‘Dear Human’ is a multisensory guide created by artist Christa Donner for Chicago’s West Ridge Nature Park, activating messages from non-human residents: its pond, a resident tick, a tree, and others. Pair your smartphone with headphones for an immersive experience merging narration with the existing soundscape through site-specific prompts to listen, touch, and find your place within the local ecology. Transcript of this track follows.

(worms moving through wet soil, deep vibration, children playing)

Dear Human. Dear Humanananan, 
I am Humus. I am living soil. My mothers move through my body, their breath and decomposition bringing heat even when the air is cold. They caress and soften and rot, pulling everything apart and mixing it up together again until we are all one, moist thing.  \\\ (inhales deeply) Mmmm…. I smell your familiar scent, little human. Can you smell me, too? Don’t be afraid. \\ Press the tip of your shoe into my spongy surface. Scrape a mark to open me up. \\\ Now kneel down, and inhale the scent of my molecules. Run your fingers through me, like the children do. Breathe me in. \\\  My beautiful bacteria need no words. As you inhale they send out calming signals to produce serotonin in your brain. Gamma-proteo-bacteria boost your immune cells. \\\ I share what I have with many beings, until they drop leaves and seeds and collapse into me. Lay their eggs and die. They shove and shape me into who I am – who we are. We lie still together through the cold times until the sun warms us up and everything begins to change again.\\\ Over there past the fence, your dead return to me too, nestled deep within my folds, among the bodies of birds and opossum and others. All of them tended by millipedes, worms, and fungi. The calcium of buried bones feeds seedlings, brings new life. It happens over and over and it feels. So. Goood. \\\ And over here, your young are learning how to be a part of this world, touching and sensing and finding where to burrow or balance, when to let go. \\\ The trees are great teachers, aren’t they? \\\ Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten. \\\ What else have you learned from the land? \\\ Whose bodies share their nutrients with yours, provide warmth and shelter? \\\ We called you here to find groundedness. Together we can make many things grow.

Humus

"Winter Walking" is an artistic performance related to a 4-month daily walking practice I embarked on while experiencing winter in Canada in 2022. The piece is a response to my attempt at multispecies listening, combining the sounds of snow, ice, footsteps, magpies, coyotes, and other beings and writers with whom I was in listening conversation. I first created "Winter Walking" as an 8-channel sound piece at the University of Alberta's Sound Studies Institute. The track here is a stereo (2-channel) version designed for participatory walking. Take a listen and walk along!

Winterwalking - Stereo

Janet Cardiff, The Forty Part Motet

On a family road trip traveling South, a song is made in every state crossed, capturing a state of mind(each recorded on a phone).

Georgia

please listen to this 10 minute audio in a quiet place with headphones.  You will be asked to draw, so please have a pencil and paper ready.

Humus

Donnersounds

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