Environs explores a number of boundaries that are variously imposed, reinscribed, policed, and challenged: borders lying between the natural and the artificial; the musical and the unmusical; the human and the inhuman; the inner and the outer; the familiar and the strange; the comforting and the threatening; the untouched and the touched. The piece was composed in August 2021, using electronics and manipulated field recordings gathered in Mongolia and the United States between 2017–2020. Its sonic world—at once static and teeming—is our own, always unowned, world: a place of uncertainty in which the divine invites intimacy by refusing it (“noli me tangere”).
environs
by Rick Nance
Rick Nance is Associate Professor of South Asian Buddhism in the Department of Religious Studies at Indiana University Bloomington. His work focuses on Buddhist philosophy, rhetoric, and ritual, and he is the author of Speaking for Buddhas: Scriptural Commentary in Indian Buddhism (Columbia University Press, 2012).
Our project takes the words spoken by Jesus to Mary Magdalene in the garden after she discovers his empty tomb — noli me tangere (“touch me not”) — as a provocation for reflection on the COVID-19 pandemic, and on other pandemics, viral and social, that engulf us.