Conversations about the ecological crisis with brilliant, passionate, and visionary artists and cultural workers on the theme of 'preparing for the end of the world as we know it and creating the conditions for other possible worlds to emerge’. Also see my ‘a calm presence’ newsletter on Substack.
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e191 luc lalande - community arts during times of crisis
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We have folks who would never define themselves as artists, but are nonetheless creative and have ideas and are imaginative. How can we get them to feel that they can do arts and express their creativity? With community engaged arts anyone can participate or contribute in any way. I think that strength and social bond makes the community strong and…
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e190 kim fry - appealing to hearts and souls
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In Canada and many other parts of the world, we've relied on policymakers and scientists to be the ones communicating around climate, and they failed because they've only appealed to people's heads and haven't appealed to their hearts and souls. I think the big conversation coming out of COP 28 - and that you but I'm sure people at SCALE and others…
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e189 tanya kalmanovitch - mobilizing the power of the arts
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What happens is that you have arts and environment initiatives popping up all over the place, but everyone's pitted against one another in competing for the same grants, right? So it makes it extraordinarily difficult to organize, to strategize, and to act with a collective insight about where it is that we need to go and how we can really mobilize…
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e188 dawit seto - talking about climate through art
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Having a conversation about the artworks and important issues such as climate change is everywhere in the globe. It's important for us also in the Horn of Africa region to talk about it through art, not politics necessarily. I feel like it opens a little bit of a door, a little bit more than the politics. Dawit Seto is an Ethiopian performing artis…
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e187 alice irene whittaker - caring for the planet I love
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About collapse acceptance : I've been in that space and it is really liberating. How I frame it for myself is : I don't know how it all turns out and it's really out of my control and to not worry about it (not that I never worry about it) but what's really in my control is : do I show up as a human being and feel my humanity and care for the peopl…
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e186 yahya aka semzyiri - collective liberation as planetary right
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We have become a bit disconnected after COVID but at the same time we are emerging more consciously while we were more complacent before. I hold hope about an inherent belief that collective liberation is a planetary right. I think we should all be always learning to reach that goal. semzyiri is a multimedia storyteller who blends surrealism, exist…
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e185 sandra laronde - home never leaves you
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I really believe that we carry the spirit of the land wherever we go. In the Western canon, they say that once you leave home, you can never return, but in the Indigenous canon, home never leaves you. I remember Sandra Laronde contacting me when I was running the Inter-Arts Office at Canada Council in early 2000 asking me where Red Sky Performance …
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e184 cpamo ai panel - from precarity to stability
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My dream with AI started with curiosity about how technology can extend to the boundaries of artistic expression. I was fascinated by the possibility of emerging traditional art and forms of traditional artistry to create something entirely new and engage my passion for innovation and to explore AI as tools to enhance my creative visions and bring …
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world listening day 2024 - listening to the weave of time
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World Listening Day takes place every year on July 18, which is also Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer’s birthday. The day is organized by the World Listening Project and is dedicated to understanding the world and its natural environment, societies, and cultures through the practice of listening. I have brought excerpts from 7 episodes from the …
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e183 imagining in public - cultural leadership in a changing world
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I've been thinking a lot about the importance of connecting the value of the arts to everyday citizens and their own connection to creativity, whatever that might be. I think it's something we should be talking about now, not only within our communities and within the arts sector, but outside of as well : talking about the value of the arts to feel…
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e182 ian garrett - modelling what we want on the other side
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Whether or not we get to a complete and total collapse or we're looking at collapses of very specific systems for it… Right now I'm concerned with modeling what we want on the other side as best as possible so that whether or not it's a person or a machine learning algorithm as artificial intelligence, when it's looking back on the things that is b…
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e181 dawn dale - reconnecting with nature through art
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To go to a farm and take a carrot out that’s covered in dirt and wipe it off on your pants and eat it on the spot. It's something that most people don't have access to anymore. So that loss of contact with the natural world is having a radical impact on how people view it, how they value it, and how they seem to be willing to let it go. Not realizi…
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e180 mary edwards - capturing the beauty and terror of reality
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We're all going to be affected by the same outcome. When I went up to Svalbard (Norway), I went with the intention of also capturing the beauty and the terror of the reality of these changes and how they can be at once fascinating to listen to, but also devastating to the environment. You’ve just heard an excerpt from composer and environmental sou…
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This is an audio from a short video recorded on June 22, 2024 on an inflatable kayak outing where I thank conscient podcast listeners (and a calm presence readers) and let you know that there are many new conscient episodes coming in the next few days and to please take your time (in particular if you are a regular listener). Please don’t feel over…
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e179 katrine claassens and sébastian méric de bellefon - art, science and climate leadership
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I luckily managed to move from a space of ‘I have to save the planet or else’ (and we talk about that word ‘save’) to ‘I choose to commit my life to climate change in the best way I can’ because everything that matters to me in this world stands to be lost in a climate crisis, especially one that would play out in a very severe and apocalyptic way.…
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e178 podium 2024 - what more can we sing and do?
