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Camilla Boemio (International independent curator, Italy), and Fabrizio Orsini (Fabrizio Orsini, Italy)

camillaboemio@yahoo.it
fabrizioorsini@yahoo.it 

http://www.camillaboemio.com

Abstract

Our increasingly mediated relationship with the environment brings new insights to the invisible forces that affect complex ecologies. From meteorological data flows to temporal climate change models, our relationship with our environment is becoming more abstract, simulated and remote – tempering our desire to act. Could it be that we know more and experience less?

Eden Project

We need a new narrative around a future that remains ours to make and a new media to transform the way we view the world and our intimate relationship with it. Mere facts won’t persuade people to get involved in fighting climate change and biodiversity loss, or confronting societal upheaval. To develop a vision for a planet fit for the future, we need fresh stories and new ways of engaging the audience.

Sir Tim Smit, Eden Project.

Invisible Worlds

Panel will be lead by: Dr Jo Elworthy, Director of Interpretation at Eden 

Launching in summer 2018, Invisible Worlds is a new permanent exhibition supported by a three-year public engagement programme of activities and events.

Invisible Worlds will explore planetary phenomena beyond our senses: too vast, too small, too fast, too slow and too far away in space or time. It will explore the interconnectedness of life and the environment at every scale, revealing how life shapes, and is shaped by, invisible systems.

www.edenproject.com/invisible-worlds

Eden will be working with artists, designers, writers, curators and performers to explore, play, test and create interventions around these themes.

Question to the panel:

How can art and science work together to better provoke and stimulate connection, action and hope?

ONLINE PANEL

The Overview: Leonardo 50^th Anniversary Celebration.

https://www.leonardo.info/50th-anniversary

With, amongst others, Nina Czegledy, Ricardo Dal Farra, Sue Denham, Roger Malina and Paul Thomas.

Balance Unbalance 2017 is delighted to be hosting the ‘Overview’, a 50^th Anniversary Celebration of Leonardo. The Overview celebrates Leonardo’s impact by providing a transdisciplinary change of perspective on the world. The Overview is synergetic with BunB 2017’s theme: “A Sense of Place” and confronts the transcalar – the macro, messo and micro understanding of our ecologies. The Leonardo Overview Panel will take place on the 22 August. The Overview is supported by the Eden Project [www.edenproject.com]

Location: Room 212 Roland Levinsky Building.

The Overview Workshop is followed by the Leonardo 50^th Anniversary Celebration meal at the Eden Project in Cornwall (Silver or Gold Ticket required).

Celebrating the Community for 50 Years

June 2017–December 2018

A half a century ago, kinetic artist and astronautical pioneer Frank Malina set out to solve the needs of a community of artists and scientists working across disciplines by using the “new media” of the time: offset print publishing. As a groundbreaking, innovative venture, Leonardo represented a unique vision: to serve as an international channel of communication among artists, with emphasis on the writings of artists who use science and developing technologies in their work. The result was Leonardo, an academic journal for artists with the peer-review rigor of a scientific journal. For 50 years, Leonardo has been the definitive publication for artist-academics, and the field has gained momentum in recent years.

Today, documenting and capturing the creative innovators and provocateurs of culture is not enough. If media is the messenger, then we must expand our scope to represent the unique works and challenges we face in the 21st century. To fully realize our purpose and place over the next 50 years, we are opening our doors to a year and a half of community collaboration to inform our efforts to redesign our programs and mission to meet the needs of our audience. We are reaching out to pioneers, institutions, thought leaders and the curious in an effort to nurture the exploding art/science/technology global community.

As a network of networks, we are reimagining our future with you at the forefront. We invite you to come along with us on this journey of rediscovery and reinvention. Why? Because the ideas that lead to critical breakthroughs can come from any direction and they don’t taking sides.

Grant Smith (soundCamp, UK), Maria Papadomanolaki (UAL, UK), Dawn Scarfe (soundCamp, UK).

This panel will reflect on outcomes and actions from the Sound and Environment conference at the University of Hull (29 June – 2 July 2017), with a focus on technical and experiential links to remote locations via real-time audio.

Live audio feeds pioneered in the arts are increasingly relevant as resources for researchers, activists and other listeners, seeking to understand and intervene around environmental change.

We will host a conversation reflecting on themes from Sound + Environment, including: the creation of spatial overlays of local and remote; communities of listening at different scales; biodiversity of interzones and ‘non-places’; ways that migration and seasonality construct and disrupt our sense of place; diy transmission communities; expanded auditoria; networking remote acoustic and environmental projects; End of the World ecologies; new environmental observatories.

