The complexity of nature goes beyond rational thinking and language. So does music. In Earthly Soundtracks For The Non-Human, we challenged eight SHAPE platform artists to take a moment and soundtrack a non-human life form of their choice, in a temporary a/v symbiosis. This is what came out.
In Sulphurus Formicidae, SIMINA OPRESCU uses footage from the Mud Volcanos, a protected area with sulphurous soil and salt flats in Romania, as background for a science-fiction scenario where a new, genetically huge mutant species of Formicidae sets on a mission to save the planet. The video is inspired by the black garden ant and their ‘Nuptial flight’ ritual: the Queen sends the ants on a mission and a bustling dialogue ensues - relationships form between multiple mating queens that ensures a colony’s genetic variability.
In Parasiti 富人, ANIMISTIC BELIEFS worked together with Ceci Sariol and Obbe van der Weide to create a cyber horror video that draws parallels between humans and parasites. While they do not inherently align with the idea of a detachment of humans from nature, they focus on the parasite metaphor to highlight similarities between species: the parasitic behaviors of humans in relation to Earth are responsible for their perceived division from nature. Parasites do not only influence their chosen environments for their own benefit, but also have the capacity to alter the psychological state of their victims through various means. The video submerges the viewer into a behavioral exchange and a metamorphosis from human to parasite.
Dallol is a locality found in the Afar depression of Northern Ethiopia. Due to the extreme habitat conditions, absolutely no life-form is possible in Dallol. The Central Statistics Agency does not even publish estimates of the population of this village, which has been described as a ghost town, a “mistake of God”. TADLEEH’s video Terra Halitus - God's Mistake chooses these fumaroles as a source of inspiration to score the life of a place where no creatures can grow, one that is not “life” as we know it, yet is being kept alive by Earth’s deeper energies.
In Arthropod Diarium, OLI XL makes a visual diary of the buggy life he encountered during the 2020 lockdown. It's not a collection of all the bugs he has encountered, but a selection of the ones he resonated with in some type of way. Which sounds perfectly ok.
In Morphosis, ROJIN SHARAFI collaborates with Iranian new media artist Arash Akbari to explore microscopic life forms. The AI model used for creating the video trained by using an image dataset of wounds, fungus, bacteria, and other microscopic creatures and phenomena to create an evolving morphological audiovisual experience, a temporal lens for observing biological processes. The sonic layers in the soundscape were inspired by the textures and movements of these micro life forms as well. In addition to the distorted Setar and prepared Piano, Rojin Sharafi employed granular synthesis on field-recordings, harmonic reverse reverbs and modular synthesizers, which operate on the microsound time scale and are based on the same principle as sampling.
In Nolite te hominēs carborandorum, OBJECT BLUE uses personal footage from her own phone, random fragments of life that she has captured while travelling in different countries and in different seasons. Her soundtrack is a salute to the creatures she encountered, with birds and squirrels going about their usual business, content and dignified, in times of global human annihilation.
CÉLINE GILLAIN’s video is an essay dedicated to ANIMANTIBUS. Throughout history, she says, “humans (especially the pale skinned ones with male genitalia) have organized the living and the non-living in neat categories, placing themselves on top of the pyramid they invented and making every creature a potential competitor with the other, a prisoner of a story they called universal". ANIMANTIBUS is a body (or a nobody) that was born from an error, when a tiny miscalculation changed the whole trajectory of decisions. At first it was insignificant, but then it started showing up in unexpected places doing unexpected things, proving everyone’s predictions wrong. And, more importantly, it has proven to be uncapturable.
In Caenorhabditis elegans, MOESHA13 investigates into the life of a free-living nematode which is merely 1 mm in length. Caenorhabditis elegans has been extensively used as a model organism in researches into molecular and developmental biology, and was the first multicellular organism to have its whole genome sequenced. As of 2019, it is also the only organism to have its neuronal "wiring diagram" completed. Known for setting a decolonialist and feminist stage for hybrid individuals who can choose where they belong during a performance or a night, Moesha13 gladly took the challenge to extend her inclusive discourse to non-human life-forms, in an attempt to further contest the “otherness”.
