Don Hill is a sound designer, immersive & multimedia artist, science journalist, broadcaster & public speaker. Don and I were both raised in Northern Ontario and are both sound based artists with a keen interest in technology and spirituality. I’ve have had long series of email exchanges over the years with Don about this podcast and my a calm presence Substack about some my doomist tendencies where Don often helped me considered more balanced points of view. We don’t always agree on all the issues but that’s part of the fun of art and listening.
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Can art save us from our hyper-accelerated, fear-driven world? Journey with Don Hill as he explores how slowing down, listening deeply, and amplifying unheard voices can create collective empathy and a hopeful vision for the future.
Chapter Summary
00:00 Amplifying Voices in the Art World
01:06 The Shift in Artistic Values
03:06 Navigating Personal and Collective Grief
05:01 Commodifying Fear in Art and Media
07:19 The Evolution of Story Trees
09:30 Slowing Down in a Fast-Paced World
12:47 Future Visions and the Role of Art
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Behind the Story
The episode delves into the state of the modern art world, critiquing its focus on real estate, perceived value, and the commodification of fear. It contrasts this with a call for art that fosters collective empathy and addresses societal challenges. The discussion highlights the importance of slowing down in a technologically accelerated world, drawing on personal anecdotes and experiences to illustrate the transformative power of mindful engagement with art.
Note: This is an automated transcription that is provided for those who prefer to read this conversation and for documentation. It has been verified but is not 100% accurate (some names might not be quite right). Please contact me if you would like to quote from this transcript: claude@conscient.ca
[00:00:00] Don Hill
There are a lot of people that don't have the kind of talent that you do, Claude. Or for that matter, I do. And they have voices, but you can't hear them. So our job in the art world, I would say, is to amplify those voices in a way that's comprehensive and understandable by the folks who should be paying attention to what's going on around them and not talking at people. So my complaint these days at the art world is we're just talking at people, we're not listening to them. And if we did listen to them, you'll find that the world is actually quite a hopeful place. And then in many Respects, what Trump 2.0 is doing is what Hazel Henderson was suggesting is the soft path to change is collapse. He's exacerbating a situation that we've been hanging onto for perhaps far too long in even in the art world.
[00:00:57] Claude Schryer
Don Hill is a sound designer, immersive and multimedia artist, science journalist, broadcaster and public speaker. Don and I were both raised in northern Ontario with a keen interest in technology and spirituality. We don't always agree on all the issues, but that's part of the fun of art and listening. Episode 229. Amplifying Voices.
[00:01:29] Don Hill
The critical point, right, now is that the art world as I understand it, is more about real estate, you know, perceived value and hoarding and all the rest of it and the other stuff. I haven't really heard anything new that really has caught my attention. I just hear sort of a repetition, and in some cases, the repetition is rewarded with grants and subsidy, etc, etc. And sadly for those folks, that world is ending because the rug is being pulled out from underneath them. So this creates tremendous opportunity in my mind, not just for journalism, but certainly for the art world.
[00:02:06] Claude Schryer
I kind of agree that there is not so much lack of listening, a lack of resonance. It's like the individualization of art. Like me, my view, my theory. That's the way we were trained. I was anyway. And we're still doing that mostly. And what we need now are collective, grounded feeling situations. So that's not so much about expression as it is about collective empathy, collective grief, collective whatever you want to call it. Joy. I mean, joy's in there. I've been overly negative. I realize I realized it months ago that I had become a doomist and a kind of shallow rabbit hole. I feel like I've come out of the rabbit hole or coming out of it, and it wasn't a bad place to be for a while with the Deep Adaptation people and others. But it's not very helpful. It just kind of, you make yourself feel important because you're proclaiming the future and you, of course, nobody knows what's going to happen.
[00:03:06] Claude Schryer
Talk to me about your art and, and how you see its place in the world, whether it's ecological or, you know, AI or whatever it is.
