Three Fields: Episode 1

Transcript

Anna 00:29
Welcome to the Three Fields podcast, an exploration of artists and cultural workers' perspectives on food justice and digital practices across India, the UK, and South Africa. Over two episodes, we delve into conversations, field recordings, and stories emerging from the Three Fields Project, an international collaboration and co-commission mobilising ancestral and embodied ways of knowing and understanding food systems and environmentally conscious creative digital practices.

Throughout 2025, the project brought together artists Deepa Reddy, Kajal Modi, and Samukelisiwe Dube to create a new collaborative immersive work from across the three territories. The artists spend time with each other weekly, predominantly in a digital space, sharing food knowledges and practices, while also learning about XR and its potential to be sustainable and accessible. The outcomes include binaural sound works following movements and journeys of three spices, salt, pepper, and cinnamon. The ingredients invite us to examine global food cultures through the botanical histories, colonial pasts and presents, and migration routes. I'm Anna Santomauro, I'm Head of Programme at Arts Catalyst, and my voice will be with you over the two episodes.

Three Fields, episode one, digital embodiment, putting your hands into a bag of rice. In this first episode, we dig into the role of immaterial digital infrastructures in the context of cultural practices that engage with climate and food justice. I'm here with artists Deepa Reddy, Kaajal Modi, and Samukelisiwe Dube, and cultural workers Dan Barnard and Lodi Matsetela. Welcome everyone and thank you for being here. I would like us to start with a round of introductions where you give us a sense of your relationship to digital practices and this is very much about you and your experience of the past few months within Three Fields. I think there is something very important in this collaboration, which is its translocal dimension. This is something we've all been thinking about, especially given how the whole process happened online. Dan, would you like to go first?

Dan 03:12
My name's Dan Barnard. I'm part of Fast Familiar. We're a digital story studio based in Reading in the UK. We make interactive digital stories and that happens sometimes in art galleries, sometimes in museums, sometimes in theatres, sometimes in the form of audio walks. Our work has also been kind of engaged with climate change for a really long time now, since before it was cool is how we used to joke.

Just lately we've been very interested in the last sort of five, six years, seven years in the intersection between making digital work and caring about climate change. Is that just something that you do in terms of the subject matter of your work or is that something that you also bring into how you make digital work? A few years ago as part of a project called the Networked Condition, we built a tool to help artists plan projects in a lower carbon way. The Networked Condition project was a project that Fast Familiar and Arts Catalyst and Abandon Normal Devices did and it consisted of a series of case studies with different artists who exploring the environmental impact of digital practice in different ways and it also involved various experiments we all did in our own practice either as organisations or as artists in terms of creating lower carbon work. In terms of how it connects to food justice, we've been making a project at the moment with Oxford University and Manchester Museum about food and climate and that's a digital project. Also I suppose the most immediate connection for me between digital and environment and food is the amount of clean drinking water essentially that server farms use. A huge amount of water is used in the cooling systems of server farms and server farms are just expanding and expanding. The UK at the moment has plans to build loads more and AI is particularly really making us use loads more server space than we ever did before. When I say us I mean like people in general. Water is a thing that's been used for that purpose but is also there's a lot of people in the world who don't have clean drinking water and there's a lot of people in the world who need that water to grow food. That's the kind of most immediate visceral connection for me between the digital and food justice.

Kaajal 05:55
So I'm Kaajal Modi, I'm a multidisciplinary artist working with food and digital practices. A lot of the time when we think about the digital it feels very immaterial but actually the digital is material and when we talk about digital practices and food justice to me the first thing that occurs is the issue of land and land justice and climate justice because I don't think these things are separate.

The minerals that make up our digital technologies come from land and the food that we eat also comes from land and often the injustices that are enacted by one system and infrastructure are very similar to the other because people are displaced, people's labour is exploited, the land is extracted and biodiversity is also destroyed and I think we don't get to talk about one of them without talking about the other.