These themes inform and are informed firstly by the Cumbria Open Microphone Network (COMN), a project to stream live sounds from Britain’s NW ‘Nuclear’ coast into a covered market in Barrow in Furness, and to the internet. And secondly by the Biosphere Open Microphone project with Biosphere Soundscapes and Braunton Burrows, a proposoal for a network of open microphones in the UNESCO Biosphere Reserves.

Keywords: Sound, environment, ecology, place, live, real-time, audio, Biosphere Reserves

Sense of Remote Places: Reflections from Sound and Environment 2017

A panel drawn from participants at Sound and Environment will reflect on accounts of experience and place at the conference in Hull, and especially on our sense of remote locations via real-time audio. Artistic explorations of DIY streaming and listening cross over with bio- and eco-acoustics, as ways to appreciate the acoustic texture of faraway locales, conduct ornithological surveys at a distance, monitor long-term ecological change and engage new audiences around sustainability science.

Themes will include:

• Initiatives which create an overlay of local andremote soundscapes, shifting our sense of spatial and temporal boundaries, and opening kinds of hybrid spaces for exploration.
• Community based listening and recording workshops as ways to engage new publics around sound and  environmental change at different scales.
• The Third Soundscape as described by LeandroPisano and John Grzinich, based on Gilles Clément: hearing biodiversity in rural and urban waste grounds [1].
• Networked locales: Conversations about sound andplace are interested in the local – how it is remembered, perceived and imagined; see eg David Goode [2]. They can also reveal how the local is entangled with the remote – for instance, how local soundscapes depend on seasonal flows of  organisms and sounds.
• Real-time audio: experiences with live DIY transmission (Reveil) [3].
• De-centred and expanded auditoria (Cage viaBennett, Iovino and Oppermann) [4].
• End of the World Ecologies: Do such networks havethe potential to create new solidarities and creative responses to precarity (Tsing, Lorey) [5]?
• Can they create new kinds of environmental observatories for complex, multi-scale objects of study – hyperobjects (Morton) [6]?

Participants

(Other panellists to be confirmed on the basis of Sound + Environment conference presentations)

Leah Barclay (Biosphere Soundscapes, River Listening)

Auditory mapping of river systems from Noosa in NE Australia onto the streets of Hull increases listeners’ sense of these remote flows, at the same time as it points to the past and future of water in the city, with its buried streams, flood alleviation measures, SUDS schemes and de-paving actions, which variously enlist water as an adversary or an ally (Helmreich, Latour) [7].

Rob Mackay

Sound + Environment convenor Rob Mackay will reflect on the University of Hull conference in relation to the theme of sound and place, as well as reporting on recent projects created as part of the newly set-up Sound + Environment Research Group and the University of Hull, bringing together artists and scientists to explore the ways that sound can deepen our understanding of environments. This will include ‘Offshore’,  a new commission from Invisible Dust based on the Humber Estuary, and ‘Twinned’, an education project linking Hull, UK and Freetown, Sierra Leone in acoustic ecology projects exploring place through sound and words.

SoundCamp

We will discuss a collaborative programme launched at the Sound + Environment conference to set up a network of open microphones in the UNESCO Biosphere Reserves, as a resource for artists, researchers, activists and others. A new live stream at Braunton Burrows will give a sense of the project’s potential to transmit continuous live sounds from sites of acoustic and ecological singificance and create a

unique long term data set available for real-time and subsequent analysis. The open microphone project responds to the Biosphere Reserves’ remit as places of research and innovation around people and their environments. It imagines sounds of the planet’s diverse biomes as an acoustic commons, available to artists, researchers, activists and other listeners.

References

1. Pisano, Leandro (November 2016, BEK presentation).Retrieved from http://bek.no/leandro-pisano-the-third-soundscape-2/ 
   Grzinich, John (2013, Blowup #181).  Retrieved from http://maaheli.ee/main/the-third-soundscapeinterview/.
   Clément, Gilles (2004)  Manifeste du tiers paysage, Paris, Sens&Tonka.
2. Goode, David (January 2017). Retrieved from https://www.thenatureofcities.com/2017/01/15/cele brating-first-ecology-parks-london/.
3. SoundCa mp (2 016). Soun ds Remote, Uniformbooks.
4. Cage, John (2009 ). For the Birds. London, MarionBoyars.
   Bennet, Jane (2010). Vibrant Matter. Durham, Duke University Press.
   I ovanno, Serenella and Serpil Oppermann Eds
   (2014) Bloomington, Indian University Press.
5. Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt (2015) The Mushroom atthe End of the World. Princeton, Princeton University Press.
6. Morton, Timothy (2013) Hyperobjects. Minneapolis, University of Missesota Press.
7. Helmreich, Stefan (2016). Sounding the Limits of Life. Princeton, Princeton University Press.
   Latour, Bruno ( 2004). Politics of Nature. Cambridge, Harvard University Press.

