Book – Living Earth: Field Notes from the Dark Ecology Project 2014-2016

Format: 17 x 24 cm Edited by Mirna Belina and Sonic Acts Published by Sonic Acts Press, Amsterdam Designed by Arthur Roeloffzen Book, paperback, 256 pp., English text, illustrated Sonic Acts 2016 €19.50 Living Earth: Field Notes from the Dark Ecology Project 2014-2016 is a book filled with ideas, conversations, lectures, and documentation relating to commissioned installations, sound walks, concerts and performances made for and during the Dark Ecology project. This three-year project, a collaboration between Sonic Acts and the Norwegian curator Hilde Methi, was held from 2014 to 2016 in different places in Norway and Russia and included three curated ‘Journeys’. Living Earth is a textual and visual recreation of these research trips to the Barents Region, from Kirkenes and Svanvik in Norway to Nikel, Zapolyarny and Murmansk in Russia. The book was inspired by Timothy Morton’s concept of ‘dark ecology’ and his philosophy of ‘ecology without Nature’. Morton offers a radical criticism of the modernist way of thinking about nature as something outside of us, and instead proposes an interconnected ‘mesh’ of all living and non-living objects. He ruminates on this idea in his essay for Living Earth entitled ‘What Is Dark Ecology’, stating at the outset that ecological awareness is ‘weird weirdness’. As a catalogue of texts and visual essays from the Dark Ecology project, Living Earth not only engages in a vibrant conversation with the previous Sonic Acts book The Geologic Imagination, but is also an introduction to the ongoing contemporary debates about the nature, ecology, art and ‘mesh’ that we live in.