Lodi 06:59
My name is Lodi Matsetela. I'm a programme manager at Tshimologong Precinct at the Digital Content Hub where we have the festival Fak’ugesi and this is how we ended up collaborating with and as well as Fast Familiar. And that's how I find myself, one, engaging by proxy, because this is, in essence, Samu's residency. In the way that I followed Samu's investigation, it sometimes gets a little more specific and speaks to indigenous knowledge systems. And just like Kaajal said, we can't talk about anything that has to do with sustainability, that has to do with food, which is sustenance, which then speaks to people being able to nourish themselves. And then whether they're nourishing themselves with quality food or just the food that they can afford, are they nourishing themselves with food that's been imposed on them? Or is it a food that is part of their culture that is putting it simply what has been my experience in following part of Samu's journey? Well, of course, she's gone a lot deeper. It has been very, very educational.

In South Africa, where we have such, I mean, we're the most unequal society, where large parcels of land, in fact, the tillable land is mostly owned by white farmers, who only make up maybe 8% of the population. Yet they do own the food and agriculture sector. And it is something that they even speak of about a power that they yield, that should white farmers leave South Africa, these are the white farmers. What would everybody else eat? And there's an arrogance in that statement that suggests that before they arrived, when there were no people on that very land, and no, were they able to till that land and farm on it, nor were they able to eat and sustain themselves without running big agricultural corporate farms, as they do right now. And then, of course, because I'm at a digital innovation hub the work that we do always has to intersect with the digital. And while it's not explicitly using new media in the project that we're going to be supporting Samu and the other artists in producing, it is about learning from Fast, Familiar’s practices on how do you create content in a sustainable way while we're encouraging and trying to accelerate in our case, young black youth to participate in the digital creative sector. How do we do it in a sustainable way and not take on practices that are harmful to our environment?

Samu 10:26
My name is Samu Dube, and I am a South African artist whose work grows at the intersection of gardening, papermaking, printmaking, and ancestral knowledge, more specifically in terms of matriarchive knowledge, based on my grandmother, my mother's, the Black women around me that have helped nourish me in different ways, you know. I explore food justice by looking at how Black South African women specifically have grown, prepared, and preserved, and also shared food historically, whether it's through the day-to-day of taking care of their families, or working on land, and seeing how their practices are forms of resistance, and also memory, and also to follow from what Lodi was speaking about.

In South Africa, food is never just nourishment. It is also very political, very spiritual, and also historical. It's very much part of our history. That is because, obviously, our food systems have been shaped by colonization, by migration, by land disposition as well. But they've also been held together by the resilience of women and people who have nurtured their own gardens within their own homes and spaces, just finding a little plot of land to build a garden for themselves, to feed their families or their communities, and to just hold themselves together through all of the stuff that happens politically. And then in terms of digital practices and how my work sort of has merged with the digital in this project, it became a way that the digital sort of extended the garden, or the garden was extended into the digital, let me say it rather, as a way of cultivating relationships with people across the land, as we are speaking right now, and between me and the other artists, and as well as seeing a different way to reimagine the garden within a digital space, and what that looks like. And so that has been mostly the exploration that we have been speaking to and trying to reinterpret, re-imagine, and just explore, basically. And as someone who works with the soil most of the time, and with paper and seeds, the digital did feel very foreign to me at first, just as also someone who doesn't have that much knowledge of digital practices. So it did feel quite foreign in the beginning, but as we sort of grew with the work, I also grew my understanding of what is expected in terms of the digital world, and how I can reinterpret the work that is happening on the land into something digital that doesn't really take away from what's happening on the land, but sort of explores it and expands it and gives more people around the world more access to what is happening on the ground. I began to understand that the digital space as well can hold memory and collaboration if it's handled with care and authenticity and also just a good understanding of where you want the work to go and to travel.

And so food justice in the digital context, to me, is about making sure that stories and practices of the people who have grown food, who have traveled with the food, and who are the causes of the food migrating to different parts of the world, not erased or overshadowed by, I guess, the speed of technology or the digital space.

