In David Dunn's article "Nature, Sound Art and the Sacred," he discusses the relationship being designed and natural sounds, and what the similarities and differences between the same say about humanity versus the other.
The article begins with an excerpt from a book which seems to say, basically, that some forms of communication are impossible, but that that alienness can be a comfort.
The article is vague and speculative. In "Part One: Assumptions", Dunn makes a lot of claims with little to no backing, saying things like "I believe x", "I have a gut intuition that x" or "It is my contention that x." Still, the experimental art pieces that Dunn describes in "Part Two: My Work" are very interesting.
Dunn makes some compelling statements about the artificiality of human separation. He shows that what we experience as distinct phenomena are actually far from discrete.
He loses me a little bit when he ties this fact into the human sense of hearing. He starts to sound pretentious and his claims seem unjustifiable; his whole paragraph starting "I wonder if music might be our way of mapping reality through metaphors of sound..." is total nonsense.
Similarly, when Dunn describes the categories that his art pieces fall into (Environmental Performance Works & Hybrid Soundscape Compositions), his tone becomes too avant-garde for me to take him seriously, even when some of his points are good. Lighten up!
Dunn's art pieces attempt to communicate the blurred boundaries between natural and artificial, human and environment, in an age where scant environments are unaware of humanity. For Dunn, nature and animals are deeply intertwined, and our assumptions about ourselves can only be judged through the lens of unknown animal intelligences.
