Communication Measures to Bridge 4.543 billion years: Bullroar

The film produced by Bryan McGovern Wilson (USA) and Robert Williams (UK) for the Geoweek Symposium and Film-screenings, Communication Measures to Bridge 5.453 Billion Years: Bullroar, emerged from discussions about how fatigued the two artists were by screen-based communication between continents during the pandemic, as a consequence, both wondered if there might be another way to link up through the planet, rather than taking the long way around the Earth?

The means to navigate the chthonic was suggested by the realisation that the problem had already been solved by humans across all times and all cultures , by the use of infrasound generated by what is considered to be a ‘primitive’ sound-generating object - the Bull-roarer , an instrument rich in magic power – in this way, we might send signals, some of which might be using natural process, others supernatural in character, through the fissures, voids, geodes and resonant materials of the planet. To do this, we both had to venture beneath the skin of the Earth – Wilson into the Observation Pit at the La Brea Tar Pits, and Williams to the Bull-pot of the Witches Cave, at the right time, to communicate through the entire geological time span of the Earth. We made a silent film all about sound.

The GeoWeek 2022 Symposium, Communication Measures to Bridge 4.543 Billion Years, and its exhibitions present a range of responses to the geologic imaginary, considered through the lens of contemporary cultural interventions and the critical reflections of artists and writers. One might argue that the cultural relationship between humans and geology has been entwined since our very beginning. I am here thinking of the defining lithic technologies that provide evidence of and argument for magnitudes of human-ness amongst primates and hominins (Shea 2017:1-9). There is a range of dating techniques available to archaeologists and geologists that can explore mineral material that is very old – even those older than can be identified using the Carbon14 method usually associated with organic material. Here I am thinking of radiation dating such as Potassium-Argon (K-Ar), Uranium-series, Fission Track and Thermoluminescence (Bahn & Renfrew 2012:145-147). Each require the predictable decay cycles of radioactive isotopes used to measure distances of time, moreover the techniques are often combined to cross reference the identified dates for greater accuracy. This approach was successfully used in the dating of the fossil of Homo habilis found by Richard Leakey (1978: 84-89) beneath a layer of volcanic tuff at Lake Turkana in Kenya, to around 2.3 million years – the earliest that a hominin bearing the Genus Homo can be found in association with stone artefacts. Homo habilis, known as ‘handy man’ is therefore identified with the Oldowan tool culture which makes and utilises biface pebble tools and flakes. Leakey, in considering the relationship between these tools and the fossils, makes clear that there is a difference between a technology and a culture (1978:105). That difference being considered to be indicative of abstract, reflective thought, a theory of mind (Mithin 2008:98-121) for non-human hominins.