Deepa 15:26
So my name is Deepa Reddy. I am a cultural anthropologist, I think by habit and at heart as well as by profession. I have taught anthropology and cross-cultural studies at the University of Houston, Clear Lake for a couple of decades now. And among the different classes I teach and among the various research undertakings I've had over the last few decades, I teach the anthropology of food.

And when I heard the question that the prompt that was given to us as an opener for this session. I was thinking back to the fact that the first time I taught anthropology of food was in a physical face-to-face class environment at UHCL, where we talked about a lot of things conceptually and we explored the experiences of people in places we'd never been. But we also could work with food and ingredients and other things in a very tactile visceral right here, right now sense. And then as it happened for various different reasons, I moved with my family to India and I suddenly realized that my life had turned quite digital because I was teaching my classes online and my growing interest in research on food and food systems and different local ways of eating. I live in Pondicherry on the sort of southeastern coast of India, coast of Chennai. I had increasingly sort of developed this interest in exploring local food systems and yet my teaching was online. The way in which I communicated anything I learned about local food practices and so on was through social media, which was, of course, on the rise at that moment. And the next time I taught the anthropology of food was online. And what I really experienced in that transition, which is why I wanted to mark out those two points, is that there was this movement from an experience of doing something, teaching, researching, eating, talking about food in any kind of a research context as being very physical to being entirely digital. And I started to realize that actually the more and more people engaged with digital media, the more and more this conversation about food seemed to grow and that food on some level had just gone and become digital. For me, that was a tremendous irony at first that we seemed to consume food more in a digital sense than we ever did physically or I mean, or both or in different ways in digital environments. We seemed to just have expanded our ability to engage with food and food practices because of digital platforms. And I experienced this as a complete irony because, of course, you're not feeding yourself by looking at pictures online. Of course, you're not feeding yourself by reading about food stories online or you're not producing food yourself by reading about these food stories online and so on. So for me, there was this big disconnect. I'm really interested in people and practices that don't necessarily make it up there onto digital spaces, which is the other point actually to make is that the digital for many people, especially when it comes to food or many, many different things, not just food, has had to do with reach and access and visibility, maybe in some sense. Also, you can connect that to issues of justice, of giving platforms to people who didn't have them before, giving voice to ideas that could not be voiced before and so on and so forth. Yet I feel that, again, it's a sort of irony that we have all of this as a set of possibilities that open up space, people, opportunities, all kinds of different things to us. And yet what really matters is what we do offline. Or at least that's how I was always looking at the ways in which I was exploring local food systems and local practices. Most of the farmers that I know have sort of limited presence online. And if they do, it's some family member who's kind of creating this space and avenue for them. So there is actually a kind of separation between the time and effort that people take to make food, to grow food, to pull it out of the earth, to process it and so on and so forth, which exists in its own different realm and all that it takes then as a separate skill set and a separate endeavor altogether to put all of this into a digital story. I was always feeling that disjuncture, right? And I think on some level, I think I still live in between those two worlds. I get the utility of one. I feel the sustenance of the other and I'm always moving back and forth between those two. So if you asked me about the connection between digital practices and food justice, I would say that, you know, I mean, of course, there's a lot to be said about accessibility and, like I said before, reach and opportunity and the possibility of making all kinds of connections. And I've had my fair share of marvelous friendships that have developed and connections and collaborations that have been nurtured by digital environments. And yet a little bit like a snail in its shell, I often feel the need to retreat into non-digital worlds just because I feel like disjuncture and just because ultimately there is something very, very different about actually putting your hands into a bag of rice or into a bag of pepper or into the soil itself, which just does not happen when you see someone do it online. So there's something tactile, there's something visceral, there's something so completely non-digital about that level of experience, which has been very central to what I see myself as doing and what I see myself as engaging with.

Anna 21:41
So, I know that the world embodiment has been very much part of your process so far. I'm interested, what does this world mean to you?