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It is taking far too long for us to acknowledge the damage we have done to the world's water and to indigenous people and to take action : truth, reconciliation, change. Scientists have discovered that some whale songs actually evolve over time. It is my hope that the choirs who perform this work with me and all those who hear it will refuse to let…
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e177 asma khan - unknownness as a playground for artists
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We essentially know two percent of all different disciplines and that kind of unknownness creates a very free playground for an artist to dance in or to draw in because we know we're going through a massive crisis. The world is ending. We see chaos. We see all of that but my personal hope as an artist remains in how little we know and how little we…
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We need culture to shift behaviour, because everything is culture but the mentality is that art is an adornment and not actually a tactic. I think art is a tactic. I first met Annette while I was chair of the Sectoral Climate Arts Leadership for the Emergency or SCALE in 2022 and have since then gotten to know her as an artist here in Ottawa on the…
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e175 sabine breitsameter - an aesthetic of care
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Listening can teach us to appreciate our environment in a critical sense, but also in a kind of admiration for it. If we admire something because we think it has a depth or it has a beauty or some interesting aspects, we want to keep it, we want to foster it. I first met Sabine at the Tuning of the World Conference in Banff, Alberta in 1993. Sabine…
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This is a bonus episode featuring the audio version of my June 3, 2024 accept | adapt | respond posting on my 'a calm presence' Substack, whose purpose is to provide 'short, practical essays about collapse acceptance, adaptation, response and art'. You can subscribe to the newsletter (which is actually more of a learning journal) here. You can subs…
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e174 julie andreyev - more-than-human creativity
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As an artist and educator, I see that this moment calls for a way of working through decolonization and forging a path of care. I like to think of this through multispecies communities so that, as humans, we're surrounded by more than human life, even in our urban environments. This path of care for our multi-species, communities that make up the n…
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I think there's a lot of focus on systems change and we need all of that, but what we really need is to change ourselves so that we can actually embody the world that we want to be in, so that has a big piece of healing and how art can be a part of that. I heard about Kelly McInnes’ (she/they) work from Kim Richards (see e76 and e171) and had a ver…
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e172 beth carruthers - a living sentient place
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What would change things is love. … We ask people to act, to change, to make sacrifices, or what may be perceived as sacrifices, which in the end can turn out to be incredible things as we open up a world we didn't consider possible for ourselves; it was always love that got people to take those steps and those decisions. Born and raised in the occ…
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e171 kimberly skye richards - dept of utopian arts & letters
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One of the roles that artists play within the poly crisis is supporting us through processes of unnumbing. Sometimes we might describe it like a re-tuning of our senses through listening. All of that is about undermining the ways that we are taught to master ourselves, to not show emotions, to disconnect our heads from our bodies so that we work mo…
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(Note: some quotes below have been edited for concision) Soundwalking is always like magic. It is a magical experience. It is so simple, Hildi, as you said, and it’s as much about listening to sounds or listening to absences of sound. It's not very typical in our lives. We don't live the kinds of lives that require this kind of presence. And so it’…
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How can we remind ourselves that we're all creative and we're all artists? I think that we need all parts of ourselves to be able to navigate this transition that we're in as a species and as a part of the world. I first met Louise Adongo at the Transition Innovation Group (see e163). We spoke on Monday April 22, 2024, earth day. Louise is a bold a…
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e168 felicia young - together through art
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Community arts became my initial quest in the 1980’s as a reaction against the commercial art world. How can art participate in a functional way to connect not just art educated people, but our overall communities on issues affecting them that have meaning and purpose. Can we just speak about these issues or can we actually have it be transformativ…
