What would the musical expression of post human shimmering sound like? How would it be composed and arranged to maintain its spaces, knots, threads and dynamic organising processes? Could it promote awareness of ecologies and our place in them, otherwise forgotten in a complex anthropocentric world?

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My research: making and performing music to bring the listener into the listening of flowing intra-action.The presentation of the music, the themes, the social ecology supporting it, interaction, immersion and the sensitivity of its symbiogenesis beyond musical rules and forms are as important as the music itself.

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Some theory:

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The concept of shimmer introduced by Deborah Rose deeply resonates with love for the Australian

environment and aligns with a post human positioning where our interrelationship with the ‘more

than human’ is embraced. It draws our attention to the stunning, vibrating pulse of life, and the

magnificence of the biosphere. It connects us with everything else past and present and yet also

highlights the destruction and devastation occurring as a result of our actions within this

Anthropocene epoch. Rose talks of the shimmer that comes through ancestral power, the shimmer

of the Earth, and how our thinking moves back and forth from the spiritual to its expression in the

physical, the material ‘is-ness’, of life on earth.

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Donna Haraway moves us from the spiritual to the physicality of Earth when she invokes the

concept of symbiogenesis in which living things — ‘dynamic organizing processes’ — are ‘looped,

braided, outreaching, involuted, and sympoietic'. We understand this to mean there are no firm

boundaries between humans, or between humans and ‘more than human’ creatures; rather there

is a constant and provocative shimmer of intra-action among our biological constitutions. After all,

humans (and ‘more than human’) shimmer with more microbes in their bodies than their own

species’ cells. We are out far from our kindred spirits; the energies that flow form our being with

others. And yet the human story is often one of separation, exceptionalism, exemption, as if

humans exist like an island somehow outside of the existence of others and the complex

ecosystems of the planet.

 

Shimmering experiences of social ecology delve into spaces overlapping, the borderlands, the

inbetween of disciplines and paradigms, simultaneously knotting and unravelling the threads from

so many divergent world views. Ecology, biology, systems thinking, cognitive science,

environmental sciences, applied philosophy, depth psychology, new economies, sociology, holistic

sciences, health studies, critical learning theories, Indigenous ways of knowing, eco-feminism,

cultural studies, political science, ancient wisdom traditions, social and environmental activism,

embodied and creative arts practices — in the knot of a social ecological approach to making

meaning of existence on this planet, these threads are all there. The tangle of disciplines and world

views have resulted in a flowing, shifting, always changing web of onto-epistemological possibilities

for grappling with, living in and consciously being with the complexity of the contemporary world.

 

By conceptualising shimmer with a posthuman lens, we hope to promote awareness and an

understanding of the magnificence of our biosphere but also highlight the destruction and dev-

astation of the consequences of human greed.

 

Exerts from the paper: Shimmering with Deborah Rose: Posthuman theory-making with feminist ecophilosophers and social ecologists, Cambridge University Press: 28 August 2020

Karen Malone, Marianne Logan, Lisa Siegel, Julie Regalado, Bronwen Wade-Leeuwen

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