Intertidal Room - A soundwalk through timescapes of Vancou

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During the pandemic, our sense of hearing seems to have gotten sharper. Urban noises and the disruptive din of everyday life rhythms have given room to more subtle and less easily perceptible soundscapes. In this unstable period an unexpected possibility emerged to rethink how we have been connecting with, affecting, and often exploiting our lived environments on multiple levels. Can attentive listening challenge our ways of inhabiting the world? Can a short moment of aural attention to transient organisms whose lives remain usually imperceptible to us, reconfigure our daily conducts on a personal, collective, or even planetary scale?

Intertidal zones are coastal areas where sea meets the land in a ceaseless interaction of low and high tides. They are characterized by highly diverse ecosystems with multiple inhabitants capable to quickly adapt to these ever-changing conditions.

I have spent the last several months traversing such intertidal zones in and around Vancouver. I have observed and listened to its inhabitants wondering how their diligent compliance to cyclical rhythms of nature can derail our human obsession with the constant growth and progression. My attempts to connect with those intertidal critters and learn from them through attentive listening and creative field recording has quickly become accompanied by other qualitative techniques and historical research, including learning from indigenous perspectives on transformations that affected those zones, their inhabitants and their resilient stewards.

The resulting work is an audio piece intended to be listened to while walking at low tide, solitarily or collectively. It interweaves elements of creative storytelling, historical research creative field recording, and soundscape composition.

The premiere on the September 27 will include a collective walk and listening to the composition as well as a short performance concluding the event.

The project is part of an ongoing artistic postdoctoral research funded by the Swedish Research Council. It focuses on the history, present and future of soundwalking and field recording practices in the context of environmental humanities, philosophy of technology, and media art. The three-year project is conducted in Sweden at Department of Culture and Society at Linköping University and The School of Arts and Communication at Simon Fraser University (as a guest institution).

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