What are the sensory implications of a collaborative artistic process that is situated across three different territories through an immaterial platform?

Lodi 22:05
You know, when you talk about embodiment, you're talking about something tactile. We're also thinking very much in what sometimes feel like a nebulous space of digital beings or digital experiences. And I appreciate both.

I appreciate the tangible, the tactile, but I also appreciate the way in which digital experiences can bridge the spaces that exist between us that make it impossible while not physically able to experience what another is to at least be aware of it. And so even in just as a facilitator, finding the balance between how you can demonstrate what embodiment looks like while keeping at the back of your mind the idea of sustainable practices in content.

The one epiphany I've had in following Samu's journey as well, and I think this exists, and I don't understand how NFTs work, mind you, I have no idea. But the idea that things must exist forever, which is a topic that Samu raised when we had the indigenous foods dinner for her, that art must exist forever rather than itself have its own life cycle and have a beginning and an end. So a time of existence and a time of not existing anymore is for me such a radical thought, which maybe for others who are thinking about sustainability are not thinking in that way, because we're also, Dan was talking about using hardware that is sustainable and lasts longer. But the other side of sustainability is things that serve their purpose and also return, I guess, back to the soil if they are created in such a way that they can be biodegradable. So in thinking about the soil and thinking about sustainability and digital practices, that's the thing that came to my mind and a topic that Samu brought to the dinner that created such heated debate. And while I'd like to think I put a lot of thought to some things that hadn't been something that I had considered that things don't need to the same way that life doesn't need to exist or live forever. The same way that we understand that plants live and die. There was this beautiful understanding that everything is not infinite, in fact, and that it's finite and that there's nothing wrong with that. And there's something actually beautiful about that. And in fact, it makes you appreciate things a lot more.

That's really what came to mind is that what comes from the soil or what comes from our hands, whatever we create, may also return back to the earth as well. It doesn't need to exist forever.

Dan 25:30
NFTs have a carbon footprint that is through the roof, way more than you might expect. And we did a really interesting interview with Memo Akten as part of the Networked Condition Project, where he was saying some really interesting things about this whole area. And of course, they became commercially incredibly successful for a period everybody was making NFTs. And then they became a way of doing money laundering. You know, it's been a fascinating kind of journey.

But, but yeah, they have a really high carbon footprint and the whole thing was very kind of troubling.

Deepa 26:33
There are several different ways to come into this, I think, but maybe I can just start with the conversations that the three of us, Kajal, Samu and myself have had with each other in the course of this. And I think Kaajal said it earlier, right? I mean, the immaterial becomes material on some level when you are engaging so much through various different digital tools and platforms and technologies and never actually meeting face to face. At this point, I feel funny to say that we've not met face to face because I feel like on some level we have. I mean, there's a way in which these digital practices become so much part of what it is that we do and how we do it that they actually stand in for and replace almost the need for in a room together, you know, skin to skin kind of physical co presence, if you like.