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e167 barbara cuerden - tending the garden of art
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The garden doesn't have to be something that's instrumental. It can be just a place where you sit, where you're thinking of growing something, you know, where the sun shines and where photosynthesis takes place and everything is sort of manifested through the sunlight and the water. It's a fantastic thing on its own without actually having to produ…
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e166 david maggs - the art of being
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What you do as an artist is crucial. Do not abandon that for a desire to serve a kind of utilitarian purpose of ‘I'm gonna make sure people know more’. The faith in knowing more is the siren song of our society that constantly sees us leaping off of the vessel that can carry us through this, with this belief that we can suddenly transform society b…
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Being an artist, or making art, in the context of climate is more about being a kind of light in the darkness, making us believe in ourselves and believe in the future so that we want to endeavor to save the thing that we have, our habitat. Some people like to say art can't change the world, but art can change us. Then we can change the world more …
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e164 jimmy ung - proximity proportionate responsibility
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Proximity proportionate responsibility: if we were to do an inventory of where all the things we own were made, that would give us a very interesting map of where our responsibility, our attention and our donations ought to go because our pressures on the global systems can be revealed. That's a much more reasonable way to interact with different c…
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e163 transition innovation group - art and defeatism
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I’m wanting something from art, which I think is much deeper, is a re-imagination of what it means to be human. I feel like we've instrumentalized and trivialized art and actually lost its capacity to expand our thesis of how we imagine ourselves and the world around us. I asked that question because the economy that we've created around art may ha…
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I think as musicians we have particular concerns that perhaps looking at those through an ecological lens can be helpful. One of them is to think about the structures of funding which allow us to operate and to maybe reconsider them because they might change. And to be open to that change and to find solutions. And those solutions might be that we …
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This is a special bilingual episode of the conscient podcast recorded on April 8, 2024 during the solar eclipse in Ottawa. The same recording can be found on both the conscious podcast and the conscious podcast. Here is a transcript of what I said. This is a bonus episode of the conscient podcast. It's 3.15pm Eastern Standard Time. I'm in Ottawa ne…
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e161 alchemize circle - a conversation with kamea chayne
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'It's kind of like sacred medicine or sacred plant medicine in a way where it meets you where you are, based on your intentions, on your setting, your relationships and everything. Where that space in between is the most powerful piece and it’s us holding the container and guiding people in certain directions. But then, here's the silence: go run w…
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e160 shannon litzenberger - a culture of collective thriving
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We are in a very unstable environment right now. We don't have to be change makers. Change is happening. It is happening quickly and the pace of change is accelerating. So this ‘plan and execute’ way of engaging with the world is less and less relevant. Building this capacity to play and improvise and allow for emergent possibilities to arise is a …
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e159 jane marsland - it’s all about balance
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It's all about balance and moving away from perpetual growth mode. It's about understanding that if you're a tightrope walker, you can't stand still, because the minute you stand still, you fall off. So you have to move forwards, or backwards. There’s no qualitative judgment about whether it's better to move forward or backward. It doesn't matter. …
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e158 bob sirman - engaging with the artistic experience
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We're not just talking about saving the environment. What we're first and foremost trying to get people to do is care for the environment and you can't care for the environment unless you feel part of it, unless you feel attached to it, unless you can see outside the building and understand we're not living in bubbles. What I mean by bubbles, espec…
