Prehistoric Harmony

“The rational mind tends to always favor the most immediate solution. And immediate solutions for our world are not necessarily the best ones because they tend to ignore the deeper complexity, all of the circuits of connection that we would call an ecology. So we need both. We need the rational mind to try to produce ways in which we could be somewhat be assured of the accuracy of our storytelling, but we also need the other modes of storytelling to remind us of all the things that are left out of that picture…”

An interview that starts with bugs and ends with psychedelics, the role of art, altered consciousness and our evolution as a species. Along the way David also talks about the non-human mind, listening and field recording, story telling, chaotic systems and nonlinear circuits, bark beetles and collective consciousness.

00:40 // Atchafalaya Swamp, Louisiana: insects & frogs (track no 9). From “Why do Whales and Children Sing?” David Dunn. Earth Ear, 1999.
02:12 // Underwater sound production, insects sound communication.
06:02 // Listening and recording: early memories. Interactions with the environment through sound. Mind, nature and technology. Intelligent behaviors: The machine and the environment as non-human forms of intelligence.  
14:15 // Perception of time, spacious and temporal metaphors, music as a mode of communication.
18:32 // Ennoia 2, electroacoustic composition for 2-channel playback, David Dunn, 1999
28:43 // “Wherever you go, the environment is more aware of you than you are of it”: the act of listening, recording, re-listening and human awareness.
32:50 // “We tell each other stories…this is what we do”: Science stories, sound stories, bug stories. The rational mind, insects social-structures, collective mind, pattern of emergence. The emergent mind of a pond.
“That idea of mind as something that isn’t necessarily inside a human skull but occurs over and over again throughout the natural world in diverse forms and ways of structuring that are really foreign to us and yet clearly are very very sophisticated”.
42:49 //  Five Micro-Worlds. David Dunn (excerpt)
48:44 // Human/virtual networks, Aboriginal culture, sophisticated knowledge and primitive tools as a manifestation of environmental awareness.
52:03 // Networks and nested forms of mind. The relationship between art and science. Observation and communication.
59:33 // The Sound of Light in Trees (excerpt). David Dunn. Earth Ear, 2006.
1:03:05 // Bark beetles, bioacoustics, insects sound production and sound sensing mechanisms.
1:23:56 // Chaotic systems, nonlinear circuits, and a recording expedition to the Atchafalaya swamps of Louisiana. “The sounds would like move, and they’d circle around, and then they start to spin, and then reverse direction…and just the realization…there’s something loud and so deep, and so rich and so complex…and it just made me think how would you ever record something like that, how would you ever characterize, you can’t…and the other thing was how do i get to that kind of manifestation, is it possible to do that through technology?”
1:30:10 // Thresholds and Fragile States (short example1), David Dunn. 2010
1:36:43 // The non-human mind: “This idea of an emergent mind that has its moment that arises out of the collectivity and complexity of nature… I'm interested in the idea of constructing a generative system that can behave in a way that I could never predict and that has its own autonomy. And I think of that in terms of some kind of structure of mind”.
1:38:47 // Metaphors and the role of art, the evolution of mind: “based upon science, based upon mythology, based upon indiginous belief systems…i’m interested in all of those things, how they can talk to each other and inform us about something that we otherwise don’t really understand but we are always telling ourselves we do…it’s a heuristic pursue of this kind of things…try to…if not to understand than at least to experience them”.
“...what we also need to be doing is pursuing those things which alter the mind, alter perception, alter consciousness to a greater awareness and a greater perhaps purpose…we need to grow up as a species, we can do better, we can be something more”

May 6 2021, via transatlantic connection between New Mexico and Haifa.