When Earth Speaks Miranda Whall

When Earth Speaks

The When Earth Speaks project has so far culminated in a stage performance and gallery exhibition. The focus of the project is on an area of land known as the Ffridd (the upland fringe), 600m approx. above sea level in the Elenydd plateau – the Cambrian Mountains, Mid Wales, and more specifically the soil beneath the land. The project utilises unprocessed (raw) scientific data generated by a high- resolution soil sensor network installed on the Ffridd as material to create durational drawings – analogue storage systems, and sound compositions, music dance, performance and film.

Included in the When Earth Speaks exhibition was a film of a performance When Earth Speaks: A Dirty Ensemble which premiered in the Theatr yr Werin, Aberystwyth Arts Centre on June 8th, 2024. The performance featured Neil Luck (percussion), Mayah Kadish (violin) Angela Wai-Nok Hui (percussion), Tim Beckham (guitar), Ashley John Long (double bass), Constance Humphries (Butoh dance) and Miranda Whall (drawing). The performance also included non-human performers, such as the mountain itself, the soil, sensors, data, and robotics. The data stream emitted from the soil sensor network broadcast live into the theatre from the Cambrian mountains, offered a unique interaction with the natural environment. The emergent and improvised performance evolved in real-time as the performers responded to the landscape, each other, the fluctuations and patterns of the data, the changes and rhythms of the earth, and the soil ecosystem; interrelating micro and macro-organisms, air, water, minerals and organic matter. The exhibition included a collection of drawings, for example Dirty Drawings – a triptych of drawings that each contain 35,712 temperature or moisture data points and 250,000 approx. digits from the datasets for October, April and August 2022- 23, Dirty Bits – a series of drawings containing elements of the 8,064 temperature and moisture data points from March 1– 7th 2024, Dirty Pricks – a drawing made from 103,488 pin pricks, each representing a digit from the data set for June 1 – 7th 2024, and Dirty Dots – a triptych of drawings made from extracted data points from the triptych Dirty Drawings. The exhibition also featured a music composition Dirty Composition in Three Parts by French pianist Sophie Agnel who was commissioned to respond to the Dirty Dots drawings.

When Earth Speaks is a non-representational interpretation of the Welsh upland landscape, a creative intervention to an environmental scientific study, and a series of intersemiotic translations – between numerical code and non- verbal language, visual art, music, and dance. The project offers a timely critique on how we understand and manage the complex interrelationship between nature, scientific data and humans, and how each element of this triad influences and is being influenced by the other. It prompts reflection on the often reductive and homogenising narratives inherent to scientific data collection, analysis, and representation, and how it is often shaped by power, biases, and inequalities. It highlights the imbalance between an increasing appetite and excessive generation of scientific data – (and its carbon and resource costly management) and an alarmingly slower appetite for policy and behavioural change, and most importantly the project invites us to pay attention and listen to what the earth is saying.

The project was conceived through a NERC funded cross-disciplinary research project: Making the invisible visible: Instrumenting and interpreting an upland landscape for climate change resilience led by Prof Mariecia Fraser from IBERS, Aberystwyth University, and developed through a subsequent NERC funded cross disciplinary research project: Multispecies Politics in Action led by Prof Milja Kurki, Interpol, Aberystwyth University. When Earth Speaks: A Dirty Ensemble was funded by LADA, Live Arts Development Agency and Aberystwyth Arts Centre.