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The most interesting part to me is to discover what we're not listening to and why we are not doing that. I think it's wonderful that I've had the chance to learn this listening from so early on where you're trained to listen to the environment and at that time it was more about listening to the sounds of the environment and critiquing them, analyz…
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I think that's what the arts contribute to these discussions. There's the possibility of that kind of emotional or embodied connection to things that, as I think these questions of climate and environment, come closer and closer to people's lives, right? We can think of the wildfire smoke here last summer, people experiencing flooding, hurricanes, …
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I think artists can challenge us by showing our blind spots, in a way, educating us, but also inspiring us about what's possible, right? I think in SCALE we talk about re-authoring the world. That's what artists do. We re-author the world. We create alternative ways of even just thinking about what's desirable in the first place. I first met noveli…
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e154 riel schryer - the art of history and gaming
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There's a sort of pulling back and forth between these two ideas. Out of the idea of fundamental inferiority comes slavery. And out of the idea of cultural inferiority come things like residential schools, right? The logics that fuel those two things are different, but they both obviously have negative results. And I think in the modern world somet…
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Trailer for season 5 of the conscient podcast : conversations about the ecological crisis with brilliant, passionate, and visionary artists and cultural workers' on the theme of 'preparing for the end of the world as we know it and creating the conditions for other possible worlds to emerge'. * END NOTES FOR ALL EPISODES I’ve been producing the con…
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e153 full circle - how can we support those who are frightened by the ecological crisis and in need of a calm presence?
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The final episode of season 4 and my conclusion from my sounding modernity learning and unlearning journey featuring an exchange with Catherine Ingram about 'a calm presence'. See the web version of this site on a laptop or desktop computer for a complete transcription of this episode. * * END NOTES FOR ALL EPISODES I’ve been producing the conscien…
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a selection of questions and observations from the end of episodes this season My gesture of reciprocity for this episode is to the Resilience. * END NOTES FOR ALL EPISODES I’ve been producing the conscient podcast as a learning and unlearning journey since May 2020 on un-ceded Anishinaabe Algonquin territory (Ottawa). It’s my way to give back and …
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e151 rain - can you hear the sound of catastrophe in the rain and thunder?
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i was listening to the sound of rain falling in a small cabin by a stream with distant thunder in the background… TRANSCRIPTION OF EPISODE (bell and breath) (Rain from inside a cabin with thunder in the distance) You’re listening to the sound of rain falling in a small cabin by a stream with a bit of distant thunder in the background. Is it raining…
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e150 compactor - are there strange sounds on your street?
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i heard a strange tapping sound from my window one morning and had a chat when the workers repairing the street TRANSCRIPTION OF EPISODE (Bell and breath) (sound of me walking towards a machine on a city street) I heard a strange tapping sound from my window one morning and decided to walk towards the sound. Claude: It's okay. I was interested in t…
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e149 spinning - let the sound take you wherever it might in your imagination
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i came upon a 1980’s era ‘discman’ portable CD player that still work, sort of and listened to it trying to spin up TRANSCRIPTION OF EPISODE (bell and breath) (old cd player trying to spin up) While going through a box of old technologies to be recycled, I came upon a 1980s era discman portable CD player that still sort of worked. I listened to it,…
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A special episode of The Place of Sound podcast featuring highlights from a project I did in 2017 for Bivouac Recordings, in Hong Kong, called 60 minutes Cities Ottawa, a series of winter time field recordings of Ottawa. Note: This episode is also available in French. This is a special episode of The Place of Sound podcast. You’ll hear highlights f…
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e148 ai - what is the sound of modernity for you?
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i asked chatGPT what was the ‘sound of modernity’ in 4 modes : normal, critical, radical and optimistic and got some feedback TRANSCRIPTION OF EPISODE (bell and breath) On a rainy August 10th 2023, I asked Chat GPT: ‘What is the sound of modernity?’ The bot responded: The sound of modernity is a symphony of electronic devices humming, the rapid cli…
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