The Former World takes John McPhee’s celebrated book, Annals of the Former World, and translates it into a variety of other media: sound, performance, text, video, objects, photographs, and assorted ephemera. What the components display is a snapshot of geologic time, one that coincided with the lives of two humans within that moment. The flows and movements of unseen biologic and geologic forces move in their own fashion, at times in relation to our human involvement, and often without, beholden to their own interior logics. Some time frames are too long for us to comprehend; this work offers a way to begin that process.
The Former World is a multi-media essay on ‘deep time’, geologic history, the environment, humanity, and the artist. The work uses two focal points: the life and writings of the artist Robert Smithson and the writer John McPhee’s tome on American geologic history, Annals of the Former World. Using the idea of Smithson's nonsites, The Former World reconfigures aspects of the American landscape into a fragmented series of pieces; pieces that represent the geologic record, the mark of resource extraction, and human created interventions. The work engages with how humans see the environment and how that environment records our presence. The work is also a documentary, a landscape written in time with audio, video, text, and objects. All these materials display a point in time, but also reference a larger time scale, one that was long before humanity and one that will last long after we have gone. Perhaps our time on this world will consist of a faint, thin, line pressed between layers in a future slice of rock.
The Former World manifests through a variety of means: a violin duo playing highly ordered pitches; an acoustic guitarist performing fractured, Americana-styled improvisations or resonating the open-tuned guitar with electric toothbrushes; 4 performers delivering a variety of text, from obituaries to high school text books; a 2-channel video that focuses on striations of rock and the human interaction on the landscape; mobile field recordings taken from road trips in the United States; roadside debris that serves as both a design element as well as percussive objects; sub-sonic frequencies that are more felt than heard. All these disparate parts fit into three discrete thematic sections: Time; STRATA; and Crystals. All these parts and sections are mutable and can be configured to suit a location or performance.
The Former World was initially produced as an operatic work-in-progress by the Industry under the direction of Yuval Sharon and performed by members of wildUp as part of the Industry's FIRST TAKE 2017. Parts of The Former World have been performed at the Center for New Music , San Francisco, CA, Scholes Street Studio, Brooklyn, NY, and as part of Title:Point’s ?! Interrobang New Works Festival 2019, Brooklyn, NY. An installation version of the work was created in September 2021 for ArtHop 2021, in Burlington, VT. A photobook and an LP were released 2022.
The Former World was originated by John P. Hastings and was co-created and co-produced by John P. Hastings and Ben Mayock.