mechanical result of air passing through a windpipe, not indicative of emotional self-expression. According to Descartes and many of his followers, animals were inferior to humans because they lacked the capacity for language. While scientific evidence as well as popular opinion about the emotive actuality and potential of animals has proven that they have inner lives, most do not speak ...

After humans destroy one another’s worlds, what will be left are the jellyfish. At least, this is the suggestion of the biologist Jeremy Jackson, who argues that the synergistic effects of the 6th mass extinction have led to the flourishing of some species — such as jellyfish. Such thriving is almost certainly not what Joseph Beuys had in mind when he argued that we are creating the “total artwork of the future social order.” But what would happen if we held these provocations together: that human auto-destruction is a creation for other worlds, other species … other others? Artworks for ...

The etymology of the word author refers to an act of creation, an act of augmentation, from the Latin verb augere. Author instantiates creation, the expansion of the pre-existing. In 1967 Roland Barthes declared the death of the author in his famous essay to state once more that the crisis is that of the author as a single subjectivity and as a term that condenses prestige, undermined by the de-subjectivation strategies of automatism, fortuity and fragmentation of the historical avant-gardes, as well as by the machinic act and by the reproducibility of the second avant-gardes. Fifty years after Barthes’ paradigmatic formula, this lack of ...

Jay Cephas reads through Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s Race for Profit to deepen conceptions of racial capitalism; Marianela D’Aprile and Douglas Spencer reframe Manfredo Tafuri to envigorate unionization among architectural workers; Stefanie Hessler reviews the art and literature of an erotic ocean, riding in, on, and through its waves; Daniel Jacobs and Brittany Utting evaluate the possibilities and pitfalls of three legal instruments of forest sovereignty; and Dima Srouji excavates histories, and present-day realities, of settler colonial archaeology in Palestine.

He used to wake at about three in the morning and sing. Sing the lines over and over, until he remembered them, I guess. Paddy had put us two fellas together in the same camp out at Coconut Wells, in those early days, and Butcher Joe would get me to smuggle in a couple of cans of VB. We would smoke rollies and sip our warm beers in the tropical night, having a laugh. Then, well before dawn, that singing would half wake me. This was what was called his nurlu, coming through from his Aunty’s spirit. The pictures in this ...

From the moment that you insert the token and the gaming session starts up, the player suddenly has multiple lives. During these games, you can win additional “life” elements, which accumulate as little icons around the edges of the screen. This function creates a positive reinforcement in the player; they have the possibility to fail many times without the game finishing. Professor Pier Luigi Cappucci, in a paragraph of his book “Il corpo tecnologico” descibes to us this phenomenom: Man has always created “virtual” constructs, learning to distance himself from the physical and direct experience of the phenomenal world. (…) mediating ...

Artist Agnieszka Kurant and researcher Tobias Rees in conversation with e-flux journal Contributing Editor Elvia Wilk.