Mesmerizing and enchanting, Murmurations, a multimedia performance piece by Sharon Chohi Kim, offers a meditative exploration of decentralized intelligence and the human relationship with nature. Kim’s work often weaves experimental vocals with themes of intergenerational memory, interspecies connection, and ecological awareness. Murmurations builds upon these interests, situating the human voice among various natural landscapes and electronic soundscapes. It features four performers, Kim, Sara Sinclair Gomez, Molly Pease, and Kathryn Shuman.
A stretched out piece of white fabric on the ground covers the performers, creating an undulating terrain over their bodies. Sounds of static and whirring emerge in the darkness, and the fabric screen lights up with the image of sand pouring onto the white backdrop. As the pouring of sand quickens and generates miniature landscapes in its wake, breaths can be heard, imbuing the scenery with aliveness and consciousness. This animist perspective is central to the piece and immerses viewers in a world where our surroundings are sentient. The sand is blown away and the screen moves through various terrains. There’s a timelapse of a mountain region throughout various seasons, and the clouds and snow are rolling in and out in a matter of seconds. The bodies beneath the screen then start to shift as few eerie chords are sung, and soon a mossy understory is projected upon this new configuration. More breaths ensue, paying homage to the lungs of the earth.
A soft bell announces the transition to the next scene: a close-up view of a stream with yellow ginkgo leaves floating in the water. This plant appears a few more times later on in the piece, possibly drawing on Chinese, Korean, and Japanese conceptions of the ginkgo as a symbol of resilience, healing, and historic memory. After a few moments, the soothing image of water fades into darkness. The performers slowly make their way out from under the fabric screen and stand on opposite edges of the screen, intoning haunting chords as specks of light come into view. With their hands on the edges of the screen, the four women performers take turns sending ripples of cosmic wind into the projections.
The pinpricks of light start orbiting and chasing each other–perhaps it’s a time-lapse of stars moving in the night sky? More and more stars appear and soar across the screen, and then the mess of points organize themselves into a fluidly shapeshifting form that creates mesmerizing, transient patterns. Increasingly fervent seagull and geese birdcalls replace the long chord tones, and as the background audio plays other bird sounds, the starry image inverts in color to reveal a murmuration of starlings as the source of the flying sculptures. The program explains that these projections were generated using Craig Reynolds’ Boids algorithm, a model that simulates the movements of groups of animals. The abstraction of the birds into light specks turned a common occurrence into a captivating spectacle, a reminder that we don’t need to look far to find incredible events unfolding.
Photo Credit: Angel Origgi and Richard Thompson III
More landscapes appear on the screen, including an aerial view of a forest fire, a mountain lake, a hurricane, and an erupting volcano. The wildfire and volcano are accompanied by a harrowing, operatic singing style, a warning of the danger that lies close by–not just in the landscapes but also in the rapidly accelerating effects of climate change. The alarming quality subsides as a long oval sculpture made of individual papers shaped like ginkgo leaves is lowered from the ceiling, but there is still an underlying sense of unease as the whirring, buzzing, and technological noises from the beginning reappear. The performers lay down face up under the suspended sculpture, their bodies forming an X. A blaring alarm intermittently punctuates the slowly intensifying chorus of glitches, whispers, drones, and lasers, yet the performers are unfazed, barely moving on the ground. They show us that finding grounding and stillness is possible and necessary in a world that seems to be in perpetual emergency, that the cultivation of inner quiet is what allows the new world to emerge from the crumbling old one.
The leaf sculpture retreats to the ceiling, and the performers shape the screen into and out of a spiral. One of the performers gathers the screen and twists it around their body, turning it into a dress as her piercing voice offers a distraught melody. Body and screen, human and nature, intertwined in communion by the voice. The other performers tenderly hold up the performer wrapped in the screen, and the piece closes with the image of four women in an embrace, supporting each other and being supported by the earth. It’s a poetic and hopeful reflection on what our relationship with nature can look like. It can be one with more tender embraces, more awe of the consciousness that surrounds us, and more surrender to the collective intelligence we are all part of.
