We can leave anytime, day or night (let us begin we have much further to go)
Rindon Johnson, in collaboration with InfrasonicaAI, audio and text - Grasse, France, June 2023
For Les lichens ne mentent jamais / Lichens Never Lie, Rindon Johnson presents “We can leave anytime, day or night (let us begin we have much further to go)”. In this text-based work, created with the aid of an AI voice, he intertwines components of artificial intelligence and lichens to confront climate change, addressing them not as opposites to be engaged with on separate horizons but as potential tools to inform one another.
About this Report
We can leave anytime, day or night (let us begin we have much further to go)
Climate change and the acceleration of artificial intelligence seem ubiquitous among public discourse today, particularly in the West. The paradoxical nature of this is curious, yet comes as no surprise. Humanity’s inaction in the face of climate change warns of impending organic catastrophe while its active advancement towards sentient artificial intelligence often comes with stern warnings of a synthetic disaster. As such, these conversations often happen on asymptotic planes as if one has no bearing on the other. They paint the picture of a fuse simultaneously lit on opposite ends with humanity positioned, as always, in the center.
For Les lichens ne mentent jamais / Lichens Never Lie, Rindon Johnson presents “We can leave anytime, day or night (let us begin we have much further to go)”. In it, he intertwines components of artificial intelligence and lichens to confront climate change, addressing them not as opposites to be engaged with on separate horizons but as potential tools to inform one another. The piece blends organic, mechanical, and ambiental sonic elements to construct a chilling soundscape of poetic ruminations on lichens and their role in the life of beings and the planet. Lichens, as a composite organism, could be said to learn like artificial intelligence programs; by collecting and combining data points to create an aggregate worldview, one capable both of impacting its surroundings and reporting on them.
In reflecting on their potentiality, Johnson wove together poetic fragments and used an AI program called Descript, which he had trained over the years to mimic his voice. Then, he, along with Descript’s voice and the voice of his sibling, recorded and layered several utterances of that poem, set against and interspersed with sonic breaks. The piece’s poetics juxtapose nature’s steady advancement against quotidian societal horrors. It compares how nature and humanity transmit critical information and what both entities then do with that information. Though the message may not seem positive, it isn’t bleak either. Instead, it calls for a decentralization of humanity in the discourse on planetary survival. An understanding that we are in this together, a pluriverse of beings. “There was a moment upon realizing that we were still entangled.” One of the three voices says. “We had to find a way to start again.”
Sound Design by Alberto Rubi
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- AUDIO TRANSCRIPT -
I ask Mountain what they know about Lichens.
There’s one, they say, that live only in the high branches of trees
that will dye things fluorescent pink.
Really
Yes, Really
and then they say that you can only harvest them after it has rained
and it is still wet.
Rained enough that the branches have fallen and wet enough that the lichens still make themselves visible.
Visible when drinking.
Greener when drinking.
You can’t believe how many they are
How the further away from us
you go
how they prosper.
Do you think they know time?
Of course
Wait, do they?
There is the before many
the current many
and then the ever future many.
Forgive me future
many I whisper watching the police lights on my bedroom walls
some person has barricaded themselves
there’s a lot of emergency vehicles
It is 4 maybe 3 doors down
I download the citizen app in fear
I track in fear
I aggregate in fear
I collect data in fear, in fear of loss, losing
Just say it
Death
Cliche
But its true
There’s a video from an informant
on the app
that shows a video of all the houses on the block
with the lights flashing again them,
lots of ambulances some leave
the tree has 3 branches on one side
Sirens
and can be written risen
like risen
like a bump
like how this tree here has 3 branches
and on one side,
risen like a bump
in the point where ribs meet on a human chest
there is green moss and it must be some lichens
When you touch the moss
it rains it changes color
Do you change color when it rains?
I haven’t bothered to look if I’m being honest.
Well now will you?
Everything I do is about rocks.
I love them
I wish for their time scale
Huh?
Even that desire is a form of anthropomorphization.
Here's a theory joke for you:
All desire is just a projection - get it?
Anyway, this projected time scale
for the rocks
Yes
it isn’t forever but it does involve a network of communication at a scale so grand. Like kind of like how we are doing right now
with basically everything.
What is near me is becoming me.
Don’t flatter yourself
Could we do this closer?
And my god the lichens.
Think of this
they are so old we can’t figure out how old they are.
Outside the realm of measure.
Some can penetrate quartz ever slowly,
slipping beneath the surface of a stone.
You’ve got to be kissing me.
I love them.
Me too.
Did you misspeak back there.
Look now
Look now.
Look now!
When you leave you’ll see them everywhere
What lives off of another and lost myself thinking
how
how many others do I live off of?
Under what guise do we detangle.
I’ll have to quote myself now,
How like the weather the heresy of definition.
