Signal Chain — Season 2 — Episode 6
Welcome to Season 2 of Signal Chain. This pop-up newsletter is a creative collaboration between generative musician Duncan Geere and photographer Oliver Holms.
We’re taking turns to send new work to each other. Each new piece is inspired by the piece before. We’re building a chain of influence together and you’re along for the ride. New instalments are released on the 1st and 15th of every month, and you can unsubscribe at any time using the link in the footer.
::SC-S2-E06::
Hi Oliver,
Have you ever come across a book called The World Without Us? A thought experiment by Alan Weisman, it’s about what would happen if humans vanished one day, raptured away somewhere unknown. What would happen to the things we left behind? How long would they last and remain recognisable?
It popped into my head immediately on seeing your last entry, with flowers gazing out longingly at a city skyline from behind a windowpane, with no humans in sight.
Structures crumble pretty quickly when not maintained. The average house begins to fall apart within a few decades, as water leaks into the roof through unrepaired weather damage. As the roof beams rot, animals and plants also make their way inside and start eating away at the structure. After about 500 years, all that would be left of the average home would be aluminium dishwasher components, stainless steel cookware, and plastic.
Plants and animals though? They’ll do pretty well if humans weren’t around any more. Not all of them - the domesticated species and those that depend on human civilization would have trouble. Don’t expect to see a lot of cows, cockroaches, corn, rice, or rats in this future.
But the ecological vacuum they leave would be filled sooner or later by other competitors, many of which would be native species that have suffered but survived through human habitation. That might, or might not, include your flowers.
My music this month attempts to capture the story of these survivor species in a world without us. It starts as a relative monoculture of tones and timbres, but over the course of the track it widens out and becomes more lush and diverse. By the end, the musical ecosystem is thriving.
The longest-lasting evidence of human habitation on the surface of our planet will likely be our radioactive waste, bronze statues, ceramics, plastics, and the faces on Mount Rushmore. But even after Earth is eaten up by the Sun, in a little under eight billion years, a small trace of humankind will remain.
A hundred light years away from Earth right now, with a large enough antenna, you’d be able to pick up a recording of several famous opera singers in New York - the first public radio broadcast, in 1910. Our electromagnetic waves, including all of Signal Chain, will continue travelling away from Earth at the speed of light.
Loaded with memories of a world that no longer exists, spiralling forever out into the inky blackness of the Universe.
See you next month.
- Duncan