I often feel like, you know, you cannot ultimately give in to treating the one as if it is another, the other. And I feel that most, I think, when it comes to food, simply because it is something that physically has to go into ourselves to nourish our bodies. It is something that we have to, you know, nurture with our hands and grow from the earth and physically process and there's no digital substitution for that. I'd like I suppose, even though it becomes so seamless and so easy to live in a digital landscape these days, I almost want to keep insisting on the disjuncture and on the fact that you must break with that level of reality and come back into doing things because you suddenly learn things about plants, you certainly learn things about flowers, you learn things about the way the soil works or feels or the three or four different categorizations of soil that, you know, farmers in a local community will use to decide what is best to grow in what particular environment. I mean, there's a whole world out there to almost to use a cliche to say it, right, which is almost unconcerned with these digital platforms. It doesn't need the digital platforms to exist and I want us to remember that. So I've often joked in the course of this project that, you know, Kajal uses the word embodiment way more than I do, but I think it's really important that she does and I'd like to bring it into my own vocabulary and way of thinking about these things exactly to talk about this disjuncture, that there is a sort of embodiment that happens when you are offline, right, which is so different from the one that happens when you are online. I mean, even if you think of something like, I don't know, this word, which I, this phrase, which I don't like at all, food porn, you know, people use it to sort of look at food in a particular way. And I think this is what I'm also reacting to is that the digital spaces seem to ask you to look at food in a particular way, which is voyeuristic, which is a kind of consumption without being consumption, which is self-pleasuring and which is all the things that you are, you know, your grandmother or your mother, at least in traditional societies, the way that I grew up for sure, the way that I see that a lot of people around me understand food from their own, you know, native traditions. It's not that it's about body nourishment. It's about understanding what is enough and what is plenty. It is about understanding what is excessive and an indulgence and what is not and what is just necessary for health and stability and so on and so forth. So I'd like us to keep that difference, I think is what I'm saying, between the kind of embodiment that becomes possible in digital spaces and using digital practices and the kind of embodiment that is possible only when you are out of those realms. I think so much of my work is just wanting to remain conscious of that while using the tools of one, the digital world, all these digital practices, to facilitate a greater understanding of our food systems in their entirety.

Kaajal 30:54
God, I do use the word embodiment, possibly far too much, but I also feel like in the spaces I occupy, there aren't this, because this has been like a very, I think in some ways, natural collaboration where the body has been very present in all of our conversations and in all of the making that we've been doing, because of course it can't not be because we are thinking about and making with food and to crucially people. I think for me, embodiment is something that's very, very important because so often we're in spaces where the dichotomy or the duality of the mind and the body and the separation between the two is like really, really present.

And so I spend a lot of time in artistic or academic spaces, although I prefer not to. These are the spaces that I often end up occupying. And what I find is that we think about and we talk about a lot, but we maybe don't do as much as I would like. And we maybe don't think about what knowing means or what experiencing means quite so much. And I'm really into somatic experiencing and this is something that I've been doing since the beginning of lockdown, possibly because of or partly just in response to how alienating I found the experience of sitting on a Zoom call and speaking to somebody. But at the same time, I was doing work that was about connecting over food. And then I realized that these two threads really connected for me in the way that we, through the Kitchen Cultures Project, which was the first project that I worked with, Arts Catalyst on, where this strand of sound suddenly emerged as a way of connecting through the body because we were sending each other these kind of really rich descriptions over WhatsApp voice note of what something tasted like or what it smelled like or what the experience of making it felt like. And that was really powerful.

And then we were also sending each other things in the post when we could. And that was possible because we were distributed around the UK. These stories in a way became the basis of my sound practice. And then I also had these recordings of these women cooking in their kitchens. And then some of them were like, oh, don't use the video. I'm actually not comfortable with that. And so then I was like, okay, well, can I pull the sound and use that instead? And I also just anytime I encounter something, I think I'm really drawn to the sound. So like I have so many recordings on my phone of just the sounds of cooking and the sounds of fermenting and just sounds that I think are really, they really in some way excite me. And so I created this sound piece and I remember a sound artist friend of mine listening to it and going, but Kaaj your projects about food. What made you make a soundscape? And I said this to him and he said, actually, because I said that there is the experience of food where it goes into, as Deepa said, it goes into your body and it's physiological. It literally makes ourselves, right? And he said, well, there's loads of evidence to show that sound does something very, very similar. When we listen to something, it changes us on a material and cellular level. And I thought that was so powerful. And since then I've been reading about and thinking about how our experience of eating changes through what we're listening to at the time.

