An Ecology of Time Traces in Extinction Events and Dawn Chorus

Abstract

This article emerges out of an ongoing project that asks: What kinds of temporal attention spans and logics are proposed in a time of climate crisis and ecological collapse? What are the temporal dimensions of the uncanny, of post-human or almost-human forms of representation resonant in our bio-technocratic age? How can an understanding of these ecological ‘time effects’ generate new forms of musical thinking? The form of the article is itself an attempt to mirror the multiplicity of perspectives that I consider to be an ‘affect’ of our time of ecological crisis. Underpinned by Timothy Morton’s notion that all forms of knowing whether scientific or artistic are ‘aesthetic’ in nature, both the approach to writing this text and the specific work under discussion, Extinction Events and Dawn Chorus (2018) make use of poetic assemblage and metaphor as the basis for an ontology of thought. A broad ecological framework is invoked to describe situations of discrepancy and slippage particularly in relation to temporal experience, and forms of repetition and looping are tied to themes of degradation and loss.