Zugzwang* or the compulsion to find a common baseline in sound

This text is comprised of a multi-platform discussion between the members of the Zugzwang* working group between 03 July and 30 August 2021. Focused on notions of taking up space, acting, and intervening, this discussion expands on previous presentations and research by the group by highlighting how the participants’ artistic and scholarly practices are engaged in making a difference within environments that are increasingly subject to anthropogenic devastation. As a discussion evolving over multiple platforms, this text is intercut and interwoven with questions, elaborations, and linkages, uncovering common themes, shared practices, and mutually-unanswerable questions in our collaborative work. This discussion itself follows the logic of our working practices, documenting a generative exercise in conversation, which in this case led toward an increased sensitivity to timings and scalings of observation and action. Particularly, the capacities of the group’s sound art practices when it comes to engaging with multiple sites, species and temporalities is put in evidence.


INTRODUCTION
The following is an edited transcript of a conversation that took place across platforms between Natalia Domínguez Rangel ("N."),Samuel Hertz ("S."),Christina Gruber ("C.") and Emil Flatø ("E.") in the summer of 2021, the second set of conversations the group has had around a shared sense of living through the uncanny condition of "Zugzwang".
Zugzwang is a German chess term for the "compulsion to (make a) move".To us, it denotes a discomfortin our various work on environmental issueswith remaining mere observers to processes of destruction that are the result of human actions.To live within an environment is to be entrained to move constantly, by something more than ourselves; yet, the urgency, the compulsion, to move is compounded by the recognition of just how many things humans ourselves set in motion.
The group first convened in the early days of the pandemic, as we were grappling with the audible silence in environments across the sites in which we were based, caused by the anthropogenic standstill.In this sudden withdrawal, human impact was paradoxically palpable.

RECONVENING
E. (remarks in a Zoom call, August 2nd and 10th; Google doc, August 21st and 29th): I just wanted to add something about, erm, taking up space / acting / intervening as opposed to observing / discussing / listening to environments?
Which is that what seems to me to mark you as artists coming to this question is how natural it comes to you to take up space, with your bodies or technologically aided bodies, doing something about the questions at hand.I think there are specific reasons why questions of anthropogenichuman-impactedenvironments require that knowledge workers, or "scientists", become more comfortable with the fact that they are in it as well.Indeed, all the way back to Hanna Arendt, it has been argued that the erasure of the work humans do on the planet in the traditions of knowing on which the modern world was built (i.e.science) is how we got to this uncanny place of being more impactful than we are able to know (see Arendt, 1998Arendt, [1958]]), especially the Preface).While it might seem obvious that no one can pretend to be a mere observer anymore, I really don't think we 197 have integrated that insight into common academic practice yet.
There is a lot of interest in "pragmatics" and "performative" qualities of science and the likes.A touchstone in the literature is Isabelle Stengers' admonition that ecologically concerned researchers … be required to construct and present what they know in a mode that makes them 'politically active', engaged in the experimentation of the difference that what they know can make in the formulation of the issue and its envisaged solutions.(Stengers, 2005) But academics are still mostly writing papers, mostly assessing, observing, analyzing.I think there is a long way to go before we will see a form of thought that is quite simply comfortable coming from real bodies acting on the world.
Many artists, to my mind, routinely relate to how creating is a way to act on the world, however vexed that responsibility may feel.Which means, to me, to engage with the environmental realities that humans are increasingly affecting, shaping, cultivating, or creating anyway.I see it so evidently in all your work.So, I was wondering whether we could circle in on specific aesthetic choices you've had to make in your work, that speak to the dilemmas of taking up space and acting on the world?Loudnessan amplification of everything, perhapsensures that nothing falls between the cracks or out of earshot, understanding that every movement or event sounds and resounds.S. (submitted to the Google doc, August 25th): E. there are 'environmental sounds', yes, (i.e., 'typical' environmental sounds: specifically, some highdensity recordings I've made at the Prespes Lakes region in Greece) which are also played at an increasingly high volume.But part of my approach to environmental sound comes from the 'disappointing symbolism' of environmental sound/environmentality), encapsulated by this Ed Roberson poem that I referenced for the previous Zugzwang* publication 1 :   We in the morning / catch, from the train, in the green garbage runoff, / sight of white herons and the cormorants./ When they're here in the evening, we safely assume the world hasn't gone anywhere (Roberson, 2006).