I'm sort of veering into the next question, but I wanna stay with embodiment for a moment because I've also been thinking about how we make things tangible when we are sharing them digitally in this project. And I actually, so I teach on a course called Digital Practises and it was a bit strange for me when I started teaching on it because I was like, I maybe like take some references from the digital and I have worked in digital space before, like, you know, in my past life, I was a designer and I was a digital designer, but I feel like I'd kind of moved away from that world through the work I was doing, which was very much about being in place with others. And what happens when you can't share a meal together? How do you share the experience of sharing a meal, which is such a tangible and intimate and in some ways very unique experience? How do you share that digitally? How do you share the experience of the taste of something? Well, actually, that's something that we each have a unique experience of. But you can say to someone, I mean, you know, it's almost the way that you invite people into art, right? You kind of, you leave gaps for your own experience within it. So you say, I invite you to eat this with me. And my experience and your experience of eating this might be different, but they are just as valid as each other's. And so that's, I think, in a way, what I really wanted to do through this work was like, almost have that be, have the digital in some way and the sound be a layer of the experience. And I think Deepa said something earlier about how these are layers of experience of eating together in the digital and how you bring that in. And I loved that because I think, yeah, for me, whatever we create has multiple layers of experience. And it reminded me of when we did the accessibility session with Kate Fox, and how they said that in any artistic experience, the way that they think about accessibility is that there is always three points of entry. And of those three points of entry, two should always be accessible. And this made me think about the artwork that we were trying to create. As these points of entry, these layers of experience, there is something tangible that you interact with that has a smell or a taste. There is a sound and there is something that you can see. And then at all points, there is something that people can engage with that will frame their own experience of the work. And I think the idea that making work in this way is accessible. But it's also, you know, it's what we've been talking about throughout, which is that how do you share this experience that I have here of the food cultures here of eating in this place, in this other place that is on the other side of the world? Well, I think it's through these building layers of experience that people can access in these ways. And so, in fact, the way that we've been talking about making this work has accessibility fundamentally within it. And I think I remember reading something about somatic experiencing, which it talks about, we all have a body. So if we all have a body, we all have a way into a work that has embodiment as part of it. And that might not be the same as somebody else's experience of having a body. And it might not be the same as somebody else's experience of the artwork. But we never experience artworks in the same way, in the same way that we never experienced foods in the same way. So that's okay.

Samu 38:52
Embodiment for me in terms of this project was very much about seeing how I could self-actualize into the digital space, right? Whether it is with my physical body or, you know, the idea of the body and how it holds space for memory and seeing how that can be translated into the digital.

And I think even though we were meeting online, our bodies were very much, you know, present through the sound, as Kaajal and Deepa had mentioned, through breath, I guess, and through memory as well, because we shared a lot of memories of each other's experiences of the garden, the land, and food, as well as migrating through different parts of the world, or migrating to the places that we each are physically in. In that way, like through the sensory storytelling as well of the different dishes that we have experienced and sort of, you know, seeing how our experiences are connected through the different dishes that we have experienced and or have made ourselves. And this brings me back to the memory of us cooking rice together. We did a sort of activity where we were cooking and sort of seeing how the style or the ways in which we cook rice are similar or different and looking at the gestures that we use to cook rice and what that means and how it is paired with other things such as, you know, meat or vegetables, other foods. I think having to do an activity like that really brings you back to yourself and sort of makes you become more self-aware of how, for example, you cook rice or how you pair different dishes or foods and also if you interrogate how that food might be cooked differently in another country and how, you know, that experience differs. So I think being in this digital space and experiencing each other through this digital lens sort of helped us become more attuned with each other in that way. So in a way, embodiment became a practice of attunement and intention and just being very present to experience a lot more than just the physicality of things.

In terms of the garden more specifically, it has helped me sort of interrogate how the garden can become very metaphorical. It can allow you to challenge different notions outside of the garden space and to look at how sound, for example, can become a garden through its ways of, you know, carrying memory and also even being able to grow something from that sound by making different people listen to whatever experience your space in your environment and how the seeds can become the different sounds that happen within a soundscape, and I think it's also been quite powerful in learning how sound can hold so much space, actually. I think it's so much more than just having just this one sense that we are working with, but it can also become its own language that speaks to so many different things outside of just it being a sound piece, and yeah, I really enjoyed that because I don't really work that much with sound, but oddly enough, I do pay attention to the sound when I'm working in a garden and, you know, planting and watering, like I pay attention to the sounds that happen, and so it's very interesting to see how that can also be translated into an artwork of its own outside of actually experiencing the garden physically.

