shimmer & loop: a conversation
Monsters & Ghosts, Earlid | fall-winter 2021
Adriene Lilly, James T. Green, Joan Schuman
What stories will help us to live on this damaged planet?
Ones that perplex.
Radio-esque, sonic-wealthy artistry is a place to spiral in an audible loop. Three artists converge around the theme of fear.
Fear isn’t a bad thing. Nor is greed for a more regenerative process of healing our global wounds born from obscene thirsts. Vigilance is the job of the artist
Shimmer is an entanglement. Shimmer is an encounter and transformation. It’s how things bump next to each other. It’s a whirlpool.
We’re considering an entanglement with Paul Kingsnorth’s text, Beast—its blank pages and loops. It’s a kind of fable or parable, depending on if you think the protagonist is an animal or the landscape. The danger is dichotomy: fear opposed to hope or conquering. Perhaps we can find solace in each, not rooted in any of the divisions. The animal, says Kingsnorth, is not sinister; rather it’s vigilant, watching.
~ shimmer & loop, audio mix, Joan Schuman
~ VLF signals recorded in the Salar de Atacama, Chile’s biggest salt flats and largest source of lithium, from Radiation Day; credits: Anna Friz & Rodrigo Ríos Zunino
~ to listen to each of these artists’ works, visit Earlid
…you will understand soon enough that this world is a great animal, alive and breathing, that we walk through it, we breathe with it, we are its breath …
Paul Kingsnorth, Beast
featured online, on air, in festivals
2023 | Radiophrenia: A temporary art radio station, Centre for Contemporary arts, Glasgow
2022 | Air on Air, presented by Datscha Radio, live broadcast festival, Finland; curator: Gabi Schaffner