TAKING SPACE OUT LOUD
For me, the appearance of nature's regularity (the presence of bird song) projects an aura of pristine or untouched nature.Even in an office building elevator, we're reminded that nature (still) exists because we have a recording of it!So, I have a complicated relationship with including environmental sounds in this context.Or if I would use them, I imagine them more as… let's say a 'calming nature soundtrack' from one of those smartphone meditation/stress apps, but one that spans such a long frame of time that you would hear the animals start to disappear… not so meditative really!My eco-pessimism shines through… Though these bird songs do appear again later, a bit more diminished (less dense, and at a lower volume), as if we could have fastforwarded through time.
So, 'environmentality' in the sound is more temporal than literal, I would say.The doom metal segment of the piece itself is one way in which it works: it is less about addressing sounds of climate than it is about addressing temporalities of changing climates.The idea is to feel time slow down, and then to speed up ever so To feel the changes that happen within those 'event markers' of timed sensation.Later on (in nondoom-metal sections), the sound works quite similarly… some of the other music I'm performing also has elements of slowly changing rhythms or durations.One piece works with a sort of generative tempo function, which makes it able to slow down suddenly and lose any sort of tempo.Even though it is always, if ever-so-slowly, moving forward.Similarly, there is a 'baroque' section which uses the micro-timings of baroque music to zoom back into a 'human' time frame and show the ways in which music itself is constantly full of temporal holes.Gaps within which even smaller events are constantly at work.E. (a fudge in the Google doc, August 30th): So, why the loudness?S. (submitted to the Google doc, August 24th): It's exactly that periphery of sounding sounds that N. mentions above … actually in a way it moves into discussions of ambient music/'environmental sound' in the sense that a generalized loudness is ubiquitous.The problem is that so many discrete networked material elements are lost in the noise.This makes me think of the conversation C. and I had in Lisbon when we met, regarding listening to environmental recordings in a club environment as a way of activating the sensual potential and access points of field recordings.I find it very relevant how, gradually, our noise footprint increases and how unaware we were (are?) of the huge impact it has.This has brought me to reflect on: How do we imagine ourselves as listening objects, bodies?The need to understand our own acoustic agency and how it tunes in or makes sense with the sonic environments of ours and others.

A SHELTER MADE OF GLASS
Connecting Acoustic Spaces exhibits these recordings through sound and light glass sculptures with a multichannel soundscape.The glass ocean creatures create personal acoustic arenas for those specific pandemic audio files collected and shared by my peripheral community.
These biological shell creatures serve as a protectorate and demarcation of acoustic spaces allowing us to observe and listen.The shelter became a means to isolate an ecology at the same time it made an idealistic environment differentiated from the exterior of the present acoustic moment.
E. (submitted to the Google doc, August 22nd): The ocean creature metaphorics are interestingly poised biologies and imaginations, which you are exploring in part for their sonorous qualities, i.e., the sound-sheltering features of a conch; and then re-creating in the medium of glass, which is an interesting material and sound medium in itself.I was left fascinated by questions of where these sculptures leave us or position us as caretakers and/or observers of environments, even at a basic level: Where do we listen to them?Can we experience the sheltered sounds within the shell shapes, for instance?
N. (response in the Google doc, no time stamp): It leaves us as observers, as critical listeners, though I don't want to dictate that to the one who experiences it.
I created these fictions inspired by nature acoustic shapes for these audio files to re-exist and resonate.These sheltered sounds can be heard and felt through the transparency and reflection of glass.
The sculptures will embody all those different listening ears.Audience can touch the glass (I am still seriously thinking about it because I don't want any broken pieces, lol) or surfaces where the sculptures are placed and feel the resonating audio files.I knew I wanted to exhibit these recordings through the medium of glass because as I received those recordings that I define as intimate moments, private spaces, and unique unreproducible environments, it was clear that glass performed those qualities.

E. (comment on the
The sculptures are unique.Each piece was glass blown in Denmark at Homergaard Vaerk.Taking inspiration from natural shapes that provide shelter, mainly from seashells, sea peaches, but also from insects in the metamorphosis phase, revealing the spirit of the received recordings.Hearing and observing all the alterations and problems caused by the overflow of human impacts made me think of ways to overcome the endless research and data streams.The reason I started listening was the constant feeling of being too loud using standard sampling procedures to assess the ecological status of a river.It felt as if we, the scientists, were the biggest invaders with our noisy fossil-fueled engines to extract specimens by exposing them to electric currents that stun them (some kind of vertigo?).

