On Vibration was an online lecture series that ran from 2020 to 2024.
On Vibration will begin as it will end, with the slippery and emphatic approach of the amateur encounter (an epistemology of love, from Gustave Flaubert to Agnes Denes, wherein a practise of objective chance can increase the chances for chance to intervene, experimenting with how long we can extend before we reach), neither substance nor perspective as much as undulating connective tissue of liquid crystalline and hologrammatic waves, of stories as cosmic viscera, the simultaneous loosening and tightening of incipient relationality in an energetic perspective of coming to know and coming to love, wherein alchemical dreams leave lexical shadows
This year there will be seven online lectures, every Thursday from October 5th to November 16th, each lasting around one hour (7-8pm BST/GMT), all given by Patrick Farmer over Zoom
Whether people can attend or not, all lectures will be recorded and sent out to everyone the same day
More information will be made available about the individual lectures between now and October (mostly on our instagram), but their skeletal psyche looks like this:
A non-compulsory reading and listening list will be sent prior to the start of the series. It’s recommended all participants download the pdf of previous On Vibration lectures for ongoing points of reference
As with previous years, an email thread and other platforms will act in conjunction with the series, helping to create a means for people to get to know each other, ask questions, and share work outside of the lectures
As a brief overview (more detailed information on the lectures to follow soon), this new series will spend time with the ancient and resonant matrices of the Babylonian Enūma Elish, specifically the myth of Tiamat and Marduk as gobbit and ecotone, intimately disjunct in belated distinction amidst the sensitive chaos and infinite spirals of sweet and bitter water
We’ll think on the micro and macrocosmic vibratory energies in between physiognomies of concentric landscapes as place, emotion, and alchemical vocabulary, entwining different and yet self-similar terms for separation as transformation under the various vicissitudes of histories of auditory theory (what we might otherwise think of as the subjective phenomena of hearing, fractal polarities of opposition and change among floating biomagnetic labyrinths), composite patterns of fieldless fields in which curiosity is a form of care
This will often manifest as an attempt to experience (in imagination) separability, one of the three ontological pillars that sustain modern thought (according to Denise Ferreira da Silva) as cosmological plurality. Enfolding a consideration of human existence as both physical (geographic, bodily) and overwhelmed universal contiguity through studies of the bioelectric body as living matrix
We’ll attempt to listen with holistic ears (enfolding the animate, pathological, even the divine) to the ubiquity of disenchantment (pulling apart) in order to come to know some of the correspondences pitching in between visible and invisible bodies as internal and external cymatic alchemy, considering what it can mean to love a place (…what is a place…) and yet still be dangerous to it
Following and making paths if only to drift from them (or is it the other way round?), we’ll spirally walk past ways in which the human ear (as creature of vertigo) can sift and distend frequencies whilst turning to more holistic principles of co-terminus vibrations enfolding the human body as both permeable barrier and field of universal energy
We’ll consider anima mundi (soul of the world) as dragon, as the loci of water’s mysteries, or as Isabelle Stengers puts it, the indifference of Gaia. We’ll think with all such interdependent figures as critters, as admixtures (often referred to as monsters), as marvellous mixtures, bestiaries even, before arriving at the archetype of the chimera, the ear as spiral nebulae, thalmic indigo, the keeper of the brain sand archives, full of animals and little gods
As with previous years, participants will have the option of submitting work for a new volume of A Row of Trees, the sonic art research unit’s journal
Please contact patrickwilliamfarmer @ gmail.com for more information
Previous lectures include:
An Amateur Perspective, auras of old green dirt
Gravitational Gulches
No Vibration Without Electricity
Thank you for the Augury
The Long Lasting Intimacy of Stengers
Poetic Physiology pt.1
Hermetic Resonance
Hermetic Reasonance
Passing Through
Poetic Physiology pt.2
The Cosmos is a Living Vibrating Animal
My Little Mirror Was To Win Over The Whole
Dirt Work
Queer Little Gods, an introduction to stereocilia
Trembling is all Living, pt.1 & 2
What is a Whirlpool
Reasonance and Dragon Language
Space Weather and Desire Work
A Tall Grass of Open Hands
A Dream of a Labyrinth is a Shark’s Love for Humanity, pt.1 & 2
A Hearing Heart