This workshop marked the culmination of Desiree Mwalimu-Banks’ engagement as a Wave Farm Radio Art Fellow. A Chance Operation took place at The John Cage Trust and incorporated intentional exchanges with the visual and written works housed in that archive. Mwalimu-Banks focused on the framework of the “chance operation” to introduce various channels of collaborative discovery between workshop participants.
Mwalimu-Banks describes the workshop offered to participants as ”an opportunity to connect with the legacy of Cage’s work through his asé—meaning energy, life, or creative power, among the Yoruba-speaking peoples of West Africa.”
Mwalimu-Banks cites the following works as inspiration for the conceptualization of this workshop: Dr. Masaru Emoto, author of Message from Water and The Hidden Messages In Water; Michael Talbot, author of The Holographic Universe; Lynne McTaggert, author of The Field; Dr.Valerie B. Solheim, Jungian psychologist and author of The Beehive Effect: Ancient Rites Quantum Principles; Dr. Hans Jenny, Swiss physician and natural scientist who invented the term "cymatics"; Dr. Sandra Rose Michael, Energy Enhancement System Inventor/applied integrative biophysics researcher; and Billy Carson, Professor of Neuroscience/Ancient Civilizations and author of The Compendium of the Emerald Tablets.
Mwalimu-Banks was simultaneously looking at and listening to the transmission works of Marianne Amacher, Jenny Pickett and Julien Ottavi (of Solar Return), Pauline Oliveros, Wendy Carlos, Laurie Spiegel, and Christina Kubisch, among others.
Participants encountered original archival materials from The John Cage Trust throughout the workshop, including: Not Wanting To Say Anything About Marcel Duchamp, Cage’s Letter to Pierre Boulez, and A Mycological Foray and its companion Every Mushroom Is A Good Mushroom.
Throughout the first floor of The Trust, Mwalimu-Banks created intentional and focused hexagonals, or stations, through which pairs of participants encountered a mix of archival, technological, and conceptual prompts. Documentation of these hexagonals is available by toggling to the Images tab at the top of this page. Participant-collaborators came from various backgrounds and interests, and together created audio recordings, drawn responses, and mathematical notations in response to each hexagonal.
Desiree Mwalimu-Banks writes: “I was excited by the potential for spontaneous discovery through sound transmissions both heard and unheard, and through phenomena seen and not seen. Perhaps this is esoteric on many levels. However, I feel that such is the nature of sound (and art). Sound in its meaning, impact, and application, continues to evolve as scientists, physicists, doctors, healers, scholars, writers, musicians, and radio transmission artists (or artists in general), continue to investigate its form and function in our fast-changing world. Understanding that we live ‘with’ nature and are part of the natural world, in which its various processes are sustained in realms that are quite unseen; understanding there is an active partnering that is asked of us all, in maintaining these rhythms with integrity and gratitude (and with deeper awareness), is what lives at the heart of my work as an artist, and a global community citizen.”
To learn more about Desiree Mwalimu-Banks' work, please visit desireemwalimubankscosmitransmissions.com.
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Original Workshop Flier:
Through a series of prompts inspired by John Cage’s Chance Operations, this workshop led by Wave Farm Radio Art Fellow, Desiree Mwalimu-Banks and presented in collaboration with the John Cage Trust, explores radio broadcasting as a vehicle for the intentional transmission of healing frequencies through the use of sound, light, and electromagnetic waves.
Electric and magnetic fields have been used in medicine for the treatment of pain, and wound healing for decades. Pulsed radio frequency energy fields, a technique where radio frequency oscillations are gated at a rate of pulses per second or hertz, is used for the treatment of wound, bone, soft tissue healing, and the elimination of cancerous cells. Through aquaphotomics and near-infrared spectroscopy, sound can be used to identify water’s biological origins and potentially change its functionality.
Considering the studies of Dr. Masaru Emoto’s water experiments as a metric for our human absorption of sound frequencies, how can radio broadcasts intentionally use telluric, aquatic, and stellar sound waves to organize and optimize the morphogenic fields of its listeners and practitioners?
How might radio “match” the energy signatures of the natural world to the energy signatures of its listeners? What effect might the recorded vibroacoustic sounds of honeybees, or the clicks, whistles, and pulsed calls of whales, for instance, have on the organization of coherent energy fields in humans? How can the radio spectrum positively impact the global morphogenic resonance of our planet?
Participants will have opportunities to engage in practices of deep listening, while experimenting with making and exchanging sounds from a range of frequencies derived from naturally occurring sounds. Individual pieces will be gathered on a live digital wall that allows users to contribute to a collective transmission work, comprised of both audio and visual interpretations in real time.
This workshop invites listeners and sound practitioners to traverse the ley lines of this cosmometric expedition, while in conversation with the archival works of John Cage, and a varied assemblage of sound transmission materials.
The workshop will culminate with a live radio broadcast on Wave Farm’s WGXC 90.7-FM: Radio for Open Ears in NY’s Upper Hudson Valley and streamed online at wavefarm.org/listen.
