air time. rambling listening gazing

“…clouds were there for everyone—no tax as yet on them—free.” —Alfred Stieglitz

As soon as the “sun” comes back, we will propose a series of walking routes through the city of Livorno to take an hour of air time accompanied by sound tracks selected from the airchive that will be dispersed through the city by leaving QR codes.

We know two forms of cloud life —the meteo one and the informatic one. Here, we are bringing them together, with all of their happy encounters, and at the same time, with all of their clashing contradictions. One cannot surrogate the other. How Raindance Foundation stated in Radical Software I:

”Our species will survive neither by totally rejecting nor unconditionally embracing technology —but by humanizing it: by allowing people access to the informational tools they need to shape and reassert control over their lives. There is no reason to expect technology to be disproportionately bad or good relative to other realms of natural selection. The automobile as a species, for example, was once a good thing. But it has now overrun its ecological niche and upset our balance or optimum living. Only by treating technology as ecology can we cure the split between ourselves and our extensions. We need to get good tools into good hands —not reject all tools because they have been misused to benefit only the few.”

We’ve been airchiving sound poetry, radio transmissions, music and other sound based files during the lockdown, with headsets on our ears, smartphones on our hands, while walking through the olive grove, gardens and forests, or rambling through the streets of Livorno during the less tight part of the lockdown.

In a conversation between John Cage and Morton Feldman in Radio Happenings (1966), Morton shares with Cage a thought on a fact of reality, he says:

“John, wouldn’t you say that what would depended on what we call reality, and what we don’t like, we consider it an intrusion in our life? Consequently, I feel that what’s happening is, that we are continously being intruded upon… [ Cage: that would make us very unhappy…] or we surrender to it, and call it culture.”

The dialogue continues with insights on environment, on noise, on creation as the intrusion into the environment, on dead time, on desire. Although the importance of Cage’s ideas in those years, in attending reality, adjusting to it and coupling chance, desire and beauty, it’s quite obvious for us, that today, the intrusion and the colonization of the environment, of air, through wavelenghts and airborne control, is making us very unhappy. There is no space left for solitude, for silence, for destroying the syntax of the army, for shutting off the order-words, so that we can do our living.

To shut off from culture, shut off from the intrusion by the regime, for a moment of air time, rambling while listening other, while gazing astray, beyond the instituted society, there where poetry is, where life is, where new values attend…

… for you, a map of Livorno
with some tracks coming from our cloud life
scattered all over under the sky…