Jenny Gräf Sheppard, Osmosymbiotic Echo (sound installation), Florasonic series, Lincoln Park Conservatory, Chicago, 12/07/08

Hum of substance; smell of earth. Entering through ears and nostrils, we are filter-filled with the terrifying beauty of persistence. An overlying softness of shrill, consistently haunting, nearly-pulsing. Our ears consume, cognize, adjust, are constituted in these acts of ingestive synthesis. Our nostrils breath an underlying roll of thick, the musty rich of life-giving, tragedy of organic breakdown. Depth and anticipation; death and nervous heaven-- we are filled and fraught between.

Bird-cries oscillate, twitter, tear at ethereality; the verdancy of ferns unfurls itself, unfurls again. Gutteral machines emerge, drown the cries, ruffle the leaves, and disappear again into-beyond the overlying hum, into-within the earth that insists, hungry, indifferent, insisting hunger in its very indifference.

Light fades to purple; shadows move-- enduring alteration, we return, return again to hum and earth, our ears and nostrils quivering for that which cannot but endure. Birds near or far, insect variation, the darkened shades and hidden details; holes of blackness even, where twilight obscures. We are filled with earth; our bodies humming earth, as violent violet tumbles slowly into green.

Dedicated in memory of Peter Ginsberg, 1982-2008

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