[00:03:15] Don Hill
Yeah. First off, thanks for that because I've had some of these discussions before with other artists and they essentially say, what the hell are you doing now? And I think some of that conversation that we have ahead of us here is already been answered in the sense that if I understand what this thing, what I'm doing is, what I'm doing is, I already know what it is, so I don't need to do that anymore. I think that's kind of a stupid answer, but I'll live with that. For now. I just want to go back to one point I'm very pleased to hear before I go on like I do, that you're admitting to yourself that maybe you've been living in a kind of a cortisol filled, drug fueled endogenous space which builds on itself.
The problem with cortisol, which is the stress hormone, is it just builds and builds and builds and builds and builds until it sort of overflows like a volcano. And in that release, I think that's where the arc comes from. A B Another story connected to this before I go on about story trees in particular. Many, many years ago, I was working in a CBC newsroom and a colleague of mine had just come back from the UK. He had been working in London as a London correspondent for a newspaper. And he looked around the newsroom. At this time we had just moved into a digital space and we're able to see all the other newsrooms and what they were reporting.
And everybody was busy, busy, busy. And then he just looked up and he said this statement out of the blue. All I see are white collared pimps trafficking in psychological abuse. Whoa. Point number two. So I think that's what's happened. A lot of us in the art world and also in journalism, we've commodified fear, we've commodified cortisol, and that seems to be the ingredient that makes social media so attractive.
But at the same time, there's all these eyeballs there, there's all these emotions, there's all these existing people who are looking for some kind of interactivity which social media seems to imply as a possibility. So back to Story Trees for a minute. What I did was I went back to some recordings I did, made an. In 1974. It was the beginning of my broadcast career. And also it turned out that my wife of now 50 years and I, we recorded oral history of our elders. Where both you and I grew up in northeastern Ontario.
You being from North Bay or the Area, and me from Sudbury, I was very interested in how we built this place. I was the child of an immigrant. I realized that the stories that were being told to me were not being stories that I understood in my existence growing up in Sudbury. So as a young person, we went around and interviewed approximately in northeastern, north, central and northwestern Ontario up to Kenora. Approximately about 50 to 60 people who are old. People who are like 60 years old. 70 and 80. When you're our age. Right now, that doesn't seem so old. But I kept those recordings and I put together a record album. Largely inspired, again Claude, by what you and I had first discussed when we met was the importance of Glenn Gould's idea of North. I was completely inspired by this, the idea of counterpoint and voices. And that's.
I took my attempt at doing that and made men of the north, or we with my wife Ann. Many, many years later, when interactive facial recognition, etc. I realized that I could take those recordings, digitize them with facial recognition, also assign certain values. And then depending on how you were engaging the recording as moving left to right or, you know, your body, certain voices would amplify or mix or blend, and it would never be the same way twice. Now I work very carefully and closely with a colleague, Kyle Matheson, who was also trained here in Alberta. There's Amy, the Alberta Machine Institute, learning Institute, rather, with Rich Sutton, who's a brilliant guy in the AI space. And so I benefited from working with these younger people because they kind of understood with all my hand waving what I was going on about.
So using facial recognition, we designed a bespoke piece of software. And that was the first story trees which, using these old recordings and they combined in many ways, like Glenn Gould, began to hear, you know, like, voices and voicings and. And it was successful. But I also realized it had some limitations because I wasn't at the time. Fifty years ago, we didn't interview any Indigenous people because it never occurred to me at the time that we should. So subsequent to that, I have made many, many conversations with Indigenous peoples about their experience of the land, the territory. And I should add, none of the north of.
We were about people working in the Resource sector. My dad was a miner, so I spoke to miners. Anne's. Her background was from Capreol which is a railway community. And I talked to lake boat captains and people who were workers in the forest. You know, boucherons, as we call in French. Okay, so that was the extent of those recordings.
And they were powerful in the sense that they gave voice to people that were voiceless. They were quite pleased to have young people, in this instance, 19, 20 and 21 years old, sitting at the feet, listening with just a microphone and listening intently to their stories. But later on I started to speak to a lot of indigenous peoples. And then I did the Story Trees 2, which was featuring the conversations I had with and sadly at this point, many past elders.
But I'm glad they're recording them. And again, the same situation happened. It was kind of a combination of voices and stuff. Story Trees 3, which is the one I kind of like the best, if you want to be in a contemplative space. Combined a lot of soundscape recordings, stems, etc. With some bespoke stuff that I created especially for that. And it is a kind of a meditation practice if you want to.
