What If We Could Play The World Like A Record?
Charting The Land Between Between Art And Folly
This is a Thought Launcher post: A bit more ranging than the usual Free Life Coach fare.
A few years ago I was hiking on an outcropping called Vroman’s Nose in the Catskills. My friend, Caleb Scharf, a scientist, had just published a book about information and we were having a ranging conversation about life, the universe, and everything. One of the points that came up was that information is alive, and it uses us to maintain itself and to grow. I love this kind of stuff. It tickles something in my mind, it tweaks my geek, and blows open new windows through which to view the world.
Once we reached the top of Vroman’s Nose, we saw lines in the ancient bedrock. Caleb pointed out that these lines are called “Glacial Striations” and they were carved into the bedrock by glaciers that scraped across the stone many thousands of years ago. As I pondered the lines in the rock, with the sweeping valley below us, the question came to me, “What if we could play those grooves the way we play a record?”
The idea stuck in my head. What if we could know what was in there? In that groove? What if the Glacier carved a message to the world, 20,000 years ago? What information is waiting there for us, encoded in stone? The concept thrilled me! It kept me up at night. To explore the idea, I would need to know more about those grooves.
I found an engineering student online and I hired him for a reasonable sum to build a device that would measure the grooves. It took a while. The first engineer I hired was in Pakistan and he kept my deposit and delivered nothing. He couldn’t understand the concept. He didn’t know what a record player was. The language barrier and the generation gap proved to be too much.
The second engineer I hired was from my home state of Michigan. He got it right away. He built a device that I could pull over the grooves to measure the variations in depth.
Since records are analog media, and I was “playing the record” of the glacier, I decided that I should document the process in an analog format. So I bought a very old Super 8 film camera.
I learned how to use the camera, bought some film, and then hiked back up to Vroman’s Nose with the camera and the device. My son, my wife Noriko, and my friend, Conrad, joined me. We measured the grooves and filmed the process. We wore hazmat suits. I wanted to wear tuxedos, but suits were easier.
Then I shared the data from the grooves with my friend, Pauline Kim-Harris. She’s a classical music composer and musician. She looked at the data and interpreted it into a violin composition.
Pauline’s partner, Conrad, is an extremely accomplished classical violinist. He was called “The best violinist in contemporary music today,” by composer Robert Ashley. He performed and recorded the piece. Pauline’s composition is beautiful and layered and Conrad’s performance is truly exquisite.
Then I reached out to the poet, Richie Hoffmann, and asked if he would be interested in writing a poem about this. To my amazement, he agreed! He wrote, The Glacier Speaks and voiced the poem as well. It’s a lovely poem, from the perspective of the glacier, and Richie’s voice and words are sensuous, soothing, and provocative.
I wrote a voice-over introduction to explain the project and hired an actor to record that. Then I took the intro, music, and poetry and put it over a digitized file of the film, which I will share in my next post: The Glacier Speaks.
Then I realized that the best way to close the loop on a project that is about playing bedrock like a record is to make a record. So I made a vinyl record of the soundtrack.
Next week I will share the video and give details to anyone who wants to buy the vinyl record. Is this project art or folly? Is there a difference? Sometimes following an idea as far as I can feels like being a flaneur of the mind, tripping down cobblestone streets of thoughts and tripping over concepts along the way. It feels like the best way to live.
What an intriguing idea! You gave voice to Mother Earth.
Great project from start to finish!