Benjamin Earl

Benjamin Earl – Week 1 – Observation
Jul 18, 2022

Hello world, my name is Ben. I am a media artist and researcher based in Rotterdam. I’ve spent just over one week at Casa Sasso now, here is a short list of things I’ve noticed and noted in my notebook:

• Waves
• Bodies (water, sky, mountain, people, bugs)
• Contours
• Models
• Weather

I am here to spend a while with some lingering thoughts and ideas that haven’t quite had the chance to come out yet. A lot of these involve listening, observing and noticing from various angles and perspectives. So far I’ve been working with a little antenna that I brought with me to tap into a group of satellites called NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration). They broadcast radio signals that can be received and transformed into images of the world from above. I’ve been trying to intercept such frequencies by following some of tutorials laid out by Open Weather. So far I’ve managed to listen to a couple of satellites over the last two nights. It is somewhat of a sublime experience I must say. Over the next week I am going to try broadcasting some of these sounds over the radio at goodtimesbadtimes.club. The first broadcast will be at 21:11 CEST tonight.

I’ve been thinking about models and perspectives quite a lot and having conversations with the other residents here about it. As we sit in the garden, we look down upon Locarno on the otherside of the lake. From up here it looks like it could almost be a model city with fake cars, mountains, boats, and people. When we went into Locarno last week, we became part of that model. When looking back on Vairano, it suddenly also looked like a model. I began searching for a webcam on the mountain to see if I could access this perspective on both places at any moment and luckily enough there was one. It looks down from Cardada upon both Locarno and Vairano. I can’t see myself in it, but I’m somewhere in there. I’ve used the webcam as a background for a small journal website that I am updating sporadically with thoughts, thinking and photos. You can find it here at sasso.bnjmnearl.eu

Other things I’ve been up to with the rest of the lovely group here have include swimming, baking, cooking, drinking, writing, drawing, hiking, more swimming, listening, chatting, sitting, sunbathing, hydrating, walking, travelling, looking, coding, recording, reading and getting bitten by mosquitos.

You can find more of me and what I do at:
bnjmnearl.eu
instagram.com/bnjmnearl

Benjamin Earl – Week 2 – Grounding
Jul 26, 2022

Hello again world, Ben here.

It’s been a week since I posted on here last and although a lot has changed, a lot has stayed the same. Tumultuous changes seem to be going on around me but life at Sasso stays the same; calm and considered.

Here is a short list of things I’ve noticed over the last seven days:

• Flows (rivers, waterfalls, processes, coffee)
• A snake
• Thunder and lightening
• Collections and deposits
• Endings
• The world from above
• …

As per my last post, I’ve been listening to satellites each evening this week. Between 8 and 10pm, a satellite flew over Sasso and broadcast its signals to the world below. I sat in the garden with my headphones on, eyes to the sky, waiting for to hear the faint sounds of the satellite. Every evening the satellite arrived 4 minutes later than I thought, but it arrived nonetheless. I was listening to the satellite to gain a perspective on the world around me that I could not reach. My eyes in the sky. During the fly over, the satellite transmitted radio signals which I could translate into images (through a process I still do not understand). Below are a selection of my favourite images created last week:

When I look back at these images and try to find myself in them (which is impossible, unfortunately) I realise its a perspective of a world that I cannot relate to. This perspective from 531 miles above, does not give me the sense of life I see around me. The plants, the flowers, the bugs, the lizards, the people, the mountains all have life in them that I can’t find. Maybe its a perspective that doesn’t allow for life to flourish, along with other top down ways of seeing.

Alongside these listening and imaging activities, I’ve been reading All About Love by bell hooks. I was most struck by her chapter on living by a love ethic. In it she says:

“Embracing a love ethic means that we utilize all the dimensions of love–”care, commitment, trust, responsibility, respect, and knowledge”– in our everyday lives. We can successfully do this by cultivating awareness. Being aware enables us to critically examine our actions to see what is needed so that we can give care, be responsible, show respect and indicate a willingness to learn.”

After reading this I didn’t want to look at satellites anymore. I wanted to listen to the garden, the house, the people, the weather and the other members of the world around me. So this week, inspired by Pauline Oliveros, I will be spending time listening and noticing the things directly around me. From a perspective of my own.

Until next time!

(cover photo by Benedikt Steiner)

Benjamin Earl – Week 3 – Weathering
Aug 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.