In the Realm of the Unseen
Deeply inspired by the immersive and evocative soundscapes of this year’s musical Director, Steve Roach.
We are honored to announce the theme for ASP 2019:
In the Realm of the Unseen:
Around us, inside us and within and between the molecules of everything we touch, is a hidden Universe.
In the realm of the Unseen, dwell the millions of micro-organisms that inhabit our biosphere. Under our feet, in the air we breathe, in every drop of water-
In our guts and in our eyelashes- are ecosystems, webs of communication and relations, that we may be barely conscious of- but bind our biological existence to our planet and all other life in the cosmos.
What is this interior relationship?
Are we planets, to the myriad flora and fauna that exist under our fingernails?
Are we Bio-Universes unto ourselves and what sort of world are we?
To paraphrase E. O. Wilson, from “The Future of Life”
If you focus down by a power of ten in size (from an ant or a termite) the animals present in a patch of soil number in the thousands.
Nematode and enchytraeid pot worms, mites, springtails, pauropods, diplurans, symphylans and tardigrades seethe in the underground.
Their home is a labyrinth of miniature caves and walls of rotting vegetable debris cross-strung with yards of fungal threads. And they are just the surface of the flora and fauna at our feet. Keep going, keep magnifying until the eye penetrates microscopic water films on grains of sand, and there you will find ten billion bacteria in a thimbleful of soil and frass. You will have reached the energy base of the decomposer world, as we understand it.
The bodies of our Ancestors have decomposed and been literally “incorporated” into this environment and when we die- we will break apart and feed the tiny mouths of the everything.
If we zoom out from this focus on the minute, every being inhabits the larger Unseen world. Every living body emits an electronic field, spectral fields and waves of heat and energy that we cannot see, but may attune ourselves to sense. We are swimming thru a sea of particle waves and washed over by the ripples left over from the Big Bang.
We invite you to explore these memes with us and delve into
“The Realm of the Unseen.”