Dan 43:58
In the sort of online workshops we were doing, we would sort of talk about our hunger quite a lot. We would talk about how we were feeling, how tired, how energised, what the weather was, what the temperature was. We did a lot of talking about our bodies, I think, even though we were only experiencing each other digitally.

And then I think I also became quite aware of the kind of differences in the physical infrastructure of the internet in the different countries, in terms of like the quality of the connection and the image in the different places. And also in terms of like in South Africa, there's quite a lot of power cuts and there's a risk. So there would be a risk that Samu would disappear mid-sentence or not be able to come one week. But I was just really aware of how physical the internet is and how also not everybody in the world has the same experience of the internet at all. So these things that we can kind of sometimes, we can sometimes think of the digital and the physical and the embodied as like a binary. But actually this project really made me think a lot about how that's not such a binary after all. Actually the internet is a really physical material thing.

Anna 45:39
I would also love to know where did your engagement with binaural sound come from and what sound meant to you in the context of the Three Fields Collaboration?

Deepa 45:50
At least in the way in which I have approached my own investigations of food in the past, everything has been very, very heavily weighted towards number one, verbal descriptions of things. And number two, visual depictions, right, photographs, mostly in my case, I never really got into doing video and so on. In my practice, if I call it that, sound was sort of visibly absent, visibly absent. Anyway, it was it was not there.

I could always hear the words that I would write. Oftentimes when I write in order for me to figure out if things are making sense, I read things back to myself so I know that I can hear them. That absence is probably what drove me to be particularly interested in using sound and creating soundscapes in this particular instance, right, to be able to bring in that missing dimension, at least in my practice so far. There's also a way in which I think somebody commented on it when I posted something online once a very long time ago, I said, you know, close your eyes and imagine, you know, dot, dot, dot, whatever it is, I was prompting them to imagine at that point. And someone, you know, sort of tongue in cheek wrote back to me said, How am I supposed to read if you've asked me to close my eyes? And so, I mean, I was very conscious of the fact that what I really am asking people to do is to listen. I wanted to bring sound in precisely because I think that there is a whole different level of imaginative engagement, imaginative embodiment even that is possible when you move away from visual depiction of things and into a soundscape.

I mean, it's a bit like I was saying earlier, and I, you know, I hope I didn't come across as sounding too hypercritical of digital practices. I'm actually not, I just want us to recognize that they are qualitatively a different kind of material engagement, a different kind of embodied practice, a different kind of embodiment, and not to use them as a substitute for, you know, all of the other dimensions of embodied practice that we might also have available to us and possible and soundscapes struck me as being another dimension of this. So I'd like people to stand and listen. And I think when one does that, I mean, Kajal was talking about all of these various recordings she has on her phone of what I assume to be fairly minute sounds, right? I mean, sounds of fermenting and so on. They're subtle, they're small. They're the things that you overlook, they're the things that you don't listen to. And what if you did? How would that change your relationship to the whole world around you if you could hear things that you don't normally hear? If you hear things, able to hear things that don't, you know, have, that don't reach our own, you know, human capability for auditory reception. How does that change things about how you see the world? How does it change things about the way in which you experience everyday life? How does that change the way in which you think about ordinary common practices? So for me, the soundscape was a way of exploring that dimension of experience of asking people in some sense to slow down, to pause, to listen. And therefore also to open up dimensions of experience which have been, you know, too subtle to hear, literally, or which have been overlooked.

Dan 49:33
I think we talked a lot early in the project about how interested we were in allowing people in South Africa, UK and India to both connect with where they actually physically were and also connect with the other two places in some way. And we were thinking about what the right form for that was. And I feel like one of the things that binaural sound can really do well is people talk about it as immersive, but I actually prefer to think of it as like transportative or like it transports you to another place and to another experience. So that was kind of one of the things that we were thinking about.

