Issue 4
—Autumn 2016

Times

Who Does the Earth Think It Is?

Anjalika SagarJoel Sines

For the 2015 PARSE Time conference The Otolith Group screened Medium Earth (2013) and followed this by the performance of a semi-fictional radio conversation between earthquake sensitives and philosophers in the US.

Part prequel and part premonition, Medium Earth is a work caught within its own imminent future and represents the outgrowth of research undertaken throughout California in 2012-2013. It listens to its deserts, translates the writing of its stones, and deciphers the calligraphies of its expansion cracks. The accumulation of moving images and sounds that make up Medium Earth comprise an audiovisual essay on the millennial time of geology and the infrastructural unconscious of Southern California. Focused on the ways in which tectonic forces express themselves in boulder outcrops and the hairline fractures of cast concrete, Medium Earth participates in the cultures of prophecy and forecasting that mediate the experience of seismic upheaval.

The conversation, “The Earthquake Sensitive as Planetary Subject” with image backdrop of slides from Who Does the Earth Think It Is? (2014), was performed by Anjalika Sagar and Joel Sines.

Medium Earth (film still) 2013 by The Otolith Group. Courtesy and copyright the artists.
Who Does The Earth Think It Is?

Lecture Performance by The Otolith Group 1
Read by Anjalika Sagar, The Otolith Group (AS) and Joel Sines (JS).

START

AS: Welcome to Night Search. It’s 7pm on March 2nd, 2013. I’m Eddie Middleton, here in Memphis, Justin Abner is up in Pigeon Forks, Tennessee, and we’re interviewing Charlotte King tonight. She is a famous biological sensitive who has been able to predict earthquakes quite accurately, and she has amazing abilities. She is able to pick up on frequencies that most people can’t experience. Charlotte, I know you do a lot of other things that you’re noted for, but I guess the main thing is the earthquake predictions. And, just to start out, I want to welcome you to Night Search and ask you to maybe fill in a little bit about your background, how you first got started with this earthquake prediction thing, so that our listeners, who maybe are not familiar with you, can know something about your background.

JS: It’s a pleasure to be talking with you, Justin, down there in Memphis. In 1981, or 1980 I should say, I connected with the mountain, here in California, and when St. Helen’s started getting active, I started getting really bad headaches, which actually started back about 1979. And I didn’t know why. They, you know, did tests and stuff, and everything was fine medically. So I basically just had headaches all the time, migraines, and nobody knew what it was. I was seeing specialists and given medication and stuff. Nothing would help. And then they had the first earthquake on Mount St. Helen’s in March, March 16th 1980, and my head felt like it was gonna blow up. Then when the volcano had the first earthquake, the pain subsided just briefly, and I said, “ah, it’s the volcano”. And from that point on, I was locked into Mount St. Helen’s. I still am. I can feel it from anywhere, from where I’m now, 90 miles away, to when I was in Colorado, almost 2,000 miles away or more. So it’s just really a connection with the Earth. And what really put it all together for me in 1979 was the beaching of the whales here in Oregon. There were a series of sound changes. I was really scared. I didn’t know why, I started crying. I called the television station up in Portland that I was reporting information to, and they said nothing was happening. And then that evening, about four hours after the call, they interrupted the television station to talk about a series of sperm whales that were beaching on the Oregon coast. In all, 41 beautiful giant mammals beached and died. When the sound changed, they beached, and then four days later, three to four days later, there were four moderate earthquakes in Big Bear, California. It just all clicked for me at that point, and I knew that I was feeling earthquakes, at least in the United States. I didn’t know too much about other areas yet. And as time progressed, I not only had sound changes, but I also had physical symptoms. Each part of my body is tied in to a different geographical location. I’m not unique in this. The only unique thing was I was able to put it together, because there are hundreds of thousands of people out there that feel these things. They just don’t know what they’re feeling. And some can hear some things. Some can feel some things. Some do both. Very few do both. Most of the people that hear it, hear it in the higher frequency, whereas I hear in the subsonic sound level, which most people do not, although there are a couple people that do. And it doesn’t matter if you’re in Oregon or in Tennessee or in Wyoming or in Japan or China or Chile. It doesn’t make any difference. The sounds and the symptoms are almost always the same. That way you can identify where the next event’s going to take place.

AS: Let me ask you: the tsunami that hit Japan a couple years ago and destroyed the Fukushima nuclear reactor—did you pick up on that?

JS: That is right, Eddie. Oh, absolutely. There was about three days of precursor activity for that. Japan always left shoulder blade pain, and if it’s over a six, which obviously this was, it’s sharp, jabby heart pain on the left side of the chest. It feels like a knife just going in and out, just sharp, little jabbies, quite uncomfortable, but not severe. And also animals react to Japan if it’s over a six. Cats start vomiting. Mostly it’s fur balls, but after a while, it’s not even fur balls. When you have one cat that throws up a fur ball, as you know, that’s not a big deal. But when you have all of your cats doing it at the same time, then it is a big deal. I also have ants that I keep a very close watch on. They’re my kind of backup precursor group here. And before the quake in Japan, they were climbing up the wall in droves, literally thousands of them, and up over the ceiling. They did not want to be in the ground at all. The morning of the earthquake, I went to go to work, I was still working at that time, opened the garage door, and the whole driveway surface was littered with dozens of earthworms that had crawled out of the ground. And I said, “uh-oh”. So I had to move a bunch of them before I could back my car out. I went on to work, I went upstairs into the office, and there are four steps going up that are concrete, and then you have the landing to go in the door. And the earthworms had climbed those four concrete stairs. There were still some on the bottom steps. And they had made it all the way to the top landing and were laying all over the landing up there, just to get away from the ground. And that’s when I gave myself permission to go out to my car, get my laptop, and send out an alert for Japan.

AS: Wow… I got to ask you this. I know you’ve been doing earthquake predictions based on these kind of biological symptoms since 1979. How accurate have you been, if you don’t mind talking about your track record of success to date?

JS: Oh, no, not at all. Obviously, I’ve not been 100%. Some of the great big ones that I felt were going to happen, were maybe a day or two late. There’s been three times or four times that I’ve missed one. But then the precursors continued, and then it did show up. So it was, wasn’t that it didn’t happen. The precursors that I watch continued to happen, so it moved the timeline out accordingly, and my groups know how that works. So, but it’s just each time you have an event, you move the timeline out another day or two beyond what the timeline was originally set on. And it’s kind of hard to explain, but anyway, that’s what I do. I always say ahead of time, you know, the timeline when it’s going to be. Mount St. Helen’s, I’m 100%. Japan, I’m 100%. Mexico, I’m 100%. Oregon, I’m 100%. Chile, I’m definitely 100%. There are some, you can miss…

AS: Charlotte, can you tell us, is there anything right now going on that would… precursors that indicate some major quake in some place in the world that, that you…

JS: Well, we’re expecting—Oregon’s stirring a little bit, because the vision’s getting really bad, and Oregon is always vision. And I’m not concerned. It’s just probably an aftershock to the five we had a couple days ago. Left lower ribs and back are hurting again. That’s Oceania, probably New Zealand, Australia, in that area, because they’re due, they’re also due for an aftershock, that’s the area that’s been real uncomfortable lately. And my right knee and and hip and my leg has been hurting, and that’s Peru, Brazil, and Colombia.

AS: Okay. Okay. Handing over to Justin now.

JS: Justin Abner here in Pigeon Forks, Tennessee. I just wanted to bring in our second guest who’s been waiting patiently all this time over in Pacific Palisades. Professor Theodor Adorno. Professor Adorno. Are you there?

AS: I am here, yes.

JS: Great you could join us. Now I understand that you have been conducting up-to-the-minute content analysis of the three months of the daily column “Astrological Forecasts” by the astrologist Carroll Righter in the Los Angeles Times from November 1952 to February 1953.

AS: That is correct, yes.

JS: I understand that this is brand new up-to-the-minute research that you have just completed in this year of 1953. Can you share some of your findings with us?