How to start an impossible thing?
Why measure when we already know that it feels off?
Numbers are our ultimate abstraction.
A counting can always be recounted.
Toward new meaning.
In the joining of two
several
there is only scale
time is a relative construction
and the lichen reflect specificity.
What can’t be relative?
Is this another joke?
Time
Weather
Like I was saying
Specificity that they are themselves.
Some only grow in the shadow and some only in the sun,
and but always
on something else.
We are always on to someone else.
I’ve touched them as you have
run my fingers over them
stepped on them running through the forest.
When the colonists arrived to australia they named the land to be park
like assuming no human hand could create such harmony
and they were surprised to find when they, they parasite, they viruses, killed many of the indigenious
people
that the land became thick and overgrown
What’s missing from the nature documentaries?
Is it the people?
Could we be harmonious?
What are you referring to?
Why don’t you rebel
If we don’t agree on what happened in the past how will we agree what time it is now? The rebellion is in the intention?
And what’s that now?
For many years we thought they were 2 but upon closer inspection they were 3 and what to make of the number 3
what to say about a dance
always a witness
can we all agree does that happen at the cellular level the disagreements
the push and pull for
like light
and like nutrients
I am nothing
Don’t be dramatic
Well I wish I could be as expansive as nothing?
As cyclical and attentive?
Pleasure comes in the mixing or is it the mitigation
who tells us when we have gone too far
and when do we know we have much further to go
I’ll do it.
We have much further to go
I can only name that we thought it was spanish moss
that his hands felt thick, coarse, he never felt smaller than me
and when our relationship ended my mother said on the phone
I am very sorry, I know how you loved him.
How do we know when we have become a landscape is it when
so many things have happened to you within it that there is no you
without the rolling of the hill, or the curvature of the road against a yellow hillside, Or is it if it can catch fire just as soon as it could flood,
why wasn't it enough to be together and in what language do we renew
in what conglomeration
do we appear again at all?
There was a moment upon realizing that we were still entangled.
We had to find a way to start again,
I thought that was the color of the stone
but I was wrong.
I am man enough to admit that
your stems contain glass,
Why couldn’t you burrow beneath stone?
Spoon fingers
I misremembered the etymology to what lives off of another,
it's actually what east around itself, like warts.
Eat around yourself?
I am by the sea side
Well I am by the sea
The weather
the ocean
the tides
The moon pulling us this way and that way and this
I have wished for another life but been given this one.
Which 3 together are you?
My brain cannot hold all of this knowledge.
What is it all here for?
While I was looking at lichens, were you marching in the streets?
Looking and counting don’t leave to revolutions
Do they?
Don’t they?
Or aren’t well ever always 3 actors,
all together
all together now.
I just want to remember and remember and remember and I just want to forget and forget and forget and live mostly,
I won’t bend my knees till I do this all again.
Let’s start then
I ask Mountain what they know about Lichens
Pull up the sails
Did you know I can read
They’re whispering
We can leave anytime day or night
Put your wrist to the sky and count out any hour.
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Rindon Johnson
Rindon Johnson is an artist and poet. He has based his work in language. Johnson has presented solo exhibitions at Albertinum (Dresden), Chisenhale Gallery (London), The Julia Stoschek Collection (Düsseldorf) and the SculptureCenter (Long Island City). Johnson has participated in group exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum, Kunstverein Freiburg, The Hammer Museum, The Whitney Museum, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Literaturhaus Berlin, Haus der elektronischen Künste, Basel among others. He is the author of Nobody Sleeps Better Than White People (Inpatient, 2016), the VR book, Meet in the Corner (Publishing-House.Me, 2017), Shade the King (Capricious, 2017), The Law of Large Numbers: Black Sonic Abyss (Chisenhale, Inpatient, SculptureCenter 2021) and Ever Given (Inpatient and Francois Ghebaly, 2022). He was born on the unceded territories of the Ohlone people. He lives in Berlin.
Infrasonica
Infrasonica is a digital platform of non-Western cultures. We record, analyse and debate the eeriness of sound and its auras, linked to the world with the audible, the hidden and the sensitive. Infrasonic waves operate at a frequency that is undetectable by human ears even though they are often generated by massive ecological phenomena, such as the movement of tectonic plates or the deep currents of the ocean. Infrasonica aims to be a catalyst for those vibrations. The platform includes archives of experimental sound and visual artists, as well as theoretical musings on contemporary critical thought. By relying on a borderless network of collaborators, Infrasonica blends essays, conversations and speculative works that encourage critical curatorial and research projects.
Rindon Johnson, We can leave anytime, day or night (let us begin we have much further to go), 2023, specially commissioned by Nicoletta Fiorucci Foundation as part of World Weather Network.
Part of the weather station: Grasse, France - find out more here.