EAR STONES
So, the idea evolved to submerge an underwater microphone and try to find out about the status of the river.Though, this meant the creation of endless recordings stored on personal computers, hard drives, and cloud storages all over the world.To a certain extent the fish never stopped to stream and caused further infinite white noise.However, this method could not gain significant insights; it only felt like a steppingstone in critically discussing the status of water bodies.
The next step would be to focus on the physical sensation.How to make for instance noise pollution audible for humans but from the position of a fish?This links to the conversations about how environmental recordings should be listened to in sterile lab situations or preferably in a loud, droney club environment.As S. mentioned above, this was how we started talking in the first case.
One of the main questions I started to ask myself for approaching the idea of "Zugzwang" was: How to hear like a fish?And if so, what alterations and activations in my body/sensorium would it take to hear beyond my human ears, even though they are the only ears I have.
I became allies with an ancient fish species, the sturgeon. 2At the moment, they are considered the most endangered animal group in the world (IUCN, 2010), even though they have inhabited the northern hemisphere for more than 200 million years already.Through my work at the sturgeon hatchery, I deeply engaged with the fish and learned the hardship of care work in all its facets and felt an even stronger urge to find out what these prehistoric beings and I have in common.Where is our common ground?This turned out to be less of an attempt to transform oneself but to understand that we already have it.We are composed of an ultra-sensitive sensorium called our body.We just need to learn how to use it again, to then re-discuss how much space we want to take up.I think this is what I aim for in all my work.I don't want to have gills, otoliths (fish ear stones), or fins.I want to be able to accept my position as being shared and in constant transit.For instance, I have gone to the river every day now for the last three years, checking the water for turbidity, current, and temperature, just to know if the fish are well.It would be a mistake to think that self-erasure can be the answer, for instance I hope someone will need my body to exist too, at a certain moment in time.
It was this search and longing for groundedness and an episode of ongoing vertigo that brought me to otoliths, or ear stones: calcium carbonate structures that allow fish and humans to sense linear acceleration and gravity to maintain bodily balance.In fish, they also mediate hearing.Ear stones occur in almost all vertebrates and help them to keep their balance as they follow their movements for instance when standing up or turning the head.
These biominerals are where we meet, to arrive here on earth.In this place.Human ear stones (otoconia) are more like crystals and develop into their final form during the formation of the embryo, while in fish, they grow throughout their entire life.The age of a fish can actually be determined by the number of layers of mineralization in its otoliths; we can also use them to see which environmental stressors 3 they lived with.
The extraction of otoliths can only be done after the animal is deceased.Otoconia are invisible to the human eye (3 to 30 microns; a micron is onethousandth of a millimeter) and rarely extracted.However, the stones can dislocate on their own account, causing vertigo and disturbances in proprioception (i.e., bodily perception).In these cases, modern medical technology cannot really do much: A surgeon could not intervene and put them in place, for example.Instead, one of the most efficient treatment methods for relocating the tiny crystals relies on the patient recalibrating their own body, by following a set of maneuvers, guided by a physician.Performing quick directional changes, aided by the powers of acceleration, can unclog the crystals.I see these activating movements as a way to reconnect with our aquatic ancestry and the material (and anatomy) we share with fish.It demands actual work on one's own body to hear beyond our strictly human capacities to understand we're porous and permeable.
I became intrigued by the sense of the geological within all bodies, and the more discrete issues that happen when constitutions change, like in a river our composition changes continuously. 4Kathryn Yusoff states: Examining fossils as material and discursive knots in the narrative arc of human becoming, I argue for a 'geological turn' that takes seriously not just our biological (or biopolitical) life, but Zugzwang* or the compulsion to find a common baseline in sound Gruber • Hertz • Domínguez Rangel • Flatø 201 also our geological (or geopolitical) life and its forms of differentiation.Fossils unlock this lifedeath, time-untimely, corporeal-incorporeal equation, suggesting the need for a theory of the geologic and a reckoning with the forces of mute matter in lively bodies: a corporeality that is driven by inhuman forces (Yusoff, 2013).Now, going back to where I started: river assessments.Trying to understand a river means to zoom into the molecular structures of the sediments but also to go beyond the river shores and roam the entire catchment (all the areas of land where water collects and drains into the river, as common outlet).Temporal scales start to dissolve, and prehistoric sands mix with sewage sludge heavy with anthropogenic pollutants.To calibrate in all this, it needs certain sensorial skills to stay afloat.For fish and humans, calcium carbonate crystals form the baseline to sense selfmovement and beyond.Over time, the continued maneuvers to activate the crystals will enable humans to traverse the river to hear the river of before, of the now, and the after.Ear stones make us realize that we are the river itself, all the time.
Not only through listening to the river -its history, present and futures -but even more we actually contain the river in the shape of our ear crystals and are part of the riverine cycle.
S. (comment on the Google doc, August 25th): I absolutely love this discussion of (re-)calibration... it's a word I never really used before in terms of scale, but it makes a lot of sense.I'm especially loving the idea of forming the interior crystal as a calcified piece of the stream itself... or making the river interior as a natural way of calibrating/contextualizing the sensorial self.Also definitely tracing the crystallising lineage to N's text beyond the material similarity... having trouble verbalizing it at the moment!But there's something floating between those mineral ideas that is working on my brain… S. (coming back to the Google doc, August 25 th ): For me there is also a connection here with glass, which is something to do with freezing time, making it hold still for a moment.You have this amazing breadth of acoustic snapshots, which are sort of taking place through the context of glass figures which are also (essentially) a material snapshot of a particular molecular process.
N. (responding in the Google doc, same day) Indeed, Sam.Such a lovely connection.

