If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.
CARL SAGAN
1. The rain came quickly 01. Afterwards, moths swarmed to the algae-covered lamp above the terrace.
01
In the animated movie Princess Mononoke (Studio Ghibli, 1997) plants glow in the footsteps of the nature spirit. One breath later, they wither and dissolve. The sound of waterdrops striking the leaves, entropy. And the rain is transformed into a distant roaring and The Pale Blue Dot is a photograph of planet Earth taken in 1990 by the Voyager 1 spacecraft from a record distance of about 6 billion kilometers (3.7 billion miles) from Earth.
2. On October 10th of 2011 a 24-hour long clip02 of the engine sound from the fictive starship U.S.S Enterprise03 was uploaded to YouTube.
02
Star Trek TNG Ambient Engine Noise (Idling for 24 hrs). [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPoqNeR3_UA]
03
The full designation of the ship is U.S.S Enterprise (NCC-1701-D). On March 19th of 2013 the clip had been viewed 1.039.594 times. Safety, lit rooms, always someone awake, heartbeats. And one exhalation later –
3. The lighted trail, 8:30 pm. Low cloud cover, no stars, high oxygen levels. The few intact light bulbs dimmed by thousands of waterdrops,04 the sections through the swamp flooded – the water could be meter-deep in the next step.05
04
The number of exoplanets in the Milky Way is estimated to 400 billion. Out of these approximately 17 billions is in the same size range as Earth. When Ursula K. Le Guin in The Farthest Shore describes the distance between islands in the worldwide ocean she means – [Life, a silent green explosion in space. Unpredictable glow, complex information. Does she mean, Drakes’ equation. A leaf in the wind, in the darkness.]
05
Passing: through islands of light, the shadow of the insect: in front of the window, the outline of the planet, in front of the sun. Pulled up the hood [dark green windbreaker], forced myself not to remove the headphones [Bach BWV 147]. Looked over my shoulder, several times. The lamps swaying in the wind, leading back, into the trees.
4. Over the course of several years the asparagus plot was transformed06. Covered with weeds, turning into meadow, into brushwood, the beginning of a forest. The vegetation spreading, churning up towards the garage. So, the clouds came closer to the ground.07
06
The plants, two and a half meters high. The fog, drifting in between them. I saw it all through the window, the birds, early in the morning, the house overgrown in parts, ivy and steam rising inside hollow walls, the lake mirrored and dull, gravity, sensitive to the light, eyes closing.
07
If something would approach, slowly. The floodlight over the lawn would spread over the fields, into the trees. All animals would pause. Their eyes would reflect the light. And inside the house: activating mechanisms: window bars lowered. Down into the basement, through the hallways, to the storeroom in the back, all the way in, below the crawl space. The system of floodgates: steel doors slamming shut behind me while I walk. Wait. Watch the screens. Fifteen minutes, an hour. And then the locks starts to give way, one by one. The sound of steel bending. Shadows around the corner, preceded by tiny particles of light, by a smell of freshly cut grass, rotting kelp, fir-tree forest in the sunlight, an undertone of smoke and solvents.
5. In the fall of 2004 I lived in Berlin. During that time I only made one new work: a looped, modified clip from the Blade Runner movie. The day after rendering the animation the hard drive crashed. The only thing left of the work was a paper printout of a still image.08
08
The print was lost when I moved back to Sweden. Robert Smithson did a piece about a hotel in the jungles of Mexico [Hotel Palenque]: nature reclaiming parts of the complex, while construction would keep starting up in other locations on the site. Breathing. Waves of unreality. Patterns of fiction within pat terns, insects, leaves, clouds, reflected shadows. Black and yellow striped body moving out into the light. Sentience.
6. Laetiporus sulphureus transforms the bark of the oak into microscopic square shapes, semi-intelligent cubes. There is no way to slow down the process. The trunk is hollowed out, and when the next storm comes the tree will break. In the end of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke an everyday routine appears – adorned with tiny magic details – it stretches out into the future.09 We built an AI, it’s purpose was to replace me. And it wrote
something hill
something field
and ”yes” black forest 10
09
It’s spectacular because it is so subtle, so responsive, for being in a book about magic. Gravity, rising at dawn, at dusk, almost translucent.
10
All is flooded by greenery: moss breaking glass. Entropy. On the other hand: vegetation in red dust, a dead planet waking up. Maybe it’s all just about control. Or power? Is it all, just about power. If we terraform Mars, won’t we have to take care of this planet anymore? Pale red dot. Elon Musk, founder of Space X [its long-term goal being the colonization of Mars], has said that he plans to grow old and die on Mars. In 2013 he is 42 years old. Time.
7. The sky calls to us.11 If we do not destroy ourselves, we will one day venture to the stars.12 13 14 15
11
Drawing nodes in a three-dimensional system, in an attempt to prove... what? A topographical map? Is it a real location? Real. Clearings in a forested slope, remnants of lightning, in regards to where it will strike again, (soon, now, there). It goes.
12
The first sign was that she wouldn’t eat, not even butter or salad. Afterwards, I realized it had been going on for a long time. She had lost weight, the fur had lost its lustre. She drew back when I tried to pet her. In the waiting room I noticed her eyes were clouded over. She wanted to sleep, but I woke here up, over and over again.
13
Around the house, the hole in the ground, the ravens overhead, in the morning. The thickets where the nightingale would sing, on June nights when the smells were unusually raw, damp. And in 1997 the Sagan Planet Walk was opened in Ithaca, New York. It is a walking scale model of the solar system, extending 1.2 km from the center of The Commons in downtown Ithaca to the Sciencenter, a hands-on museum.
14 “This morning in my room a little swallow was trapped/ It flew around desperately until it fell exhausted on my bed/ I picked it up/ so as not to frighten it/ I opened the window/ Then I opened/ my hand” 15
Wakes up in the middle of the night. The ocean outside. Faint noise through the glass wall. What time is it? A first hint of light, blue. Just trying to understand what’s happening, this brief twilight surrounded by darkness.
8. On his 91:st birthday Chris Marker dies, in his home in Paris.16 17 On a forum I sometimes read, someone writes: “you could tell from his movies that he loved life” and links to the short film Cat Listening to Music. A cat sleeping on a Yamaha DX7. Music: Pajaro Triste18 by Mompou. Cassettes, reel-to-reel, old technology, drowsily flashing lights.19 20 21
16 – 17
What will happen with his cat?
18
“Sad bird”.
19
I never made it through Sans Soleil without falling asleep. Yet it has made a deep impact on me. The dream-like sequences of Tokyo, the hollow, wooden synthesizer sounds, Cat, wherever you are, peace be with you. The giraffe, blood pulsating from its throat. Someone said that animals grow still, calm, in the moment before death. There is no changing your mind, it’s true, it’s strange. Like when caught up in a – too wild – game when you were a kid, you want to say hold on, I don’t want to play anymore. I really don’t.
20
She’s there now, alone in a glass cage. On the phone they said she would react when petted. But the prognosis wasn’t good. I sat in front of the TV, the sound muted to hear if someone was trying to break into the house. Watching shows like Big Moves, 2.30 - 03.15 AM. They moved lighthouses across land bridges and up the coastline of Nova Scotia. If I would stay awake until 04.30 no one would come, because it would count as morning. And then I could sleep. Consciousness. Glass cage. The dinosaurs perished around the time of the first flower.
21
The quest for a sustainable world may succeed, or it may fail. If it fails, the world will become unthinkable. If it works, the world will become unimaginable.