conscient podcast

(bell and breath) Today's episode does not have any sound other than my voice and a series of silences.  And I think you’ll understand why in a minute. (Silence) Writer and broadcaster Jesse Wente, author of Unreconciled , became the first indigenous person to chair the Canada Council for the Arts during the summer of 2020, a few weeks before I retired from the Council.  (Silence) In an August 6,...

(bell and breath) (sound of campfire) I invite you to slow down, or maybe stop, what you’re doing and listen to a campfire story We’re sitting in the snow, by the Preston River in Duhamel, Québec. The snow absorbs the sound here but it is also slightly amplified by the cottage and frozen trees. It's raining so you also hear drops of water, snow and ice falling in between the fire crackles.  Someti...

This recording is a rope holding a boat to the dock at Toronto Harbour on November 26th, 2022.  Sketches by Sabrina Mathews. * END NOTES FOR ALL EPISODES Note : I'm currently 'pressing pause' and am not producing new content until further notice.  Hey conscient listeners,  I’ve been producing the conscient podcast as a learning and unlearning journey since May 2020. It’s my way to give b...

(bell and breath) (loud sound of train passing at close distance) (once the train has passed, cross fade between quiet city and very quiet mountain forest) (indigenous artist and curator France Trepanier from conscient podcast é55 trépanier - a very small moment in a much larger space, in French): I think that with this cycle of colonialism, and what it has brought, that we are coming to the end o...

(sound of bell and breath) On December 5th 2022 we had a heat pump installed in our house in order to reduce our carbon footprint.  What is a heat pump, you ask? Well, basically, It heats and cools a space by transferring thermal energy from the outside using a refrigeration cycle powered by electricity.  It’s a more environmentally friendly source of heating than say methane gas but it still gene...

(ocean shoreline) The problem with beauty is that it can distract us from reality. Sit with me, please, take a moment. Sit and listen…  Over there, about 56 kilometers to the northeast, is the traditional territory of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh nations, also known as Vancouver. Listen to the ocean flowing, like the blood and liquids in your body. We are water. Listen to the ravens p...

(Deep breath) Tension I was thinking about the tensions in our lives and the art of finding a balance point…  So I went for a sound walk in Vancouver and came upon a piece of fishing line. I brought it home, strung it up and recorded myself plucking it  (sound of fishing line being plucked by hand)  I held the fishing line with my left hand while I gradually reduced the tension with my right hand....

Welcome to episode 0 of season four of the conscient podcast, Sounding Modernity , five-minute sound meditations, published every Sunday from January 1 through December 31, 2023.  My name is Claude Schryer and I'm happy to be back podcasting  about art and the ecological crisis after a 10 month break. I'm talking to you today from the unceded traditional territory of the Anishinaabe Algonquin Nati...

'What would the Prairies be without wind?  It’s the keynote sound here, the one against which everything else is registered. But to record it? Impossible.' R. Murray Schafer, winter diary, 1997 See episode 99 for details on winter diary revisited - homage to r. murray schafer and to listen to the version with a 25' introduction and 3' of credits. Note: an article for the Institute for Music in Can...

Episode Notes Barn on the farm of R. Murray Schafer and Eleanor James, Indian River, Ontario, January 19, 2022 (photo by me) Note: the text below is a transcription of the narration in the episode (sounds are described, with their source where possible) Welcome to episode 99 of the  conscient  podcast, the last episode of season 3, which you might recall was on the theme of radical listening.  (fa...

'I came to realize that in season three that I continue to be very deeply moved by the layering of words and soundscapes. There's something about it, when new contexts for listening are created, that I find it very stimulating. It's like the spirits of the sounds are actually speaking directly to me and that I can hear and feel their presence. Now I've always felt this, but I rarely talk about it,...

'We are missing so many voices that could be the change. Art gives us that opportunity to amplify those voices and I think it's important that now, more than ever, that we amplify those marginalized voices, those racialized voices, those voices that are being directly affected with what's happening around mother earth (CHANTAL CHAGNON). An online map that showcases all the ideas, artists, institut...

