We have all been there, when Mufasa tells Simba to look at the sky and the great wisdom from our old lion king goes: "everywhere the light touches is your kingdom…” And we’ve all fantasized about our ancestors looking down on us from those stars. What fascinates me is the magic of scale, the inevitable insignificance I feel when I gaze into the starry night. If I’m lucky enough to see many stars though, only in foggy memories back into some unbearable summer nights in the countryside with my parents when I was a child. "Back to the nature”, that’s how my parents put it. At the time, I bought the idea fully but resented it—nature, because of the solitude and horrifying silence it brought about. The sparse moments of magical milky way’s appearances along with my sense of pettiness did add a strong mark to my early understanding of nature.
What I didn’t know about then was that the insignificance I felt under the starry sky bore the first confrontation between me and the world, perhaps also formed my understanding about human relations with nature. How can I even put something so small and powerless as “me” in comparison with the vast, incomprehensible and volatile nature? What I know is the smell of yellow spring flowers in the field, sneezing from getting too close to their pollen, the burning feeling on my skin from running around too long under the sun; at night, the rampage of the sky which drops thunder to the ground and shatters my last bit of courage in the pure darkness. I couldn’t fathom the existence of things I couldn't see or hear until I went through the age of romantic puberty. Imagination and high-school physics joined forces to paint a dramatic terrestrial love story between two earth poles, composed by all these invisible, inaudible dancing forces. Such dreams dominated my lonely nights, I was drawn outside of myself and into perspective of a giant sphere. Nature never left the romantic realm, in which the stage for electrical poetry was built up. I couldn’t tell since when the notion of nature became an abstract idea. The urge to make solid contact with “nature” again draws me into more scientific inquiry, to look into the struggle that is shared by humanity in making the idea of nature tangible again.
On this never ending journey of uncovering the unseen, unknown, ideas diverge and coincide again throughout history. However there are always some constant variables. These came to my attention: scale, gap and sense. The first contact we make with the world that ensures our existence is based on our senses. It is the foundation upon which we construct our experience and understanding. Accumulating knowledge is the collective crystallization of our sensory information. The drive for knowledge is the urge to make contact, to grasp, to touch, to understand. Yet, crystalized information over generations also provides insights into the mechanism of our sensory machines. And the more we investigate, the bigger the gap between what’s known and what’s unknown. The gap concerned is both physical and metaphysical; the former is a visible vacancy, a space that has two boundaries. While maintaining the space in between as constant, both boundaries can be stretched infinitely towards opposite directions. A gap is the space where spark kindles under static condition, a gap is the space where romantic feelings tickle the nerves under your skin. The latter is an abstract limbo, an unexplainable stage where ideas travel at the speed of light, in the pattern of quantum particles, leap through space, appear and disappear, fleet and collide. The gap is the division of thoughts, class and infrastructure, it’s the indirect communication mentioned by Graham Harman. It’s where potential lies, the electric potential for discharge that kindles spark; the potential for multiple perspectives to communicate "under the radar” that bridges interpretation. A gap can seem too small for anything to happen, yet if we shrink ourselves down to the scale of an electron, a leap in space can generate enough power to destroy a city. A gap can be too vast for us to grasp, yet if we magnify ourselves to the scale of a planet, untouchable radio waves burning through our jackets, emits emitting "the smell of god” as Douglas Kahn humorously put.
In the journey of re-establishing our contact with nature, which is one of the aspects of the Anthropocene, I’m revisiting the ideas of sense, scale and gap together with speakers from Thursday’s lecture sessions at Sonic Acts. To put the gap between tangible spaces, the gap between ideas in different scale, from what I’ve done as an individual to the collective effect on the planet, from scaling down to the single component to the totality view of the whole; from the invisible potential between two conductors to the vast magnetic force between two earth poles; from the familiar smell of a spring flower to the inaudible roaring of the earth; we are standing on a horizon that was yet established before, and ask ourselves, what would I do to the temple of my body, what would I do to the kingdom of my land...
