you are variations is a ten-year-long study of tree water-cycles
in which scientific climate change research has provided environmental data on
sap flow that is here transposed into a musical score. The score is enacted live
– including in-situ – in collaboration with electro-acoustic ensembles. By
turning climate data into sound-performances, the research draws attention
to the sophisticated energy balance of trees under changing environmental
conditions, contributing to scientific research concerned with climate futures,
and evidences a committed stance in art as sustained experimental (re-)search
into transformative power.
Inspired ecopolitically by Isabelle Stengers, Donna J. Haraway and
Bruno Latour, aesthetically by Pauline Oliveros and Catherine Christer Hennix et.
al., the project exercises how to think and work across wounded worlds together.
In gathering disciplines that are unfamiliar to each other – linking environmental,
cultural and mental ecologies – the project reveals ‘difference’, theoretically
drawing on the work of Alfred North Whitehead, Félix Guattari, Gilles Deleuze,
Jean-Luc Nancy and Elizabeth Grosz.
The key methodology, ‘ecology of translation’, incites gaps and transpositions
as acts of mediation in a complex process of evolving relationalities between
art-music, science and the climate. It conceives of ‘trans-lation’ as human,
and more-than-human activity; creative in the making of a ‘re-lational, resonant
kinship’, based not on sameness, but alterity.
It is the experience of wholeness that is the significant outcome
of this transdisciplinary practice across a vast range of contemporary climate
urgencies. The conclusion elicits a new term for the felt experience of wholeness
instantiated by you are variations performances: /wi/. Addressing the problematic
term ‘we’, exclusive in its presupposed inclusivity, /wi/ denotes the experiential
communion of tree, you and self, exemplified in the poetic, ecopolitical
movement the research brought about: in asking ‘Can we learn to listen to
a tree?’ you are variations advocates how to become /wi/ with the world.