Contextual ecologies of earth circuits were tested in the specific context of Greece as part of the Tuned City Messene manifestation in collaboration with the Onassis Cultural Center, Athens. For the project titled Agora Circuit various energetics of the site were negotiated in real-time via a series of coordinated transductive insertions at the agora on the ancient site of Messene. The circuit patched into ongoing telluric currents, seismic vibrations, spatial resonance and environmental infrasound at the site.
The Peloponnese is particularly conducive to such a transductive approach not least for the fact of its location. Situated in one of the most prominent geo-active regions on the globe, arguably tremors have worked their way to the very core of ancient Greeks leaving traces in both mythic and empiric modes of observation and thinking. Frequent earthquakes in the region of Messene were followed up with spurts of construction such as the expansion of the agora. More recently seismo-electric earthquake monitoring (VAN method) has been employed since the early 1980's in Greece as a early-warning method for high magnitude earthquakes and the country still hosts an array of expansive passive dipole electrodes listening for signature waves in the low frequency range of telluric currents.
Agora Circuit patches these goe-locational energetics through the other anthropogenic sedimentation on site. Today after millennia of weathering, while morphing back into raw limestone, these reassembled architectural fragments expose attitudes fossilized at their intersection with terrestrial matter.
They are sediments of bygone, yet familiar, civic rituals still propagating through today's urban earthworks. Such circuits inscribed in ground and masonry habituate the social and enact the landscape beyond. The site of the polis kind of ground-zero for certain forms of Occidental being where political-social identity and thought -- carved in stone and ground -- also (inadvertently?) co-produces notions of landscape. Here the human-non-human relations are tangibly articulate, expressive of conscious intentional boundaries rather than the absentmindedness characteristic of the current nature / human divide.
The agora in particular – consisting of an open plaza combined with peripheral shaded stoas – is a crucial waymark in the perpetuation of contemporary public (and economic) space. The rise of agricultural economics in the Peloponnese is exemplified in the measure tables at the north-east end of the agora where the standardization of units get imprinted through the spherical hollows in the stone of the tables on grains, olives and other granulated produce exchanged at the site.
Agora Circuit is a live in-situ circuit, literally plugged into the expanse of stone, dirt and air. A rewire of human-mineral binds interlinking column vibrations, irrigation channel infrasound, telluric currents of future earthquakes and distant tropical thunderstorms, marketplace standard measure resonance and the politics of stoa reverb.