AMMAN + AUGUSTIJN 2024 – 2025
Overall Concept
Translating Earth’s hidden messages into sound installation. We will compose a soundtrack for a multi-media exhibition attempting to translate the invisible messages from the Earth. We would like to listen to the Earth’s songs at different ecological epochs by taking data from materials and rock samples, as well as radio signals from earth’s magnetic field interacting with the cosmic radiation and solar storms. The European Space Agency’s ESA Swarm satellites records these transmissions for example. By tuning into these soundscapes, the voice of the Earth from different eons becomes discernible through the aid of researchers, AI data analysis, and our work: The Earth Sings To Us.
Transforming the sound bites of the earth’s electromagnet field into a moving soundtrack. The sound of the electro magnetic forcefields protecting the earth can be perceived as eery when heard in raw transcribed format. By transfiguring these resonances into a beautiful healing audio composition helps visitors identify and relate with the foundational, invisible forces inherently moving life on this planet.
Invigorating magnetic resonance data with artistic research, utilising AI’s Pattern Recognition, we seek to create spacial-audible understandings of life on earth. While recognizing unknowns, such as the Devonian period, in contrast to known variables, our research findings aim to create soundscape for viewers to temporally experience a meaningful relationship with ephemeral messages from the earth to aid humanity in reimagining beautiful and benevolent futures. In this way, that which is often missed being right in front of us becomes an eloquent and sustainable solution generator.
Software Resources For Visualisations
Goldspot LithoLens
ChatGPT
Datarock
Driver AI
OreFox
RadiXplore
Budget
Collaborate with EPFL’s researchers in Audio Processing and Digital Acoustics, Audiovisual Communications Laboratory, Lab in Acoustics, Laboratory of Wave Engineering, among other humanities, sciences, technologies and publicity departments to create a soundscape used in a multimedia installation. By utilising on-site resources such as projectors, the given pavilion space, and audio-visual equipment, our project budget will focus on the editing, programming, and composition elements of the soundscape and acoustic scenography (which we can also fabricate).
3-Month Timeline
Month 1: Gather and organise samples and data, photography and video of nature landscapes, and explore materials and performance concepts. Outreach to researchers and collaborative partners.
Month 2: Outreach to researchers and relevant collaborative partners including associates outside of EPFL. Editing samples, data, photography, video, and iterate material and performance concepts.
Month 3: Refinement of the soundscapes and multimedia materials. Testing and setup of sound installation and scenography.
Magnetic Signals Battle With a Solar Storm
2006, Ernst Reijseger, Album: Requiem for a Dying Planet (Music for Two Films by Werner Herzng: The White Diamond and the Wild Blue Yonder)
Mola Sylla, vocals, m’bira, xalam
Voches de Sardinna: Tenore e cuncordu de Orosei:
Patricio Mura, voche
Gianluca Frau, voche e contra
Mario Siotto, bassu
Piero Pala, voche e mesovoche
Massimo Roych, voche e mezzovoche
Recorded at Yellow Cab Studios, Paris, France, June 12,13, 2004
Bauer Studios Ludwigsburg, October 10, 2004
Fluxx Tonnstudio, Munich, March 12, 2006
A result of a fortuitous collaboration between German filmmaker Werner Herzog and Dutch avant-garde cellist Ernst Reijseger, REQUIEM FOR A DYING PLANET is an autonomous album created from score recordings, remixed by Reijseger and producer Stefan Winter, of the Herzog films THE WILD BLUE YONDER and THE WHITE DIAMOND. Combining Reijseger’s formidable skills in the grey regions between jazz, improvised, and chamber music, with the mesmerizing vocal talents of Senegalese singer Mola Sylla and Sardinian vocal choir Voches de Sardinna, the album covers an extraordinarily wide range of moods and textures, from vaguely liturgical atmospheres to threatening drones to delicate percussive vignettes–eliciting a mysterious aura contemplative of planet Earth’s hereafter.
Lyrics:
Thank you, Lord
Dank sei Dir, Herr
Thank you, Lord
Dank sei Dir, Herr
You have led your people with you
Du hast Dein Volk mit Dir geführt
Israel across the sea
Israel hindurch das Meer
It passed through like a herd
Wie eine Herde zog es hindurch
Lord, your hand protected it
Herr Deine Hand schützte es
In your goodness you gave him salvation
In Deiner Güte gabst Du ihm Heil
Thank you, Lord
Dank sei Dir, Herr
Thank you, Lord
Dank sei Dir, Herr
You have led your people with you
Du hast Dein Volk mit Dir geführt
Israel across the sea
Israel hindurch das Meer
Motivation
We are applying to the EPFL residency to generate visual and spacial works, as based on ongoing international magnetic resonance research, openly providing the public nuanced perspectives within the spectrum of ongoing anthropogenic and naturogenic collected data.
Our works map out these geologically rooted perspectives, illuminating beneficial ways researchers and AI based algorithm programs work together. Our aim is to use this 3-month residency to conduct research and create these works that furthermore serve to shape the ontological building blocks needed for our future projects.
We see the use of geologically rooted perspectives improving the safety, sustainability, beauty, and harmony of relationships between people and the environment. Analyzing such research and collected data, as revealed through our artworks in the exhibition pavilion, informs how AI may help mitigate logical error and cognitive bias in humanity’s effort to create sustainable usage of earth’s resources, energy generation, civil engineering, and architecture of natural and built environments.
By applying to the Open Transdisciplinary track, we seek support of the College of Humanities and EPFL Pavilions, to work with the departments of Soil Mechanics Laboratory (LMS) and Rock Mechanics Laboratory (LMR), Geometric Computing Laboratory (GCM), Scientific Imaging, and Center for Climate Impact and Action (CLIMACT).