Again, through facial recognition, body movement, in terms of gestures, etc. Mind you, I realized that we just did this in audio, but I did move back and forward and to the left and right and it created the conditions for you to. To basically mix the recording. But more important, I also added along the way, and this is important to me. And this, I'll close with this part.
This is me talking. I'm a speedy guy, okay, I'm. I'm hyperactive. I've been this way since I've been 8 years old. I've been told, right, I bounce around a lot. So what I also noticed was that hypermedia is now a thing in the sense of social media. You have doom scrolling and all this kind of stuff.
The question I had, what would happen if we slowed down instead of speed it up? And then it took me back to a time when I used to go to. As you, you know, you being in Ottawa, had the luxury of doing this on a regular basis when you're at council, used to go to like the National Gallery and then, you know, these big huge medieval paintings, you know, like that, or these, you know, and I just would zoom through the gallery, take a look.
Yeah, got it. Move on. Then one time, for whatever reason, I just stopped. Which brings me to this story. Years ago, when I first encountered non representational art, abstract art, a very good friend of mine Dennis Labey, who's out in Prince Edward Island, a sculpture.
And he took me, I'm a young person, I'm 17, 18. He took me to a gallery to see some non representational paintings. And I looked at him and I, I was drinking the cheap plunk, you know, the white wine that usually accompanies this stuff as well. This is crap, you know, it's garbage. Ah, anybody can do this. And Dennis looked over to me, says, wait a minute, what's wrong? Wow, this is junk.
Any kid with a crayon could do. And then he stopped, he said, wait a minute, let me show you the way into the picture. Kaboom. And he showed me the way into the picture and then I followed the line and I realized this was frozen time. This was a single image, non ordinary, abstract, and yet it had layers of time on it. And I follow it through. So later on I took the same approach to a big, huge piece I saw in the National Gallery.
And I found the way into the picture and I stood with this thing, I think for over an hour and I followed it through. So in other words, how can we get people in the art world to slow down?
[00:12:15] Claude Schryer
You've more or less answered my last question, but I'll give it to you anyway, which is, what are action points or follow ups or suggestions, recommendations? You just talk about slowing down and you're not the first, by the way. But everybody does it differently throughout the through. Technology is tricky because itself is an accelerating medium. What action points do you recommend to listeners?
[00:12:35] Don Hill
We're at a perturbation point. The issue of what the future looks like is we can't know it until we're on the other side of whatever it is that we're leaving behind. The only thing I can say is that this is a fantastic time to be alive as earthlings, you, you and I, human beings, we're not leaving the planet. We can't. Our bodies cannot cope for too long in outer space. Even people who are near Earth orbit, we're discovering, can't do well. They just don't do well at all.
But more important, and I reflect on a talk I gave in Moscow in 2017 to a group of scientists. I said that everybody has a desire to go to Mars. And what I mean by everybody, this nation states, etc. And Elon Musk, for example, probably knows what I'm about to say. And that is our bodies are not going out into outer space because if we stay out in outer space too long, it affects our physiology, which affects cognition in other words, the dirty secret of the Russian space program, and these guys acknowledged it, was that they're guys who stayed out in space too long, they come back a little crazy, they just do depression, etc, all this comes with this. So I said to them at the time, and you mentioned spirituality, something we should talk about perhaps in the future. I said, if indeed you're going to go to Mars, if that is part of the plan, make sure you send a shaman with you now.
Why a shaman? Well, of course, in Yakutsia, the wild east of Russia, there's a history of shamanism. I don't think I have to go into that. But I said the reason why you should is because a shaman knows how to be lucid inside a hallucination. So that's where we're going to right now, is that if we're going to go off planet for a number of reasons, it might be a hybrid human. So if you comprehend what I was going on about just a few moments ago, it'll be genomics coupled with props. An artificial intelligent agent that is embedded.
But we won't be human anymore. We'll be something else. And we may require in the art world some Genesis stories. That's what I think the future is for the art world. At least what I'm interested in.