the ether swaddles me

Documentation from the workshop I facilitated with musicians-in-residence at Omi International Arts Center on August 20, 2016.

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I experienced something quite uncanny today. When testing a transmission - of sounds of walking & drawing - the audio that came through the radio didn’t sound like the original recording at all. Rather, it eerily resembles the audio cassette a friend let me borrow that is of womb sounds - the purpose of which is to soothe the newborn to sleep with this familiar sonic environment.

Here are 3 tracks to compare:

01 an excerpt of the original audio track that I was broadcasting

02 an excerpt of what actually came through the radio

03 an excerpt of a digitized version of the cassette tape of womb sounds

Original audio track.

08/16/2016

Surrounded on all sides by air, ether, atmosphere, electromagnetism, light, waves, particles, carbon dioxide emitted from trees, signals

01 Again, from Jennifer Gabrys, “Atmospheres of Communication”:

"The space that wireless communications seems to cancel from view -- the ether, air, or atmosphere -- then emerges here as a necessary area of investigation. This hazy, electric, and intermediary space is, by many accounts, the medium that enables us to communicate in the first place” (52). 

02 And, in speaking of clouds in relation to the ever pervasive Cloud, Gabrys states:

“Clouds appear to be at once material and immaterial, emerging through a simultaneous process of formation and dissolution. They are visible only to become invisible, spectres of transformation. Airborne and ephemeral, they also graze structures and deposit residue. Clouds layer onto other architectures, moving through and transforming these seemingly impermeable forms” (56)

03 The infamous case of Schrödinger’s Cat; Or, distinctions in what is meant by “blurry”:

“A cat is penned up in a steel chamber, along with the following diabolical device (which must be secured against direct interference by the car): in a Geiger counter there is a tiny bit of radioactive substance, so small, that perhaps in the course of one hour one of the atoms decays, but also, with equal probability, perhaps none; if it happens, the counter tube discharges and through a relay releases a hammer which shatters a small flask of hydrocyanic acid. If one has left this entire system to itself for an hour, one would say that the cat still lives if meanwhile no atom has decayed. The first atomic decay would have poisoned it. The ψ-function of the entire system would express this by having in it the living and the dead cat (pardon the expression) mixed or smeared out in equal parts.

“It is typical of these cases that an indeterminacy originally restricted to the atomic domain becomes transformed into macroscopic indeterminacy, which can then be resolved by direct observation. That prevents us from so naively accepting as valid a “blurred model” for representing reality. In itself it would not embody anything unclear or contradictory. There is a difference between a shaky or out-of-focus photograph and a snapshot of clouds and fog banks.”  ~~ Erwin Schrödinger, “The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanic,” 1935, quoted in Barad (2007), 277.

04 RFID tags, objects & information

01 A discussion about the difficulty of discerning the “medium” - here “medium” ambiguously refers to art mediums and physical medium, that which waves travel in:

“But the apparatus, or medium, is even more than its raw material. It also includes economic, political, and social contexts; spatial and temporal registers; cultural practices and modes of circulation. [...] While the “medium” may acquire its distinctiveness by its instantiation and use -- a radio, for instance, conceived of as a certain frequency, broadcasts, and a transmitter encased in a black plastic box with antenna and dial -- it also inhabits a larger landscape that spans from the history of wireless to Clear Channel.” ~~ Jennifer Gabrys, “Atmospheres of Communication” in The Wireless Spectrum: The Politics, Practices, and Poetics of Mobile Media, eds. Barbara Crow, Michael Longford, Kim Sawchuk (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), 53.

02 Niels Bohr’s response to Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen’s 1935 paper “Can Quantum-Mechanical Descriptions of Physical Reality Be Considered Complete?” which claimed to solve the uncertainty principle by measuring one system with a correlated one, thereby not “disturbing” the system under examination, as quoted and described in Karen Barad Meeting the Universe Halfway: