Interspecies Meditations
Interspecies Meditations: imaginative meditations on belonging to a living world
Interspecies Meditations is a monthly performance series exploring intimacy between humans and the more-than-human world through sound and imaginative listening practices. Each installment immerses audiences into a different realm — forests, fields, fungi and the underground, darkness, migration — through deep listening, song, guided meditation, and sound made in collaboration with living organisms via biosonification.
Our invitation: learn to find belonging in both the body and the world by attuning and listening to other species. Inspired by the body's capacity for metamorphosis, each session follows an arc of arrival, dissolution, and re-formation. Audiences are invited not to observe but to practice an interspecies transformation: imagining their own becoming, listening to what the world is saying, and discovering that the boundaries we call skin are more porous than we think.
Interspecies Meditations is created by Willow Gatewood and Audax M. Gawler, with contributing artists, and is hosted at Reforesters Laboratory, Brooklyn NY.
Note on Biosonification:
Biosonification involves turning biological processes within organisms into music or sound. Electrodes and a midi-data biosonification device convert changes in micro-conductivity in plants and fungi to midi notes, which "play" digital instruments. Willow's interest in biosonification lies both in producing rich sonic landscapes that intrigue and connect viewers to the world around them and as a novel method for researching processes that influence micro-conductivity, including ion transport, water transport, and electrical activity in the body of the organism.
Artist: Willow Gatewood, Audax Gawler
Willow is a transdisciplinary artist, environmental scientist, and storyteller who uses immersive, multi-sensory experiences to cultivate ecological understanding and build bridges between human and more-than-human realms. Fascinated by subverting the familiar, their music weaves recordings from the environment, biosonification, and re-worked classical instruments with minimalist pop beats, and it is their passion to explore formats for positive planetary futures. Willow's work has been featured in publications including Ambient Receiver | Journal of Creative Ecologies, Grand | The Journal of One Grand Books, and the Rachel Carson Council's website, among others and they have performed at festivals including Earth Celebrations Ecological City, NYC, Deep Water Literary Festival ('22, '23, and '24), and at the MonViso Institute in Ostana, Italy. Their poetry collections, tangerine and Salt, are published by Bottlecap Press, LA and recently, they released a more-than-human future-ambient album, Plant Music for Tea Parlours with Agami Records. As an independent educator, they teach new media and sound through the lens of the more-than-human and often lead workshops in environmental art and biological imagination.
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Audax M. Gawler is an award-winning, multigenre Symbiopunk artist and world-builder whose practice sits at the intersection of speculative design, ecological humanities and more-than-human world-building. Based between Australia and Brazil, they create participatory and embodied prototypes for speculative interspecies futures, attending to multispecies justice, feral imaginaries and collaborative survival. Trained in diverse eco-spiritual practices they have spent fourteen years creating invitations for humans to encounter interspecies worlds and return to planetary awareness, connection and collaboration. Their work commonly composes the intuitive and imaginative with socially engaged practice, natural science, ritual, myth-making and environmental humanities to create experiences, publications, workshops and public programs. Audax is co-founder of the Trans* Ecology Club, curator of the Symbiopunk Library, futures columnist for Fast Company, and director of Planetary Futures Lab Urthling.
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Come Early to Elevate Your Experience with Adaptogenic Foods and Teas
Reforesters Laboratory is an experimental adaptogen cafe and sound clinic located in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. We utilize music – including spatial, sub-bass-centered, and organic instrumentation – along with breathwork, meditation, art, plant care and adaptogenic, nutritional foods + beverages to cultivate kindness—both physical and spiritual. We aim to create an environment that offers peace, space, and clarity, helping people understand the connections between themselves, their communities, and the world around them. To that end, we offer "pay what you can" ticket options on all events and classes.