“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Friday, October 14, 2016

We Are All Mermaids: QSO Lens, The Video (with Tim's words)

I'm so so honored and so deeply proud to have been a small part of this project. Part of it as you'll see is that Škarnulytė transmogrifies herself into a mermaid and interacts with a nuclear sub in deep freezing Arctic water. Just the commitment and the bravery of that blows my mind every time I think about it, which is a lot.

Another part of it is that Škarnulytė opens our ears to entities and dimensions far beyond the human, such as quasars, and links them with massive terrestrial beings such as glaciers and mountains. The result is a deep and complex engagement with our contemporary, globally warming world of mass extinction, where we're all figuring out in different ways how to relate differently with nonhuman beings.

In the end, a lifeform is always a hybrid, a being endowed with some X-power such as being able to breathe for a few seconds out of water. That's how evolution works. Spectrally. We are all mermaids.

So I wrote a text that you'll hear some of, read by a female computer voice. When I make music I often sound better singing as a woman, go figure, so I like to tweak the formant and pitch and suchlike of my recorded voice. Sounds better.

You can hear my lecture about it in Vilnius here.


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