Authors Biography

SoundCamp work with sound and place, particularly with live audio streams that connect local and remote acoustic and ecological settings in real time. We organise the annual soundcamp outdoor listening events and produce the 24 hour live daybreak broadcast: Reveil – both on International Dawn Chorus Day each year in May.

Acknowledgements

Our work has developed in association with partner organisations, especially Locus Sonus and Cyberforest. This proposal depends on their central contributions of technical and conceptual approaches together with the contributions of Sound + Environment and the ongoing work of Biosphere Soundscapes.

Panel Organizer:

Eric Leonardson, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, World Forum for Acoustic Ecology, Midwest Society for Acoustic Ecology, Chicago, USA.

Paraphrasing Tacita Dean and Jeremy Millar, it is surprising that our sense of place is so strong and yet it defies definition. Herein lies one of many paradoxes and conundrums that provide a kind of soil or spark for new ideas about how art and science attract constant appraisal and reappraisal of the questions: “Where am I, where do I belong?” as a state of being. Proposed is a panel discussion of several ongoing projects that intersected in 2015, under the name “Eco-Sensing and the Soundscape,” a course taught in the fall of 2015 by Eric Leonardson and Lindsey French, at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. This studio course connected concepts and practices of acoustic ecology with the hacking aesthetic of art and technology to open up possibilities for transdisciplinary collaborations that offer new understandings of our environments and our boundaries, locations, and roles within them. Subsequently, numerous collaborations continue in new contexts and places with additional support for public engagement in the ecologies of sound, listening, and environment. The panelists, who join Leonardson on-site and online are sound and media artists Leah Barclay, Norman W. Long, Amanda Gutiérrez, and architect Linda Keane. Their individual and combined efforts engage and activate students and public communities in design of urban soundscapes using virtual environments, social codes of immigrant communities, river listening, soundwalking, plant communication, and new media.

Keywords

art science, acoustic ecology, eco-sensing, soundscape, river listening, social codes, immigration, soundwalks, hardware hacking, technology, communication, biospheres urban, public.

Author Biographies

Eric Leonardson is a Chicago-based audio artist, co-founder and Executive Director of the World Listening Project, founder and co-chair of the Midwest Society for Acoustic Ecology, and President of the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology. He is Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of Sound at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). As a performer, composer, and sound designer, Leonardson provided sounds of the Chicago based physical theater company Plasticene (1995-2012). He performs internationally with the Springboard, a self-built instrument made in 1994. His work for radio, “Coincidence and Control,” was featured on Kunstradio-Radiokunst in 2015. Publications include Ways of Listening, Figures of Thought: A Festschrift for R. Murray Schafer On the Occasion of His 80th Birthday co-edited with Sabine Breitsameter, published 2013. In 2015 Leonardson published articles in The Journal of Radio and Audio Media, Volume 22, Number 1, The Journal of Urban Cultural Studies, Volume 2, Numbers 1-2, and The Conrad Grebel Review, Volume 33, Number 2.

Born in Mexico City in 1978, Amanda Gutiérrez completed her graduate studies at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago specializing in performance and new media. In Mexico, she did her undergraduate studies in Stage Design at the INBA ENAT. For twelve years, she has worked in the field of performance and sound art, fusing the two disciplines in installation projects. Among the video series is “A brief history of fictions”, which consists of four projects, performed under the same methodology and work strategies from documentary and performance. This series won The Fellowship Competition 2007 and CAAP 2008, and was nominated for Artadia Art Chicago 2009. Gutiérrez received many residencies, the CMM in Mexico City in 2001, and at ZKM (Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie) Karlsruhe, Germany in 2002. In 2009 she was selected by Artist Village in Taipei, Taiwan, and also obtained a scholarship for Artist Residencies Program 2009 FONCA-BANFF Centre, Canada. In 2012 she was awarded an EMARE EMAN scholarship and prize for a residency at FACT, in Liverpool. In 2011 she developed the video series “Topographies of Time,” supported by the Program Development and Cultural Conversions FONCA 2011 in Mexico City. This series has been exhibited internationally in museums, and contemporary art galleries, such as The Windor Gallery in Madrid, Spain, Khiasma Gallery in Paris, France, Move Forward Festival in Halle, Germany, Liverpool Art Biennale 2012 in the UK, Ex Teresa Arte Actual in Mexico City, Mexico, and Action Art Actuelle in Montreal, Canada. Most recently, she is a recipient of the National System of Art Creators from Mexico. Gutiérrez is currently developing her most recent residency project at the B lit Contemporary Art Center, Girona, Spain. She is currently a Ph.D. student in the University of Girona, Doctoral Programme in Humanities, Heritage, and Cultural Studies.

