by Sammy Allen
Project Inspirations
I designed this activity to test whether I could instill in (increasingly “disenchanted”) students a sense of "fatedness" using a classroom exercise. I use "fatedness" to describe the affective experience of wonder, marvel, and uncanniness that often accompanies an unlikely yet meaningful change occurrence. My interest in ‘fatedness’ developed out of research on late-ancient (mostly Christian) conceptions of “divine providence”—God’s plan for creation and history—one of the few ways humans have theorized the cause and purpose of individual and collective “fate” or “destiny.”
In this exercise, I tried to recreate the ancient auditory-divination practice of cledonomancy (or cledonism). Cledonomany refers to a few similar sonic-based divinatory techniques, but my inspiration comes from its most detailed attestation by the travel writer Pausanias in the second century CE. He describes a town in the Peloponnesian region of southern Greece where residents would give votive offerings to Hermes while asking a question. The residents then would stop up their ears, enter the market square, uncover their ears, and listen for an answer to their questions in the market’s soundscape.
To recreate ancient cledonomancy, I have digitally constructed an artificial, somewhat exaggerated urban soundscape to which the participant can direct their questions.