CONCLUSION: FREEZING TIME
Zugzwang is an ongoing discussion between sound artists, an ecological researcher and a time scholar about the "compulsion to move": about the weirdness of how anthropogenic environments situate humans in.Zugzwang denotes how we are simultaneously compelled by the movements of planetary flows, multispecies entanglements and accelerating societal impacts on its surroundings, and compelled to move ourselves, thus putting the whole ensemble into motion ourselves.The transcript above summarizes a discussion about how to ethically take up the latter role, the one in which affecting is inevitable.Can art serve as a fount of inspiration, because of artists' relative comfort in taking up space by giving form to things to come?If so, how?
Having reflected upon what transpired in the conversation, the point about art freezing time stands out; the importance, in the flux of lives and processes within which we find ourselves, of making time hold still for a moment, even if only in the fiction an artwork sustains.In the artworks we discussed, freezing time was not a matter of "pressing pause" on some universal, abstract temporal flow, but to provide distillations of the kinds of temporal complexes we are usually busy living in.
The multispecies, geological and anthropogenic times that may all register in sturgeon otoliths, or human otoconia, given the right form of attention.
The century-long unravelling of climate change condensed into a doom/drone metal concert.
A multi-sited, audio history of the early pandemic, resonating in these marvellous creatures of glass.
All of these art works, or proposals for art practices, take care in the way they do or would take up space in the world; in the forms of embodiment, being or mediation they engage in.These are first moves in processes of giving form; hopefully, some may also find them generative for inquiry.
The environmental humanities tends to unite around the notion that Western scientific modes are inadequate to the "global weirding" of humaninduced environmental change.With the according sense that the universe is more multiple than singular accounts of the nature of reality allow, knowledge also becomes about "pragmatics", or the difference you can make (Savransky, 2021a).
With these ways of implicating ourselves in multisited, multispecies, multitemporal process, however, it seems inappropriate to offer conclusions in the sense of an ending.These conversations and art works are created in the key of the "generative" (Savransky, 2021b), they are open-ended events meant to beget more questions, insights, perspectives and problematizations.

Figure 1 :
Figure 1: Still from video documentation of DOOM."DOOM is a vibrating and reverberating vision of the end of the world… maybe just after, or right before.DOOM is an accumulation of grievances, and a mapping of those grievances onto an entanglement of snarls.Without committing to the aesthetic regime of metal music, we take serious influence from the time-based approaches of the doom/drone-metal genres, understanding that the performance of this music creates a unique, atmospheric and temporally-expansive way to experience sound… as an embodied and enmeshed part of sounding networks, rather than a being separate from, or an observer."DOOM had its film premiere in August 2021 and performance premiere in November 2021.Credit: Ethan Folk.<DOOM: Sophiensaele Homepage> E. (submitted to the Google doc, August 24th): S. how do environmentsor more specifically, long temporalities of climate changeenter the music in DOOM?Are there recordings?Of what?

Figure 3 :
Figure 3: Microscopic view of otoliths, extracted from a sardine during C.'s Biofriction residency at Cultivamos Cultura, Portugal in July 2021.They are part of the bioacoustic research project "Houston, can you hear me?"And explore embodied ways of listening of environmental changes in aquatic ecosystems.

Figure 2 :
Work in progress "Connecting Acoustic Spaces" sound and light sculptures.Studio view."Connecting Acoustic Spaces" are sound and light glass sculptures with a multichannel soundscape created with 500 collected audio recordings from around the world since the corona lockdown in Europe.Dating from March 2020 till March 2021.Credit: Natalia Domínguez Rangel.
<http://nataliadominguezrangel.com/ pages/works/listening/> N. (excerpted from email, July 3rd): As for myself, I already produced half of the sculptural part from the collected recordings I have from March 2020 till March 2021 concerning our acoustic noise footprint and as listening bodies.Sculptures are made of glass and inspired by some sea creatures and several cocoons.