Time Seeds
Tap! Sounds may enter gently.
Time Seeds: A Prairie Cosmogram is a multi-channel sound meditation installation shaped by my listening to the prairie over more than a decade. In the gallery, eight channels of pre-recorded and processed field recordings form a continuously shifting drone, creating a sonic field that holds multiple temporal layers at once.
From this page, visitors may enter that larger field by planting additional time seeds in the present through their own devices. These brief sounds gather into a chronophonic map of the land’s geological, ecological, ancestral, and future-facing strata. This is not music about time, but time itself vibrating at different densities, coexisting within a single, cohesive sonic experience.
The sound resonates like layers of geology accreting upon the land, while also offering a vertical mode of listening—a kind of sonic borehole through which multiple temporal layers may be heard at once. Sounds enter and recede, sometimes gathering briefly before drifting apart again, as weather and seasons do. What is heard as ancient, living, or emergent is not separate material, but the same substance encountered at different temporal scales.
Visitors are invited to enter the sound landscape emanating from the installation, listen with their whole bodies, and join the soundscape through their own devices by clicking the image on their cell phones. These contributions leave brief, ephemeral traces in the present moment. Listen deeply, and offer your own seeds to this prairie soundscape—adding your presence to an ever-changing land as old as the hills themselves.
An immersive audience participation sound installation
Time Seeds was commissioned for the exhibition, Life on Land, organized by the Emily & Todd Voth Artspace at the Kansas City Art Institute, and on view January 30-March 14, 2026. To inquire about installing Time Seeds in your gallery or museum, please contact Paul Rudy Directly at 785-813-3451.
