Cocky Eek

Dark Skies

10 march 2024 – Sonic Acts –The Muddy Muddy Mystery Tour by Cocky Eek. In a rapidly changing world, fieldwork is a crucial part of our cultural orientation. It is the practice of making sense between oneself and the landscape. In this field trip, we will visit several places along the Frisian coastline, known for their dark skies and direct exposure to the elements.
Staying with the mud, Cocky Eek will conduct a ‘quick and dirty’, low-tech workshop to create mud listening and sensing devices – a unique opportunity for an in-depth encounter with the saltmarshes of Marrum. Under the guidance of a local mud guide and equipped with our handmade devices, participants will visit the area around the villages of Moddergat and Paezens – to listen in, to, and with the tidal landscape.
Muddy Muddy Mystery Tour, Sonic Acts, foto credit: Carolyn Strauss

The Wadden Sea, as one of the largest tidal planes on the planet, ties together sky and mud. At night, this is the darkest area of the Netherlands, with relatively little light pollution. It is exactly in these places where one can strongly sense the rhythms of a tidal region that are governed by interplanetary cycles. Their force of influence extends also into our imagination and culture. What can the dark sky tell us if we listen to the depths of its mysteries?

Together with twelve ArtScience students we conducted improvisational research under the night skies of the salt marshes of the Wadden Sea during the darkest week of November 2023. This is not research done alone, but involves local people, local beings, as well as the darkness of the sky and the pitch black mud below our feet. As a collective we shared our experiential findings with local residents in synchronicity with the falling stars of the Leoniden swarms. What a night! And I wonder: what happens if, in our educational systems, we would tune in more with celestial rhythms?

Dark Skies public events:

Sonic Acts: Muddy Muddy Mystery Tour, 17 jan 2024, Moddergat and Marrum, Nl https://sonicacts.com/news/The-Muddy-Muddy-Mystery-Tour

Het Lage Noorden: The Night of the Falling Star, ArtScience Interfaculty public evening, Thursday, 16th November, Marrum, NL

Faultlines forum: KABK Deep Futures Research Group, 31 may 2024, The Hague, NL KABK’s Design Lectorate Deep Futures Research Group 2023-2024. brochure: https://www.kabk.nl/en/lectorates/design/fault-lines-kabk-research-forum-2024 video Dark Skies – Cocky Eek: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ffEOZEd8dwvBGELqTeYQ11_Ff6WoqF5q/view?usp=sharing

Here we are receiving the live radio signals from NOAA-2 passing over in a curved line above our heads from Portugal to Iceland in a duration of 10 minutes. NOAA-2 is a weather satellite, orbiting earth since 1970 and about to die. [piep -peip – piep ]. The workshop Stars in Their Eyes conducted by Sophie Dyer and Sacha Engelmann from Open Wheater was hosted by Sonic Acts 2024.

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Excerpt of research book Cocky Eek page 5: A Balancing Act: The Autumn Equinox

Excerpt of research book Cocky Eek page 3: Dear Saturn

Excerpt of research book Cocky Eek page 15: dream notation of implosive and explosive tufts of clouds.

During the research process, my dreams seem to guide me for direction: one said: ‘only write down your direct observations!’ Others sucked me in a black hole; functioning as a portal to travel to other times and other places. 

Where are we when we dream?

I kept falling into black holes.

If I fall in a black hole how do I get out of it?

I explored this question by diving into the ideas of Stephen Hawking who first conceived of black holes, and Carlo Rovelli who has written about them, and their opposites – White Holes – more recently. It might be hard to see behind the event horizon of the black hole but in my dream I was positioned on another angle from a far distanced in space: a methodology I borrowed from his book, which I applied in my dream. I saw that white and black tunnels are swirling around each other. This theory possibly builds upon Rovelli’s insights. I wrote him a letter to share the amazing insights of my dream.

Dark Skies with special thanks to:
ArtScience students: Lola Brancovich, Lila de Coninck, Jedrzej Eltman, Raphael Diederen, Wouter van den Elzen, Inge Kengen, Inga Hirsch, Bokyoung Kim, Anaïs Lossouarn, Wiggo Mott, Charlotte Roschka, Michelle O’Higgins Theilmann. The birds, the mud, the salt marshes, the stars, the planets in particular: Jupiter, Saturn and Venus, Sophie Dyer and Sasha Engelmann from Open-Weather, Adriana Knouf (scientist/artist), Koen van den Driesche (local astronomer), Harry Veentra (local field-guide), Sandra Jansen and Stephan Valk for
welcoming us to Het Lage Noorden, Marrum, Friesland and Sonic Acts 2024.

Dark Skies – and The Art of dreaming presented during Fault Lines: KABK Research Forum 2024
Featuring the KABK Deep Futures Research Group
Friday 31 May, 11:00-19:00, KABK Auditorium

Jedrzej Eltman – ArtSience student: ‘It was cold, the wind was gently touching my cheeks… In the same position as 8 hours earlier where I saw Jupiter, was Venus… It was alone, there above all things that were closer to me. Even though I couldn’t see any movement of it, It was mostly about movement…. The sky above was getting brighter and the Venus started fading out. The day was about to begin, birds were flying to the coast to rest, sheep were waking up. There was a visible relation between the outer movement with the coming movement…’