AS: Our social system, in spite of its closedness and the ingenuity of its technological functioning, seems to actually move towards self-destruction. The sense of an underlying crisis has never disappeared since World War I and most people realise, at least dimly, that the continuity of the social process and somehow of their own capacity of reproducing their life, is no longer due to supposedly “normal” economic processes, but to factors such as universal rearmament, which by themselves breed destruction while they are apparently the only means of self-perpetuation. This sense of threat is real enough, and some of its expressions such as the A and H bombs are about to outrun the wildest neurotic fears and destructive fantasies. The more people profess official optimism, the more profoundly they are affected by this mood of doom, the idea, correct or erroneous, that the present state of affairs somehow must lead towards a total explosion and that the individual can do very little about it. The sense of doom may today obtain a peculiarly sinister colouring by the fact that the present form of social existence seems to go down and no new and higher form of social organisation appears on the horizon. The “wave of the future” seems to consummate the very fears that are produced by the conditions of the present. Astrology takes care of this mood by translating it into a pseudo-rational form, thus somehow localising free-floating anxieties in some definite symbolism, but it also gives some vague and diffused comfort by making the senseless appear as though it had some hidden and grandiose sense, while at the same time corroborating that this sense can neither be sought in the realm of the human nor can properly be grasped by humans. The combination of the realistic and the irrational in astrology may ultimately be accounted for by the fact it represents a threat and a remedy in one, just as certain psychotics may start a fire and at the same time prepare for its extinction.

JS: Preparing for extinction. Great. I would like to throw that thought right back to Charlotte King who is on the line right now with Eddie Middleton. While you’ve been looking at how people look up to the stars, Professor, Charlotte’s been right here, listening into the earth. Charlotte, can you hear me?

JS: I can hear you just fine, Justin.

AS: Great. Good. So my next question would be, do you predict any major events coming soon?

JS: Well, it’s hard to answer, because I’m in a timeline. I’ve moved the timeline out several days for another, another bigger event again. I haven’t seen the major precursor that I’m watching for yet. Once I see that, I’ll put out a heads-up.

AS: Okay.

JS: It’s, it’s kind of in a three-day timeline right now, but I am watching for another, that final precursor to show up before I can actually put out a heads-up on it. Like I said before, I’m really feeling Peru, Brazil, and Colombia. That’s the right leg. If it gets into the left leg, then you have to watch for Ecuador. I’m watching for Australia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, and the Kermadec Islands. If it’s New Zealand, it could be North or South Island, or even Christchurch. Those are the main areas that I pick up on. Oregon is always vision. You can see just fine, but everything is blurry. Your depth perception is off. Other people are picking up on Chile. So things are still moving around.

AS: If you could just hold it there, Charlotte, we just have time to introduce our final guest on Night Search. Professor Bruno Latour, all the way over there in Edinburgh. He has taken time away from preparing for the fourth of his six Gifford Lectures at Edinburgh University to be with us tonight. Professor Latour, are you there?

AS: Yes, I am here.

JS: Great. I understand that you are about to deliver your fourth Gifford Lecture on “The Anthropocene and the Destruction of the Image of the Globe” today at 2pm on February 25th 2013.

AS: That is correct, yes.

JS: You’ve been listening to Charlotte all this time, have you not?

AS: Yes, I have. Indeed I have. And what I want to say, very briefly, is this: It is our Globe, our ideal idea of the Globe that should be destroyed for any work of art, any aesthetic to emerge. If you agree to hear in the word aesthetic, its old meaning of being able to “perceive” and to be “concerned”, that is, a capacity to render oneself sensitive, a capacity that precedes any distinction between the instruments of science, of art and of politics.

JS: Justin here in Pigeon Forks, Tennessee. Just following your words down there in Edinburgh, Professor. Charlotte, when you hear Bruno Latour talking about the capacity to render yourself sensitive, you are ahead of him, in a sense. After all, you’ve been sensitive since 1979, haven’t you?

JS: Yes, I have. I’ll get email from people in Oregon or other places, and all of a sudden they say, Chile must be going on, because I have been angry all day at everything, or my husband and I are fighting, it must be Chile. And it is. It truly is. If you start getting angry, and you don’t know why, and there’s no reason for it, then you have to look for an outside cause, and that’s usually Chile. And, suicides—suicides really, really escalate before Chile. In fact, I had three people that I know personally, two of them good friends, that all knew about Chile, and they committed suicide before the Chile quakes. They had an Operation Lifesaver by our Governor’s taskforce here in Oregon, and they asked me to come in and speak to the group, because I had actually predicted three of the fatalities before they happened, based on my Chile connection. And so they had me come in and talk to them.

AS: Amazing… Professor, do you want to come back on that?

AS: I really must go to prepare for my fourth Gifford Lecture now. I would just like to emphasise that the capacity to render oneself sensitive precedes any distinction between the instruments of science, of art and of politics.

AS: Professor Latour, thank you for joining us. We really do appreciate it. Now, Charlotte, did these suicides just occur with the Chile earthquakes, or is that with earthquakes in general?

JS: Chile. I don’t know what it is. I, for sure, I don’t know what the mechanism is that causes it. But I know that it is there, and it’s really easy to see. All you have to do is go back and look at events that have taken place and then go back and look at the reports on the archives on USGS, you know, the United States Geological Survey, and you can see Chile followed every one of those events.

AS: They had a nine-point quake in Chile, not too long ago, or am I mistaken?

JS: Well, Eddie, nine-point-two, that was the biggest quake anybody ever recorded. That was quite a few years back. I think the biggest one, though, was in Alaska, 1964. I think that was the bigger one. I’m not sure. We had Chile, Bolivia, and Alaska, and Japan that have all been nine or greater. The Chile quake in 2010, that was 8.8. And I predicted that one. That was the one I predicted to ABC Television before it happened, and it hit four hours later.

AS: Wow. Professor Adorno, you’ve been very patient over there in Pacific Palisades? Would you like to respond to anything Charlotte King has been saying?

AS: Yes, I would. The veiled tendency of society towards disaster lulls its victims in a false revelation, with a hallucinated phenomenon. In vain they hope in its fragmented blatancy to look their total doom in the eye and withstand it. Panic breaks once again, after millennia of enlightenment, over a humanity whose control of nature as control of men far exceeds in horror anything men ever had to fear from nature.

AS: Thank you, Professor. Lots to think about there. We appreciate you taking time away from your urgent work on your Ten Theses on Occultism to join us all on Night Search this evening. Charlotte, would you like to come back on anything Professor Adorno has said?

JS: Chile, the, the Chile quake in 2010, that was 8.8. And I predicted that one. That was the one I predicted to ABC Television before it happened, and it hit four hours later. That one is on YouTube. They actually put it out there on YouTube, and the interview that they did with me, which was on the news four hours after the quake, within four hours of the quake.

END

Contributors

Anjalika Sagar

Anjalika Sagar is one of the members of the collaborative platform The Otolith Group along with Kodwo Eshun, which was founded in 2002. The Group sets out to rethink the dynamics of cultural production under conditions of
accelerated, unstable and precarious global environments. This endeavour finds eclectic forms including films, artworks, exhibitions, curated programmes, and publications that are conceived as ongoing research into the structures of global regimes, speculative futures, tricontinentalism, and cybernetics. Their work in particular has focused on audiovisual essays as an expanded form that seek to inhabit events and histories that inform our present and future, geology and collective unconscious.

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Joel Sines

Joel Sines trained as an actor and theatre director at Academia Contemporânea do Espetáculo, in Porto. He has led an intense artistic practice in the realm of theatre, cinema and performance art through research and practice both in Portugal and the UK. He has collaborated with visual artists and directors such as Ângela Ferreira, João Sousa Cardoso, Giorgio Sadotti, Claudio da Silva and Bruno Schiappa. Sines is co-founder of the performance collective Ma Companhia (Bad Company) based in Porto. He recently moved to London, where he was admitted to the Open School East Associates Programme in 2015.

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