Eco-Rhythms
by Ryan Edwards, MASARY Studios
What fundamental ecological rhythms are we aware of or nearly aware of, and what rhythms are we somehow ignoring completely?
How do we leverage that which is familiar, easily observable and near, towards connection to deeper and more nuanced layers of eco-rhythms, and thereby their patterns, extended periods, and phasing?
Can combinations of known and unknown eco-rhythms produce interesting meta-rhythms, and can these resulting meta-eco-rhythms become compelling, sensuous, important?
How is our collective (average) attention-span precluding the perception of some phasing and phrasing, the extended patterns of certain eco-rhythms? What do we think we see-hear-feel and what do we truly?
What is an eco-rhythm?
If everything is ecological, then an eco-rhythm is everything over time. It may be a bit paradoxical to consider “individual” or “singular” eco-rhythms, given the view that everything is ecological, and therefore connected. But then again, each part is made up of more parts. The more we dig down the more we circle back up. The parts are always more than the whole, and each has its own rhythm. Phasing, cycling, forming, deforming, giving, receiving.
Rocks, toothpaste, high-pressure systems, smog, Herring migration. Each has rhythms, some expressed in time-scales we as humans can relate to quite easily; The Herring run every spring. Humans blink on average 15-20 times per minute. Some time-scales are much less observable by humans; some rocks take millions of years to form. Some polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS, or “forever chemicals”) will take up to 1000 years to break down. The writing about certain artworks can go on and on.
We as humans seem drawn to more and more rapid rhythms as the modern era has progressed. As we shorten our time-horizon so does our sensual connection to rhythms that phase beyond those bounds. If our main cadence is driven by our own lifetimes—and perhaps even more to the point by returns, gains / greed and everything as soon as possible—well, we know how distortive and powerful those rhythms can be.
If the climate crisis is a crisis of creativity, we may just be missing the beat.
"Ecological awareness is shaking our faith in the anthropocentric idea that there is one scale to rule them all - the human one."
—Timothy Morton
How do we listen past the priorities we have been so trained on? How do we start to shake off anthropocentric-time-values and hear more, feel more? It is starting to feel like the cadence we inherited and have doubled down on generationally since the industrial revolution has reduced our sense of rhythmical awareness of cycles beyond our life-year-quarter-page-scroll-moments, reduced our hipness to the cycles even of the tides, the moon, the Herring, the geese and the orange blossoms. Our quest for efficiency and expediency have left us hyper-focussed on shorter and shorter cycles—when the wellness of our ecological reality begs for greater and greater phrases of rhythm to be felt, acknowledged and respected.