Goodbye Anthill
"Goodbye Anthill" Drone (2018)
Voices: Cibelle Cavalli Bastos, Elise Mac, Cobi van Tonder,
plus augmented-, AI- & data mined voices and spliced interviews, field recordings, audience participation..
Galiläakirche — Jugendwiderstandsmuseum, Friedrichshain, Berlin,
22 June 2018
Photo credit: Therese Koppe
The title, a quote from Elon Musk, refers to one potential outcome for humanity, when super intelligence arrive. What happens when we as humanity play a reality chess game agains Deep Mind?
For the Blind Signal Concert, the audience is invited to participate actively, to use the listening experience as a chance to a collective meditation and intent. The audience can participate in meditation, be a voyeur or by downloading a “voice” to their phone and join as “choir member” (links will be provided).
The process of developing this project is inspired by trauma and approaches to healing it. Including both personal and group experiences, as collective consciousness, we are daily bombarded by trauma inducing global news. Through an active position of telepathic resistance, similar to what a Shaman does in healing rituals: calling to the disconnected soul or fragment of soul to return to the sick (societal) body.
Instructions to participants: visualise each sound as a part of your body, extending in all directions. Allow for spontaneous free association to take place.
From the shamanic view, when people become overwhelmed, their souls may become separated from their bodies. Missing important parts of the soul, people become suspended in spiritual limbo, resulting in physical illness.
Through colourful ceremonies, chanting, dancing, fire, the soul or fragments are called back.
In another form of healing, called Somatic experiencing therapy, a process of “pendulation” is used. The healthy nervous system is constantly in a state of expansion and contraction, called pendulation. One of the tools SE therapists use is looping between resources or conflict free states and small titrations of traumatic material. This process of looping kick starts the natural self-regulation of the nervous system and a natural rhythm of pendulation.
Goodbye Anthill, will be a live drone fed by non-verbal vocal calls, tones and data mined voices that follows as process driven form a pendulation between“complex listening” and “telepathic listening” (my terms influenced by Pauline Oliveros’ Deep Listening). With “complex listening” the performers (and audience) try to take in everything they hear, whilst during “telepathic listening” the singers (and audience) choose a single sound to focus on and imagine this sound to be a telepathic pathway that they travel on. (Free association).
Each individual in own rhythm, however fast/slow they feel the contracting/expansion of the pendulation.