The Man and the Nature (from Shelley to Panda Bear)

The second day of Sonic Acts started with a biblical quote:

“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep.”

The central theme of the three conferences of yesterday morning was the relationship between darkness and light from the point of view of man and, specifically, in the context of Anthropocene. We focus on the lecture by John Tresch. Divine and artificial light John Tresch, Associate Professor of the History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania and author of The Romantic Machine (2013), introduced to the audience to the waymanner in which mankind conceived itsthe man began to conceive his existence in relation to the world in nineteenth century. THe indicated the invention of artificial light became aas the pivotal moment in which it was born a certain way of interacting with the earth was born. In: in fact, the light was traditionally linked to the divine but from that time onwards it has been used and manipulated by man. Tresch talked about the history of cosmograms as well, showing how these representations of the universe belong to both the religious context as to the scientific, showing how ssince the nineteenth century the land is no longer represented as an inert object that passively awaits to be discovered, but is rather seen as a living and conscious thing: this change was recorded through those decades in the manner in which the world was represented. End of a dream At this point of the presentation, Tresch has made a bold parallel between thea specific American culture of the early Seventies and some poetic, political trends developed in Britain nearly 150 years before: starting from the representation of the decadent period between the Sixties and Seventies described by Thomas Pynchon in the novel Inherent Vice (2009), he moved to the change of the perception of nature in the music and imaginary of Beach Boys (from the images in technicolor of Surfin’ USA to the unsettling imagery of Surf’s Up, released in 1971), eventually coming to the similarities and differences between the lyrics of the last songs of the Californian band and Ode to the West Wind (1820), the poetry by Percy Bysshe Shelley in which he describes in five verses the effect of wind on the nature and especially on humans. The divine watchmaker In the third part of the conference, Tresch focused on the vision of nature and matter in the course of the nineteenth century in Europe and Britain: if the mechanical philosophy influenced very much the way of understanding the world as a sort of large mechanism regulated and controlled by a divine energy, German Romanticism was based on the coincidence between human soul and spirit of the world. According to Tresch, these two trends were combined in Britain generating a dynamic that enabled the development of technologies such as steam and coal engines. A new (?) connection with the land The presentation ended with the screening of the music video of Boys Latin (2015) by Panda Bear: a girl immersed in a primitive and alien space comes into contact with mysterious organic forms and is crossed by a battle between different states of organic matter; once she has managed to find a balance with these forms, helps a boy to handle the same forces. They find a child immersed in a third multicolored creature and turn away with him towards the sunlight. Tresch has indicated this as an example of a sensitivity and a conception of nature which is no longer anthropocentric but that rather concerns much more than men. Tresch indicated how the concept behind the Antropocene idea is nothing more than another step of the relationship between the men and their land-related imagery.