Reading Earth/Worm Poetry

earth coding, sonic acts, workshop, FoAM, geomancy

Through exploratory field trips that focused our attention down into the earth, we opened a window into a world of telluric currents and fugitive radio waves that normally would remain unnoticed or inaudible. This was achieved through iterative, performative processes in the field: at one point, we plunged a circuit board into the soil to listen for what the earth (and a few worms we found there) might have to “say:” the currents thus detected were fed directly into a computer where they were “translated” via Python program into letters and spaces of the English alphabet. This process resulted in a “worm poetry.” This process quite literally returns circuitry to the earth from which it once came, in effect inducing the earth (and its intimate inhabitants, worms) code itself.

http://sonicacts.com/2015/blog/reading-earthworm-poetry