SOS! is a setting of a poem by Rimona Afana (see below). It is the fifth in a cycle of multimedia pieces called Naegleria Fowleri. Naeglaria fowleri is the name of the so-called “brain-eating” amoeba found in warm waters at the bottom of lakes. Rimona suggested titling the cycle with the name of a non-human entity in order to personify interconnected themes that challenge humanity: the terror exerted by unseen forces like viruses and bacteria (and also those economic, political, or ideological), which operate seemingly autonomously to restructure human existence; violent intersections between human and non-human in the Anthropocene; and world-wide human deployment of inhumane technologies of diagnosis, extraction and control.

This short text visits a grain of sand in the moment she is swept away by forces beyond her control and for which she was never prepared. Why would a grain of sand from the desert need to learn to swim? There is dark humor in her appeal for help. SOS! Lost in a desert sea, she mutters prayers that only she can hear. It is also our dark humor. Why should we care about a grain of sand?

The poem may appear modest and unassuming, almost a castaway itself —and perhaps an unlikely basis for a 45-minute sound installation. Yet, to me, the humor and nuance of punctuation, personification, and paradoxical juxtaposition illuminate dramatic existential realities. Rimona animates nature. She finds kinship with the most minuscule and singular of earthly specks. We are indeed connected to a grain of sand through our experience of isolation and vulnerability amid threatening storms—storms out of (our) control, and which appear in unexpected places and with unprecedented intensities. In one way or another, we all experience the eschatological-meteorological sublime, in which our infinitesimal is judged in relation to the global. Ecological balance dangles at the precipice…

My sound installation seeks to present this experience—being swept away—through an immersive and engulfing swarm of material-synthetic sounds and patterns moving through a space around the audience. The installation will make use of a large multichannel array of speaker-objects (16-32 or more in number), hanging above the audience or spread on stands around in concentric and overlapping circles. The resonating speaker-objects may be homogenous or heterogenous materials of various kinds (wood, metal, musical instruments, etc). These are created by attaching transducer exciters to various objects following the model of David Tudor’s Rainforest series.

Synthetic and recorded sounds play through the speaker-objects modelling patterns of meteorological and other natural phenomena (waves, thunder, lightning, clouds, wind, also the fractal forms of natural beings found in the desert or the ocean, such as conch shells). These sound “waves” will be synthesized out of many small noise particles, i.e. “grains”, like the subject of Rimona’s poem. Their synthetic aspect will be mediated by the physical properties of the speaker-objects through which they are heard. I am also making multichannel recordings of ambiences and textural sounds (or objects filled with many smaller objects, like a “rain stick”).

Layers of these 8-channel recorded and synthesized sounds flow, overlap, rotate, stream, mutate, expand, and swarm across the space. Audience members can move around the space, hearing and feeling the constantly shifting elements engulf and pass them by. Circular and spiral movement patterns (representing “S” and “O”) as well as elaborations of SOS (. . . - - - . . . ) structure micro and macro phrases within the piece.