Norman W. Long (b. 1973, Chicago, IL) is a sound artist/designer/composer based in Chicago, IL. His current work focuses on sound art production within the larger context of landscape. He has exhibited and/or performed in galleries in Chicago, Ithaca, New York, London, and the San Francisco Bay Area. The processes involved in his practice lie within the area of field recording, electro-acoustic composition and dub technique. His art/studio practice involves gardening, collecting, performing and recording to create, objects, environments, situations in which the artist and audience are engaged in a dialogue about memory, space, value, silence and the invisible. It is his desire that his practice offers us a space to consider our relationship to sound via social, ecological structures, our interiority and to affirm our existence. Long holds a Master of Fine Arts in New Genres from The San Francisco Art Institute (2001), and a Master of Landscape Architecture from Cornell University (2008).

Dr. Leah Barclay is an Australian composer, sound artist and creative producer working at the intersection of art, science and technology. Her work has been commissioned, performed and exhibited to wide acclaim across Australia, New Zealand, Canada, USA, Europe, India, South Africa, China and Korea. She has been the recipient of numerous awards and has directed and curated intercultural projects across the Asia-Pacific. She creates complex sonic environments and transmedia experiences that draw attention to social issues including climate change. These works are realised through immersive performances and multi-sensory installations drawing on environmental field recordings, data sonification, multi-channel sound diffusion, live performers and ephemeral projections. Her work is multi-platform in nature and often involves rich community engagement programs and accessible virtual outcomes embedded in each project. Barclay’s PhD involved site-specific projects across the globe and a feature length documentary exploring the value of creativity in environmental crisis. She is currently an artist in residence at the Australian Rivers Institute investigating the creative possibilities of aquatic bioacoustics, the president of the Australian Forum for Acoustic Ecology and the founder and artistic director of the UNESCO Biosphere Soundscapes project.

Linda Keane, AIA, is an architect and academic passionately active in greening public imagination. Her animated films with Mark Keane are part of the J. Paul Getty and Metropolitan Museum of Art Film in Architecture Collection and received a PBS (Chicago) Emmy. She combines an ecological urbanism practice with writing, public speaking and community engagement. She collaborates with diverse practices envisioning transformative experiences as Co-founder of STUDIO 1032 contributing to sustainable initiatives along the Milwaukee- Chicago corridor. Projects include the City of Chicago Green Roof Website, Milwaukee’s North East Side Plan, Milwaukee River Greenway and Ecological Great Lakes Gateway focusing on environmental conservation, smart growth guidelines and remediating urban areas with nature play. Professor of Architecture and Environmental Design at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, she chaired development of the city’s third transdisciplinary Masters of Architecture program. Select publications include ARCHITECTURE an INTERACTIVE INTRODUCTION; The Aesthetics of Sustainability; Eco literacy: Greening Public Imagination; Design Is Our Nature: Designing K12 Design Education. Co-creator and Director of the award winning eLearning DESIGNOPEDIA, NEXT.cc, she advocates for design thinking as necessary for cultural and community stewardship.

Lindsey French is a Chicago-based artist and educator whose work explores the complexities and tensions between new technologies and the natural world. Engaging in gestures of communication with landscapes and the nonhuman, her work spans a variety of media including video, performance, audio sculpture, and generative literature. French has exhibited and presented work at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Chicago Cultural Center, the Pico House Gallery at El Pueblo de Los Angeles Historical Monument in Los Angeles, and in conjunction with the International Symposium of Electronics Arts in Albuquerque, as well as internationally. Her work has been featured in an essay by Kayla Anderson in Volume 47 of Leonardo published in 2014, and her forthcoming essay “The Ecological Necessity of Here: Site Specificity in Meghan Moe Beitiks Track and Trails” will be published by Out of Site Chicago. French currently teaches courses blending new media practices within an ecological context at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the Art and Technology and Contemporary Practices departments. She received her Master of Fine Arts in Art and Technology Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2013.

Online Resources Eco-Sensing and the Soundscape course https://ecosensingsoundscape.wordpress.com/

Midwest Society for Acoustic ecology http://mwsae.org/

Amanda Gutiérrez http://www.amandagutierrez.net/

Norman W. Long http://normanwlong.wixsite.com/soundartdesign

Leah Barclay http://www.biospheresoundscapes.org/

Linda Keane http://next.cc

Lindsey French http://lindseyfrench.com/

World Listening Project http://www.worldlisteningproject.org/

World Forum for Acoustic Ecology http://wfae.net/

Eric Leonardson’s “what’s new” blog http://ericleonardson.org/whatsnew/