The Animals Were Never Alone II

Performance, 45 min. This work is based on an essay written as a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure and designed as an interactive website (154 pages). It revolves around a meeting with the scientist Karl Heinz Frommolt; the curator of the existing Animal Sound Archive, and its online database. During the performance-lecture I project it on the wall, asking the audience on how to proceed. My lecture is interrupted by pop-up alerts and recordings of animals. I use a loop pedal to record the voices of the audience; gradually building up a cacaphonic chaos.

Essay-website: www.tierstimmenarchiv.dk

The online database of The Animal Sound Archive boasts of having more than 120 000 recordings of animals.

Although it is open to the public, there is no instruction manual on how to navigate through it. Reading the metadata that comes with each archived entry hints about a context in which the animals were recorded; a scenery - but there is no way of smoothly moving between the scenes, from one recording to another. There is no chronology and no causality of action.

On July 5, 2018, you wrote an email to Karl, but he never responded...

- the author

Looking for an alternative way of navigating this overwhelming amount of data, I turn to storytelling. Stories give an illusion of continuity in time. They smoothly transport us between fragment of time by invented meanings, linking together event to event, recording to recording.

The philosophers Derrida likens the archive to how a human psyche organizes memories (Archive Fever). Sometimes it is a house with walls, separating one memory from another by placing them in different categories. I look for vulnerability in this architecture. What if the voices of animals managed to escape? I re-write scientific reports, imitate the voices of animals. Writing a story myself, I become an author, an authority. My voice struggles to impose order in a cacaphonic chaos. At one point, I transform into a wolf.

You had written to Karl because you know that he keeps the recorders in his office, and you want to get into his office again.

- the author

You want to gently touch the metal surfaces, you want to press the buttons, you want to smell the inputs and the outputs, you want to hold them in your arms and speak softly, in German...

- the author

We archive because we want to remember. Having a shared past gives us an identity, a sense of belonging together in this world.

The Animal Sound Archive is made by humans, yet our own voices are strikingly abscent in the recordings. It is producing a history of human silence. It speaks of a past where we did not exist. And it grows, adding layers and layers of recordings, layers and layers of voices, layers and layers of time, longer times, longer recordings that nobody has time to listen to.

**Website, projected on the wall during the lecture-performance.** The Choose-Your-Own-Adventure is a type of book with short texts, each describing a scenery, an event. At the end of each event, the reader makes choices on where to go next. The storyline branches out in parallell storylines, parallell times, loops. In my performance, it becomes a Choose-Your-Own-Lecture.

**Pop-up alert.** Interactions with the web site triggers pop-up alerts and recordings from The Animal Sound Archive to play, interrupting the reader.