Bread Symphony: Bread and Protest
Cross-species and inner-species collaboration for social, spiritual, and material nourishment.
Submission for After the End at Sound Scene 2023
Summary:
Visitors can linger around a large vat of fermenting bread as it generates a composition that is a mix of organic human and nonhuman sounds (bubbling, clapping, vocalizing) and protests recordings sampled from all over the world, eating bread (with oil for dipping), reading zines, and conversing.
Prototype:
Rough audio sketch here based on existing Bread Symphony generated sounds https://vimeo.com/723129219 - at MOCO 2022:
What is Bread Symphony?
Bread Symphony, started in 2020, is an ongoing generative sound installation experiment that uses the collaborative efforts of nonhuman organisms to produce sonic compositions. We make audible the symbiosis of living organisms in the literal and figurative fermentation vat and use these explorations to re-frame notions of human centrality, acknowledge nonhuman collaborators, and encourage inner species collaboration.
About this proposed version Bread and Protest:
Inspired by Ashley Jane Lewis’s Fermenting a Revolution, Jeremy Woodruff’s work with protest sounds, Ultra-Red’s sound objects for cultural analysis and action, and Pauline Oliveros’ collective vocal Deep Listening exercises, we’re proposing a Bread and Protests version of Bread Symphony that generates (offsets and recombines based on fermentation sensor data) permutations of protests recordings sampled from all over the world, including, the ongoing Black Lives Matter protests, the Women Life Freedom youth-led protests in Iran, and the protests against the the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The emitted sounds will vary throughout the day in amplitude, pitch scale, time-stretch, and number of samples/voices depending on which phase of the fermentation cycle our nonhuman comrades - bacteria and yeast - are in.
The protest recordings will be combined with Bead Symphony’s base generated sounds of human humming, clapping, and bacterial nonhuman gurgling, thus remaining both a meditation on collaboration within the human species and on human-nonhuman collaboration.
In this way, voice is given to nonhuman comrades and arranged next to human sounds of collective action like protesting, clapping, and vocalizing together. A way to make audible the vision of what “after the end" of humans practicing atomized, hierarchical ways of relating to one another and other species” may feel like. Can such a project encourage conversation about moving towards post-anthropocentric, post-extractivist futures where people move together in collective power, acknowledging their interdependence with one another as well as other species? A hope of “hope after the end”, of earthly and pan-species survival and even thriving.
Installation details
Large vat of fermenting starter with a clear lid, sensors, Arduino, headphones. Circular table with plates and bread, local political zines to discuss. (Bread possibly baked by Ashley Jane Lewis or Bread on Earth.). Possibly chairs to encourage lingering and discussion. Optionally a projection of a video on a wall as back(see below)
Optionally:
There can be a video of alternating footage of protests and macro footage of live fermentation. The protest footage would be sped up and slowed down using Jitter in accordance to the pace of the fermentation, much like the sound component. Visualization of protest activity juxtaposed and in tandem with the yeast-bacteria activity would help underscore the collaborative nature of revolutionary social and political action, symbiotic relationships found in both cross-species collaborations such as bread-fermentation and inner-species collaboration in cultural movements.
Rough audio with optional placeholder video sketch (using my videos of BLM and found footage of other protests):
Previous Bread Symphony samples:
https://vimeo.com/723129219 - at MOCO 2022
https://vimeo.com/602942760 - at SloMoCo 2020