Invitation to join Sound Ecologies Lab

October 25 – 30 at het Veem in Amsterdam, with Field Trip to Borssele

Fiber is looking for researchers who are interested in joining their Lab and Field Trip to Borssele between 25 and 30 October.

With Sound Ecologies we boost interdisciplinary collaborations between artists, designers and researchers, in order to raise awareness or make experienceable the invisible effects of the Anthropocene. Sound Ecologies offers a temporary lab space for interdisciplinary experimentation, peer-to-peer research and the collective prototyping of new works; sonic spaces, performances and (sound) installations. In the lectures, inspiration and knowledge are shared by specialised artists and researchers. Workshops and work-sessions will focus on theory, techniques and methods, expanding to research or experiencing sound as tactile sensations through transducers, or visualizing recorded sounds. The content of the programme is both technical, situated and theoretical, moving between working with software, data, field research and discussing and designing with ecological knowledge.

Within Sound Ecologies we will focus on investigating a context and a related case: the area around the Borssele nuclear power plant. In the Netherlands, a landscape is considered a non-fixed entity that can be utilised, adjusted, reshaped and reworked. Its earth layers, built up over millions of years, are redistributed at will, their materialities chaotically re-organised into a non-linear timeline. In the last 150 years, technological development has increasingly enabled the Dutch to pursue domination over land and sea, earning them a questionable reputation as “masters of water”. It is a carefully crafted narrative of technological development, of progress and victory. Yet nearing the end of the Holocene, in the border zone of transition, other narratives emerge. In one particular part of the Netherlands, a small beach outcrop in the Zeeland peninsula, sound stitches all narratives together. Both onshore and offshore, vibration moves with, between and through everything that exists. Against a backdrop of windmills and the Borssele nuclear facilities, and situated at one of the world’s economically most important waterways, the place emits a constant humming, a grunting, a grinding. We will immerse ourselves in this technocratic landscape and ask ourselves: What is transition in a place that is never static and where time is non-linear? Can we attune ourselves to the complexity of realities unfolding? Who is vibrating, how can their tune be detected, and how can their story be told?

More information:https://www.fiber-space.nl/project/sound-ecologies/