January in Vermont, wood, paint, extension cords, archival pigment prints, bioelectricity music, wooden chair, wool blanket, clamp lights, LED bulbs, balsam fir incense, 2023
What does it mean to exist within the darkness of winter that is January in Vermont? It is a time synonymous with short days, long nights, bare trees, and the internalization of experience as the exterior world goes silent. In January just before sunrise and just after sunset, the landscape of Vermont is suffused by an otherworldly blue glow between the sky and snow-covered ground, with sporadic glimmers of warmth from cabins tucked between the trees.
This is a time of intensity, a flow between loneliness, despair, melancholy, mourning, wonder, harmony, balance, and peace. Experiences during this time and place are often reminders of our own fragility as well as the ecosystem as a whole. The blue hour exists at the precipice of not only day and night, but also ecological harmony and unraveling. Processing the cold darkness of January in Vermont can build a personal framework of processing grief and despair beyond this specific experience as we build connections between places and time, embracing the interconnectedness of the world. This framework of processing through connection is more than metaphor, as metaphors in and of nature are not created fictions—they are a way to amplify the stories of the world in a way that the soul and spirit can comprehend.
Although I speak of January in Vermont, this piece was made in Oregon during my first year of graduate school after arriving in the state at the height of fire season—with orange skies and the smell of ash swirling in the air. And this was not the smell of fireplace smoke known and loved in the woods of the Northeast, but rather from the burning of tens of thousands of acres of forest. It was the smell of ecological unraveling. During this time, I began to look back towards experiences that could help me and the broader collective begin to make our way through the ecological unraveling that was happening and will continue to happen. When arriving at the experience of January in Vermont, pathways emerged as both require an existence and reconciliation with darkness. I then set out to recreate the essence of this experience out of things that are not January, not Vermont, and not blue hour; embarking on a journey that could illuminate the possibilities of connecting places and time far apart.
This journey spanned not only through my personal experience of summer and fall in Oregon, but also included a collaboration in the creation of music between the plant life of Oregon and composer Gary DeSorbo, who composed this music in his Berkeley, California studio. In a similar way of recreating the essence of experience, we used an alternative way of music creation to enhance the emotional experience through the connection to the living world of plants. When engaging with the life of plants in Oregon, we found raw musical material by looking through the prism of bioelectricity feedback—a technique of directly recording the electricity of plants and trees using electrodes and a 3D printed recording device. Once gathering data recordings in the field, our task was to then map the measured empirical data we collected onto a musical work and create a human interpretation and subsequent sonic experience from this otherwise unheard source of sound. It is the intersection of life, emotion, sensory experience, and understandings of the interconnected web of life from Vermont, Oregon, California, and everywhere in between.
As you enter this experience, keep in mind that the moment of blue is the precipice of busy day and quiet night, both existing at once in a transition out of one into the other. It is the precipice of darkness and peace. It is the precipice of ecological harmony and its unraveling. Let oneself reach the precipice and crumble amidst the weight of this blue and sound of the world. Let all feelings be felt and all sounds be heard, then begin to rebuild from the ruins.