Benjamin Earl – Week 3 – Weathering

August 3, 2022

Hello once again world,

I’m happy to be back at my computer writing this little entry for anyone who is curious to read. This week there have been a few things happening. But first, a short list of things I’ve noticed:

• Clouds
• Publics
• Outlines
• Wave forms (water and sound)
• Spiders (a little one is on my laptop as I type this)

Since last weeks post I’ve followed my intuition again, a process that’s becoming more familiar as I spend more time taking note of some kind of internal working. I wrote last time that I no longer wanted to look at the weather satellite images I was collecting and I didn’t. Instead I began to look up at the clouds and the sky, the place I was previously directing my radio antenna to. I thought that if I wanted to know more about the weather, I need to spend time looking at it.

The sky is huge here, which seems like a strange thing to say. It is not like in the city where you only see a certain section of the sky. Watching the clouds change as the day passed was actually quite a joyful experience and something I will continue to do from now on.

I know almost nothing about clouds. I have a general idea of how they form from my secondary school physics classes, but name and catergorising is beyond me. To look up at the clouds closely for longer periods of time felt like I was observing something that had always been there but that I had never seen. I took photos of them and drew over those photos and stuck the photos on the wall. The paper blew in the wind, much like the clouds that are captured on them did in the sky.

As I watched the clouds above, I also listening to the birds, the crickets, the dogs, the people, the planes, the boats and the wind. I noticed the ants moving in the grass beneath my feet and the bees flying from flower to flower. My attention to one part of my world inadvertently directed my attention to others. I began recording the noises of these other things that I noticed around me. I’ve made several hours of audio recordings whilst I’ve been at Sasso. I tried to make some music from it and I produced a sketch of a soundscape/song. I won’t be sharing this with anyone right now.

I didn’t share anything this week as I had done previously on the radio. I think it was because of a vulnerable tenderness that arose when dealing with a subject that I have never approached through methods that I’ve never really used. But it made the process somehow slower and more methodical. Something that I actually enjoyed in contrast to the broadcasting the week before. I think in the future I need to find ways to combine these feelings of moving iteratively / making public and the moving slowly / staying internal.

As I write this there are only two days before I have to leave. I feel the preparation to leave seep into my mind even though part of me wants to refuse it to happen. I’m definitely going to miss it here.