emergent patterns

ER. Your work often deals with the microscopic world around us and the complex forms and patterns in the natural world. Can you talk about these emergent patterns and how it intersects your own work?

JG. When I talk about emergent patterns, I’m mainly referring to the meshing together of forces in the natural world, the effects they have and how we perceive this. In one sense it is the study of complexity, looking at processes we have little understanding of and not trying to rationalize it so much as be absorbed by it, to really sense nature rather than analyse it. This is where my view differs from science in that the value of nature here is not in what we can abstract and isolate but what generates forms of meaning, particularly in a cultural sense. So the “art” here is in using sound and its properties as a medium of translation for finding significance in processes that give rise to the emergent patterns around us. Most of this happens on the microscopic level or beyond what we can normally perceive, but if we employ tools and techniques, our attention can be sharpened allowing us to develop new forms of sensitivity, aesthetic relations and ideally creative impulses. This is a good base from which to start and from here we can go into great detail about the specifics of this process and what it means.

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John Grzinich interviewed by Mark Peter Wright in
EAR ROOM # 4 | re-sounding dialogues across the globe (2009/10/01)