Gibber

by A. Rawlings

Spawning from an ecopoethics praxis, Gibber surveys interconnection between (ideas and realities of) land, bird, human, signified, signifier— all founded on a gentle interrogation of the language nurtured “here” (here being Queensland, Australia). Gibber explores the concepts that humans read their environments and that humans are in conversation with landscapes and the inhabiting non-human species. Through Gibber, rawlings questions embedded notions of what bodies (be they human, water, weather, other) are capable of or even constantly composing as well as how to ethically read, converse with, collaborate with, and/or interpret non-human entities.

Genres: Poetry

Digital publication

First published December 1, 2012

About the author

a rawlings is a Canadian-Icelandic interdisciplinary artist whose books include Wide slumber for lepidopterists (Coach House Books, 2006), Gibber (online, 2012), o w n (CUE BOOKS, 2015), si tu (MaMa Multimedijalni Institut, 2017), and Sound of Mull (Laboratory for Aesthetics and Ecology, 2019).

Reviews

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Writing has nothing to do with meaning. It has to do with landsurveying and cartography, including the mapping of countries yet to come.

- Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

Gibber is a transdisciplinary site-specific project created during my 2012 Queensland poetry residency that combines sound, visual, conceptual, and digital poetries with acoustic ecology and counter-mapping. Spawning from an ecopoethics that applies the three environmental R's (reduce, reuse, recycle) to creative process, Gibber surveys interconnection between (ideas and realities of) land, bird, human, signified, signifier—all founded on a gentle interrogation of the language nurtured "here" (here being Queensland, Australia). Gibber includes field audio recordings and photo documentation of biotic and abiotic collaboration, synaesthetic museums of sound, and an archive of a multisource polyphonic exquisite corpse composed live via Twitter by 25 international poets. Today, we'll walk through Gibber as ecopoiesis and an attempt to countermap the literary genre of travel writing.

Signs, we all know, are ordering systems. We accept names as fact. When I arrived in Queensland, I held two questions in mind: "What is the language of here? What is the language nurtured here?" My emphasis on language related directly to witnessing (though not necessarily comprehending) the types of ordered systems present culturally and ecologically. While I understood English as the dominant, colonialist language in Australia— and I had seen detailed maps of Australian aboriginal languages (some existent, some extinct)— I was keen to consider language as an ordering system that may exist outside of human creation as well. It may be conceptually possible for humans to converse with ecosystems and their components, but would take practice to learn an encoded system through which meaning may be transferred. Through what signs does weather communicate? Could an arctic tern be considered a travel writer if her flight patterns are engaged as communicative material?

As Mary Louise Pratt wrote, "the journey and the writing about it are inseparable projects (Pratt 201)." I knew from the outset of my journey to and through Queensland that I would be engaged in a constant stream of dialogue, of linguistic exchange — whether or not I had fluency in the languages. Gibber showcases some of the conversations I had with Australian ecosystems and their biotic and abiotic components. I collaborated with freshwater lakes and with ocean surf; I audio-recorded soundwalks through dense jungle, early-morning island arousal, and a cattle pen. Instead of trying to write about the experience (thereby naming it via description), I opted to classify or categorize based on sensory engagements (eye, ear) through documentation of conversation and the collision of naming practices with the ecosystems and their components. Could an innovative, contemporary travel writing include the undoing of what we think we know— the abandonment of word as we know it to stand with the fear and pleasure entrenched in our imponderabilia?

- A. Rawlings

Read here: arawlings.is/gibber/

Watch here: youtube.com/