And also we were very interested in this kind of quite intense embodied experience. And I have lots of memories of experience in binaural pieces and having like physical reactions when for example the sound feels like somebody's blowing in your ear, my ear gets hot. Other kind of things I kind of you know shiver or I jump and look to the left in certain pieces that I've experienced. So we thought that maybe binaural sound might be a way that you could really connect people in one place to another place to the extent that that's possible at all. The other sort of reason why I felt quite comfortable that we chose sound rather than video or VR or these various other technologies is that sound uses a lot less file space than those things and a lot less also space than something that used a huge amount of code as well. So it was also a way of us sort of creating a low-carbon digital artwork in a way that was true to what we were kind of trying to do with the project. So it really kind of made sense to lean into sound in that way as well.

Kaajal 51:33
Yeah, the thing that Deepa said about picking up on the mundane noises that surround us and what does it do to tune into these things. And I think that's so key, right? Because so often you can look at something and there's something about the act of closing your eyes and then all looking away. And I know that you can, in a way, tune out something when you're listening, but it's still there, you're still hearing it. It's just you're choosing not to acknowledge it.

And so that act of tuning in through your ears felt very, very important and a way of connecting. And so as part of the commission, I also did a residency at Kirkgate Market where I collected food waste and spices from around the market and had them in these jars fermenting over the course of the residency. Now, I say they were fermenting. It was so cold that actually they only started fermenting like a couple of days ago. But the idea was that I'd have a stereo pair of hydrophones in the jar. And I almost wanted to be able to like have it as though I was putting my head inside the jar and listening to the fermenting from inside the jar. And one of the reasons for this is because I'm really interested in how one of the things we could potentially be tuning into is the microbes around us that are in and on our foods and in and on our bodies and also crucial to all of the life that's around us, including our own and the food that we eat, because without microorganisms, we couldn't grow food. And so some of that, some of those microorganisms come to us with the food. And so what happens if we create, if we cultivate spaces where these microorganisms are cared for and nurtured. But of course, we want to do this in a way where the, where certain microorganisms, maybe our cultivated and others are killed off, I would say. And so this is why I started working with salt, but, you know, more about that in the other podcast.

And there's a tendency sometimes in sound art when we're listening to other organisms to translate and then pretend we haven't translated. So for example, putting contact microphones in soil and going, oh, this is the sound of the soil. I mean, that's one thing, but then like taking data points and then converting that to sound. And I think sometimes what that does is it takes away the human translation that's happening, because these things don't make sound. Whereas fermenting does make sound.

And I was keen to kind of capture that. But there was something about the materiality of the, of the hydrophones underwater. And because they pick up, they pick up sound and they pick up noise, but they don't pick up pressure. And actually, one of the ways we listen is, is through pressure and the binaural headphones pick up both. And so it wasn't quite capturing it. And so I'm interested in how the textures of sound kind of play with the idea of like listening and how our relationship to these other organisms is actually mediated through these technologies. For me, that's the important part. And because so often when we go, oh, I'm listening to nature or I'm listening to sounds of nature, we're not thinking about how the technologies that we're using in order to record those sounds is mediating our experience. And so I wanted the work to, in some ways, speak to that, that we can't, we can't listen to nature, or we can't listen to food. Because if food made a sound, we'd just hear it and we don't. And maybe food is making a sound outside of our sound ranges, but that's not something that we can hear. So we need to, we need to use these technologies to bring that into, and I want to say view because so many of our metaphors are visual. So to bring that into range, maybe.

Anna 55:58
Thank you for listening to the Three Fields podcast. Three Fields is an international co-commission between Abandoned Normal Devices, Fak’ugesi, Arts Catalyst, First Familiar and Unboxed Cultural Futures. It is funded by the British Council's International Collaboration Grant and supported using public funding by Arts Council England.