DEAFNOTES002: Deceleration Tales
How I boosted my creativity during a crisis.
When the COVID pandemic kept the world on hold and quarantine regulations put entire nations in a state of paralysis, I - like many others - experienced a major disruption to my fundamental understanding of everyday life. The empty streets and supermarkets gave many people a reason to feel insecure, along with protective masks, raised plexiglass panels in every conceivable place and systematic distancing between people for their fear of infection. For me, the everyday, practical dimensions with which I went through the day as a person with profound hearing loss had shifted.
My hearing aids are valuable and necessary aids that I wouldn't want to do without, but they can't compensate for all the deficits that arise in everyday life. Even as a child, I created my own method kit to compensate for the deficits and unheard sounds: Reading lips, interpreting body language, analyzing facial expressions. In fact, the range of methods became increasingly obsolete as the pandemic progressed.
I experienced a flood of voice, text messages and video chats in the privacy of my own apartment - I was delighted because, paradoxically, I discovered something of a relief during the pandemic. This was really an intriguing experience that seems somewhat ludicrous when you consider and recognize how people with profound hearing impairments have had to suffer under the quarantine restrictions!
Over the years, advanced accessibility features have emerged in the world of digital media and technology, such as automatically generated subtitles in all languages, a customized settings app for hearing aids, audio amplifiers, audio adapters, the removal of compatibility obstacles when connecting hearing aids via Bluetooth, audio denoisers and so on.
Now the necessity of my method kit was replaced by the sheer luxurious range of such possibilities. In addition, everything was slowed down and delayed due to the pandemic, not only the economic supply chains, but also personal plans and wishes. This created a yawning sense of apathy, of not being able to do anything about this deceleration and simply waiting until it was all over.
It is no coincidence that I’d created a number of experimental and overstated conceptual works on the myth of Sisyphus around this time: the story of how the King of Corinth tried to cheat death and was condemned by the gods to roll a huge rock up a steep slope in the underworld as punishment. However, the rock always slipped away just before he reached the top and he always had to start all over again.
Inspired by french existentialist Albert Camus' idea that we should imagine Sisyphus as a happy man, I wondered: what would happen if Sisyphus would simply stop pushing? I imagined Sisyphus turning away, wandering through the endless rocky landscape of the underworld, not quite knowing what to do with his new form of mental freedom. To be honest: I had difficulty even thinking this out loud. Because if a study of ancient myths teaches you anything, it is that ancient gods were cruel and rigorous in their punishments. Most punishments were irreversible and intended for eternity, unless an external entity, whether full or demigod, broke the seal, such as Heracles on Prometheus, who was chained to the Damascus Rock.
Anyway: In my imagination, it seemed most obvious that Sisyphus would begin to interact with his surroundings, throwing stones, hitting each other, forming rhythms and running around, just playing like a child on a playground, you know?
And what if at some point, the stone was just forgotten?
I was captivated by this idea because I had the feeling that the best thing that could happen to me in this pandemic was the fact that I was allowed to simply forget that I had profound hearing loss. The stone just stopped to be important. Because my everyday life had vanished, I started to develop new routines. I thought to myself: “Okay, we have a global pandemic right now, everything is at a standstill and I don't know for how long - what do I want to do?” The fact that I was living near a calm forest at the time, and could go out there undisturbed without other people to interact with, meant that I was well placed for my new journey of discovery.
When I got lost in the woods on a walk and found a meadow that offered me a very generous view of the sky, I noticed for the first time how few planes were out flying. Before the pandemic, the condensation trails of airplanes and these ant-sized capsules streaking the skies were a common sight. As I walked up a hill, I caught a glimpse of the nearby highway, which was emptied. I looked at my watch. It was 17:00, mid-week, normally those roads are full of after-work traffic.
The abandonment of things and the perception of every single sound in the forest - birds, flapping wings, a rustle, a hiss, movements in the undergrowth - made me aware of how much of the background noise could have disappeared. But, as I said: could. As a hearing impaired person, I can't always be entirely sure what is actually there but not audible to me, what I might be imagining, where a low-frequency tinnitus is playing tricks.
However, later research largely confirmed my perception, as a decrease in noise pollution during lockdowns has been be measured in different environments on our planet (in EUROPE, urban environments, sea / underwater environments or protected areas, etc.). So on my later hikes I took my field recorder (at that time still my cell phone, later a Tascam stereo recorder) with me and started recording whole setting and listening to them again and again.
Over weeks and months, I repeated my tours and continued to record sounds with the field recorder. I then took the time to process the recordings, analyze their frequencies and even create smaller compositions loosely based on them, such as sequences of birdsongs or even drones made from wind noises and crackling brushes.
I enjoyed a huge boost to my creativity because I learned to see my environment as an inexhaustible source of inspiration. Almost two years later, I was to continue this work artistically with the project “Chambers of Wishes” in a team I had initiated, the PHASMA Collective.
For me, the crisis offered a new space to develop further - standing still is a hell of a nightmare for me, comparable to the idea of perhaps being entirely deaf at some point because my hearing is also deteriorating further with age. Being able to take what I can with me and rediscover the world in which I live has become a task and a new approach to awareness that I am still pursuing intensively years after the pandemic was declared over.
It seems that the rock has now stopped rolling. Finally? I hope so.