Host.

Be not afeared; this isle is full of noises,
Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears; and sometimes voices
That, if I then had waked after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again; and then, in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open and show riches
Ready to drop upon me, that, when I waked,
I cried to dream again.

Caliban in Shakespeare’s The Tempest.

Natural sound-scapes that we perceive as intricate and seamless natural compositions; a forest at dawn or the metropolis at rush hour are in reality conglomerations of independent and unrelated sounds.  What appears to the auditor as a structured and syncopated whole, arises from a vast array of largely unrelated sonic events, some intentional, many accidental.  All are spatially displaced but all converge upon our ears which form the centre of the soniferous universe in which we are immersed.

In effect our senses form a Procrustes Bed upon which the palpable world is forced to comply.  Therefore that which we naturally assume to be comprehensive and exhaustive is simply a small portion of a vast spectrum that extends well beyond our perceptual horizon.

The Host project suggests that for a moment we abandon our Anthropomorphic worldview and think about life (well actually think about sex) from the perspective of an insect.  We are invited to join an audience of Crickets, who are attending a very serious scientific lecture on the sex life of insects, which we quickly realise is rather more complex and interesting than our own! 

One screen shows the heavily pixelated talking-head of the scientist, the other an image of an oscilloscope signal.  The oscilloscope image with its crackling sound-track was obtained under laboratory conditions and is a direct recording of the electrical activity in the aural nerve centre of a Cricket which is listening to the sex lecture.  From one perspective the creature becomes a type of electro-physiological microphone - but at a deeper metaphorical level we are asked to re-consider our own perceptual assumptions about the world.

Nigel Helyer, Ars Electronica Linz 2007.

Read the Sex lecture Transcript below: -