Approaching Verisimilitude

Not all those who wander are lost
             -- Bilbo Baggins

The eye is a greedy child; it swallows the world whole. The red rock, the blue sky, the infinite horizon. But it is not enough. It creates a picture, yes, but not a sense of ‘place’. To truly summon the ghost of reality, to build that shimmering mirage called verisimilitude, you must open the door for the ear. You must let the sound in. For in my mind, the visual is a half-finished sentence, and only the subtle sound of the wind can put a period at the end of it.

I was not always a hunter of this open-air silence. In a former life, I was a weaver of electric dreams, a builder of walls made of light. During my years at Virginia Tech, I served as the VP for Production and Development for an enterprise called Virtual Prototyping and Simulation Technologies. We worked in the CAVE,  a recursive acronym, a womb of 3D projection screens, speakers, a Silicon Graphics Supercomputer, and computer code, where we tried to teach the human mind to believe in worlds that did not exist. The SGI system we used was called the Silicon Graphics Onyx Infinite Reality Monster for a reason.

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-CAVE-at-Virginia-Tech_fig1_277847174).

It was the dawn of the digital immersive virtual reality age, the early days, but we were planting the seeds. If you look now at the great, glowing ‘Sphere’ in Las Vegas, you are looking at the grandchild of our research. We were the ancestors of that immersion, wrestling with the basics of 3D projection and spatial sound, taking on the incredible technical challenge of fooling the senses. The torch has since been passed to companies like Mechdyne, who gathered up those patents and technologies to keep the dream growing, but back then? Back then, it was us, and other teams in universities around the world, immersed in the creativity and deep in the hum of the machines.

https://www.mechdyne.com/

I tell you this history so you understand the machinery of my own head. When I stand out on the Colorado Plateau today, camera in hand with the geology around me, I am still that virtual architect. I am not just taking a picture; I am building a simulation of the soul.

I shoot panoramas because they crack open the visual space; they let the viewer step inside the volume and perspective. But the picture remains silent, and the desert is never truly silent. To fill that gap, to cement the "place" in your memory, I have turned to soundscapes.

At first, I tried to catch the wind in a simple computer, a cellphone with a stereo microphone capsule clipped to its back like a mechanical beetle. It works at one level. But the sun, that great, copper penny burning in the vast sky, has no patience for delicate things. Out here, when the heat rises to a fever of 100°F in the open light, the phone gasps and dies, retreating into the sleep of overheating.

So, I have upgraded my arsenal. I now carry a four-channel recorder, a beast that does not fear the noon sun, with a set of microphones that allow me to experiment, to place ears in the grass and ears in the air.

And what am I listening for? I am listening for the symphony of the wild, broken into movements.

I hunt the Geophony, the voice of the earth itself. The sound of wind fluting through the sandstone ribs of a canyon, the groan of rock expanding in the heat, the sudden rush of water, the very friction of the air against the planet.

I hunt the Biophony, the living choir. The frantic, paper-dry rustle of a lizard in the sagebrush. The chitter of the pinyon jay.

Along with the soundscapes and the still images, I am weaving in time-lapse and real-time video. It is a full capture, a net thrown over reality. I will share these gleanings on social media for those who wish to step into the frame.

I smile at the irony of it, standing there with my headphones and my high-tech array. I come to the Plateau because I love the quiet. I viscerally enjoy the silence. But in that silence, there are actors on my stage. My actors are the breezes blowing through the undergrowth, the occasional hawk circling the thermal, and yes, even the fly-by insects, whining their electric tune as they search for a blood meal.

It will all be there in the headphones. If I can hand you a photograph, and with it, the sound of the air flowing over a crow’s wing as he dives near looking for a meal, if you can feel that wind on your neck, then I have succeeded. I have rebuilt the world, and you are standing in it.

Thanks for stopping by for a read.

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