'We find ourselves in a liminal space right now and liminal space means it's that time between what was and what's next. That's where we are. It's a place of not knowing and unless all of us humans, and not just artists, recognize that we are already in a transition - not just an energy transition - but a cultural, a democratic, a social transition. There is an end. We will come out of this. No on...

'Yes, we agree that anti-racism is important. Yes we agree that anti oppression is important. Yes, we agree that equity is important. Yes, we agree that sovereignty is important for indigenous peoples in particular and that decolonization is really important but to us, these are tools to get toward a new society, to transform the world in which we live. If I can refer to the panel that we had the...

'We have a national data set that's about to emerge and that's a really powerful thing. If we can gather data from across the country from arts and culture organizations across the country and build a data set over time, then we'll actually be able to understand what kind of programming we need for environmental sustainability in the arts and culture sector. We can actually do that based on the de...

'The economic models and the way that policy is guided in Canada and around the world at the moment assumes that culture will not change. It assumes that we're self interested individuals, which science is now showing us that that is not the case. We're actually very collaborative and that are ancient cultures and traditional cultures around the world already knew this but we're assuming we're con...

'The environment and sustainability is an integral, if not the founding process, of how we view the world: interconnectedness, responsibility as human beings, to be caretakers of the earth, to be forward thinkers about what we do now will affect seven generations later and that has always been our understanding since we can remember. It's written into our wampum belt designs and our pottery shards...

'I look for stories that are not there just to educate people. If I tell a really good story and it happens to be about the global crisis, about global warming and about the effects on community, if I get your heart, then you're gonna go forward and look at other things, you're gonna start doing some research. It's like, I wanna look at and so to me, I always tell people, tell a really good story...

'I would first and foremost love to see artists really lean into experimentation with their creative practices and to share what comes out of those practices - the learning and experimentation - with each other. I think that's something that even as a community of art makers we can get better at, but what that then also does is it starts to socialize learning about what art as a system of knowledg...

‘ Here we are on the edges of the biggest crisis that has ever faced us. We need a new philosophy for these times, for this near-terminal moment in the history of the human. It is out of this I want to propose an existential creativity.’  Ben Okri, The Guardian newspaper, November 12, 2021 I’m back in Ottawa and I’m going to record this monologue in one take, as I have been doing since the beginni...

'I don't know how many people in Canada who would immediately understand what radical listening is, because it would occur to me that the listener would have to be sensitized beforehand in order to listen radically, so that the radical listening is a secondary function of becoming radicalized in a political matter or political level. Radical listening is at one level, isn't it, one listens in repo...

'We are all artists of the Anthropocene. We inherently are because this is the world that we're living in right now. There's no other world. We were down earlier at Robert's Creek (BC) and it's a salmon bearing stream. I think of it like we're artists in the Anthropocene, like fish would be in the ocean: the water is all around us and the Anthropocene is all around us. I think it may be what Ben O...

'I'm interested in what we can do to both mitigate the climate emergency and adapt to it but there's another level which is revisioning the world and maybe that's the one that's most interesting, because unfortunately it's going to be rough for the foreseeable future on earth, but life will go on, with or without humans. I think humans have a place in it, but then we have to figure out how we're g...

'What's starting to interest me is stories of resilience for a post carbon world. What are we going to need for our emotional well-being? It's going to be a different world not long from now. If we do this, and we must do this, this transition has to happen and there's going to be a sense of loss and sacrifice and challenge, not just with what's happening externally from a climate point of view, b...

Museums have been very good at normalizing social values and so when you have this shift and the government is seeing it, we have to change behavior, the museum can create that space where people can rethink some of their conventional thinking about consuming, for example and there's all kinds of ways, like we were saying earlier, of integrating this kind of knowledge, not in a lecturing way. I th...