So Far by Now, 2018
Sound installation

Loop, duration: 7’53” min

In this sound installation, we encounter a future world. The calming voice of the narrator shares a memory with us, describing something that has happened with details frighteningly similar about our present time. Through human desire and greed to control nature and consume resources, we are moving with accelerated speed toward mass extinctions, drought and the disappearance of precious ecosystems.

As a listener, we can empathise with the narrator who expresses feelings of both optimism and defeat. We recognize the underlying sense of false hope they place in the thought that science and technology will find solutions that fix all the problems. An Orwellian notion emerges as the voice tells us how words about nature are removed from dictionaries, only to be replaced by more modern and relevant words. The narrator goes about her day, accepting the dire circumstances.

In today’s world, we take for granted the beauty of bird song and flourishing landscapes, but do we really want to feel and experience what awaits us in the years to come? A disturbing truth in this narrative is that the occurrences revealed to us stem from actual news articles the artist read in 2018. 

hansrosenstrom.net/