Homo Sapiens

Nature Denatured and Found Again In his book "Listening After Nature", Mark Peter Wright examines the role of field recordings in the age of mass extinction; audionaturalism becomes irrelevant, aesthetics of wilderness crumble under the weight of the industrial technologies that haunt field recordings. The idyllic representation of a virgin nature collapses in the acts of recording, coding, framing the field, nature is constructed through our correlation with it. Wright speaks of a "listening-with", the contact zone between human and non-human in the act of recording, it constructs nature (and destroys it by the same move) rather than discovering it. In many regards, Homo Sapiens follows this idea but with a speculative twist; it shows a posthuman world, outside of the human-world correlation, where our debris have become the arche-fossils of the unreachable future. This is the main contradiction that problematizes the experience of this film: the "listening-with" is overcomed by the depiction of a world after us. The film blurs the line between the two: are we looking at a world after us, or a world constructed by us, too human ? From which does our desolation come from exactly? Obviously, cinema just like music or any type of recording is correlationnist by essence, but the exercise of playing with the tension between the two suggestions remains fertile. Field recordings in Homo Sapiens are surreal, extremely precise (as the images), yet listening to birdsong in the context of extinction cancels their "natural" untouched pastoral connotation and brings forward this unconceivable new nature, "found again" as Pisaro puts it. A nature that chirps, creaks, wooshes, decays, molds, decomposes, our traces are intertwined in bigger processes in a unhumanly dilated time. This bioconcrete world corroded by moisture sluggishly evaporates, compound materials are slowly decomposed by elemental forces; humidity, wind and waves erode all synthetic fabrication, eons will have to pass in order for matter to de-hybridize itself. Anyway, definitely a landmark for dark ecology cinema, I'm gonna need more or this. Similar albums: - Michael Pisaro - Nature Denatured and Found Again - Peter Cusack - Sounds From Dangerous Places