This is something I’ve been wanting to do for a long time, and I finally got the chance to take an array of instruments into the forest and improvise. In this clip you hear a Softpop synth, a Kastle synth —both from Bastl Instruments — running through a Koma Field Kit FX unit. I intend to keep exploring this format, not only because it unequivocally adheres to social distancing regulations.
The question is whether this performance is in some way an intrusion, benign or otherwise, into nature, or itself an entirely natural event. Is human technology the same as the ‘natural’ technology that enables all those flying insects to hover and dart around the place (and pollute the silence of the forest with their own noise…), or the trees to draw water from the soil? We tend to assume that what distinguishes human design from nature’s design is that with humans conscious decision making is involved and we have control over what we’re doing. The fact that this autonomy is only made possible through the bio-technological workings of a human body whose design we’ve had nothing to do with, tends to be overlooked.
It would be too simplistic, I think, to say that the source of technology is autonomous human ingenuity. It’s becoming increasingly clear that technology is self-generating, our tools are giving rise to other tools at a phenomenal pace, and the extent to which we as a species are in control of this process is questionable. We follow our tools in a similar way to how I was following the capabilities and limitations of the instruments I was performing with in the forest.
Perhaps it’s more accurate to say that we are the tools of technology; or, taking it a step further, a medium through which technology expresses itself. Like how language, the original technology, uses humans as a medium through which it propagates, develops, mutates and exerts influence on matter. This idea of language as an organism was popular in the 1800s, Friedrich von Schlegel called language “ein lebendiges Gewebe". Gewebe has a number of related meanings so a translation would be: ‘a living tissue/fabric/network/web’.
If technology has a mind of its own (so to speak) then band pass filters, LFOs, patch chords, speakers and contact mics don’t intrude in the forest, they come from the same source as the ‘natural’ technologies of the forest itself. This would also be true for chain saws and bulldozers. My own technological intervention in the forest, would then be a manifestation of a deeper expressive drive that has nothing to do with me, where the performance tools are the image this expression takes, and the unwitting human being the medium. The source of this expressive agency is hidden and lies behind what language seems to want me to call ‘nature’.