The lightning-filled night

“Day, compared to the lightning-filled night, is night.”
This quote by André Breton captured my attention during Douglas Kahn’s intervention, at the opening lectures’ session of the Sonic Acts Festival. Douglas Kahn is a historian and theorist of media, arts, and music, author of Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts (MIT Press, 1999), and of the more recent Earth Sound Earth Signal: Energies and Earth Magnitude in the Arts, published by University of California Press in 2013. The latter is the text which informs the talk he gave at Sonic Acts Festival on February 26th. The lecture The lecture by Douglas Kahn was aimed at isolating the connections among energies, and specifically between those which belong to the domains of geology and heliology. During the intervention, though, that quote taken from Breton's Surrealist Manifesto helped drawing an analogy between the image evoked by Breton’s quote and our experience of environmental energies. We have been educated with, in, for electricity and electrical power. We live in a “lightning-filled night” in which our enhanced, augmented, electrical reality, obscures what is already luminous and rich in the natural light of the day. The energies between sun and earth There is an entire environmental network of energies at work around us; these energies naturally belong to earth. However, we are capable of approaching these forces only after understanding how to make them useful by applying technological mechanisms that enhance our life style, our communication possibilities. Those energies between the sun and the earth, though, exercise their power irrespective of us, they are not communicating with us. Even if we discover them and we are able to use - or even exploit - them, they are not there for us, to serve our aims. A good example is given by Douglas Kahn in the introduction of Earth Sound Earth Signal, explaining how radio, as a natural force, was already there, and could already be heard by accident, even before the radio itself, as a device, was invented. If we put aside the concept of practical usefulness, a natural force can have a valuable importance, especially if considered under the light of speculative realism. This school of thought aims at the reintroduction of science in the philosophical speculation, opposing the reductive approach of phenomenology and critical theory. In an era of trans-perception, that is of senses and categories overlapping one onto the other, it is easy to accept the idea of a multiplicity of forces affecting hyperobjects on a global scale. Notwithstanding, it is difficult to identify a field of knowledge or a single practice where just one energy is at play. An energy-based ontology It is for the aforementioned reasons that Kahn proposes an energy-based ontology, or ontogeny, in order to bring up and highlight the presence of these forces which are the primary inhabitants of our planet, and whose nature is often unknown to us. Despite this, they are constantly present and active, regardless of us. This is the reason why we feel the need to humanize and bring back to our level of understanding those agents which operate at earth magnitude, especially those ones which seem not to be communicating with us. The quote Kahn borrowed from Breton is emblematic as it suggests how some ideas which have already been thought, formulated, and proposed, had at their time - and still have - an enormous value. However, it sometimes seems to us that those ideas have always been there, in the air, just like the radio, unused until the day we rediscover and reactivate them, making them effective according to our contemporary expectations, supporting our contemporary needs. Otherwise, they risk to stay forgotten.

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