Dagmar Lorenz-Meyer, Charles University In Prague

virPrague 20: Climate Change, Anthropocene, Geosciences

Pre-recorded audio file, no images. While photovoltaic arrays have become a familiar sight, they have not become a technology of conviviality (Illich 1973), creating a creative, joyful, just and responsible becoming-together of ‘people, tools and a new collectivity’. This performative piece presents audio vignettes that gather the sound recordings of large Czech solar fields, PV recycling and poetic recitations to touch and involve listeners with silicon materials, their amplification of electricity, potentials for abundance and dis/articulations and in/sensibilities. The focus is on chemical entanglements in PV production as much as electric kinship, brought into sensibility not merely through semantics but through the sensory propagation, dissipation of sound vibration. To hear, writes Yasmin Gunaratnam (2013) ‘is to be touched and to receive. To take in and to resonate with the ambient and sublime presence of others and the world around us.’ How might energetic resonances bring into sensibility the inhuman electricity around and within humans, the abundance of solar generated electricity, the pleasure for squandering energy and a desire for cutting the energetic entanglements? How can the potential for solidarity, or solarity (Barney and Szeman 2018) be realised?