“Mapmaker, mapmaker, show me a map so that I may hear the world”

To know the Arctic rather than believe in the Arctic requires an ontological politics that makes space for the land, the climatic and hydrological processes taking place on that land, and the beings who choose to inhabit it. Through the Arctic Auditories project, we have worked to open up new conceptual spaces for the sounds of the land, these processes and these beings. Over the coming months we are making exciting plans to work with the city of Tromsø, to audibly transform urban space so that it may be known in a new way. Is there a map that could express that transformation? And if so, what would it look like?

See what I did there? I assumed that a map must look like something. Maps show us a representation of something, and even if that something is ideas or concepts (e.g. concept mapping), the one thing all maps have in common is that they are visual. As a geographer with training in cartography and GIS (geospatial information systems and science), I have always known that maps are tangible and material items. My additional training in critical cartography taught me to question maps in terms of what they represent, who they are for, and how they are used for political aims, which is to say I can tell you all about how maps are biopolitical tools that make landscapes and places governable and controllable. I never questioned this idea of what maps are in the ways I have done since joining Arctic Auditories, but now I will. For, in thinking about the nature of sound and its co-constitutive relationship to place, I would like to suggest that we proceed very carefully with soundmaps; that we need a critical cartography of soundmapping to make us aware of, attentive to, even provoked by, the biopolitical nature of the soundmap.

Arctic Auditories began with the foundational premise that the Arctic soundscape has value through the presence and in relationship with humans and Earth kin; that the soundscape itself is co-constituted and given meaning through the co-creation of relational value with other beings. In this articulation, sounds of wind blowing through towns, the churn of electric cable cars, the hum of electric wires, all convey meaning and presence. This premise is in contrast with the mainstream normative understanding of the Arctic soundscape as one that has traditionally aligned with a European understanding of Pristine Nature, one in which the Arctic is either quiet and silent, or filled with the deafening sounds of nature itself – wind blowing snow, ice cracking and squeaking, birds crying. As natural sounds, birds, wind, and even silence remain representation of a Pristine soundscape.

What continues to draw so many people to the Arctic is the attraction of both pristine nature and its assumed companion, the pristine soundscape. Yet, when seen through a biopolitical lens we can interpret sound as an expression of bodies alive and otherwise, of sensibilities, of preferences and tastes. And like (sense of) place, sound is somehow both ephemeral and constant. We know we are in a place, but what are the boundaries of that place? How are these boundaries determined, accepted and socially reproduced? For if a place has no boundaries, how can it be defined, and if it cannot be defined, how can it be known? Like the horizon, argued Casey, place is always there but somehow can never be fixed. Sound is always there, even in its absence. “If a tree falls in the woods and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?” goes the old saying. Of course it does, and the idea that if no humans are there to hear it then a sound does not exist disallows all the bodies that are there, their sensibilities, preferences and tastes.

Here is the crux of the soundscape, and in association, the soundmap. To fix the soundscape onto paper in the form of the soundmap is to create boundaries around something that is fluid and ephemeral, to determine that sounds increase in value (or become at all) by making them visible to humans. Like landscape mapping was a way to know the land in order to govern it, soundmapping can be understood as a biopolitical act meant to elevate, standardize and normalize the human senses, creating a pathway to govern them.

Maps are an important biopolitical tool because of their ability to fix and make material/visible what can otherwise only be experienced. Visual representations of space, maps of landscapes are contested for what they include or exclude, yet they are recognized nevertheless most often as snapshots which accurately, if at varying levels of precision, inform action because they are interpretable. Following Sterne’s definition of the audiovisual litany, maps are objective representations of a spatial (visual) reality. A landscape map can show roadways and neighborhoods, powerlines and business zones. It can convey elevation and slope, land cover, wind direction, vegetation and soil types. The biopolitical dimension of these maps is that they enable governancebecause these things are understood as relatively static until a new map is created. Decisions are made based on what these maps show, which may or may not accurately reflect what exists in the world at a given time. While they are useful and interesting for lots of reasons, it is critical to remember that they are representations of a set of situated knowledges collected for a specific purpose. A side effect of that set of choices is that the map fixes place to become a place, at a point in time. Through this process a place becomes a location, which is to say the richness of place is lost.

Sound and soundscapes, by their very nature are constantly changing at a rate at which the idea of mapping them, at the very least requires serious consideration as to the epistemological value of such a tool, and at most could be considered as a form of ontological violence to the relational value otherwise created through experience. The ephemerality of sound means that like place-making, sound could in fact better be understood as sound-making, an epistemology of sound in which it is always becoming as an expression of a dialogue between a place and all of its abiotic and biotic inhabitants.

To go one step further, and in alignment with the ethical positionality of Arctic Auditories, through a critical cartography of soundmapping we introduce here the idea that audio recordings could be understood as counter-soundmaps. Angus Carlyle’s recent LP Powerlines, a recording of sounds in and around Tromsø/Romsa, could then be considered a counter-soundmap of the Arctic soundscape. While the cd still represents a series of snapshots in time, it rejects the idea that the sounds captured in the cd are elevated in meaning only once they are spatialized onto a visual map. This logic would suggest that to know the sound of a waterfall as a moment in time when water is liquid, falling, crashing, gurgling, spraying and playing is as much an expression of an objective reality in its own right, without the need to “place it in space”. It still informs us about climate, environment and the like. To hear other layers of sound – children playing, electric lines humming, cars honking – allows us to build a relational understanding and value for the waterfall where sound becomes a dialogic expression of a place and its sustainability (Barron and Losleben 2025).

In the last blog post Angus Carlyle introduced the concept of the audiovisual litany, and he reflected on how the sensory and intimate personal experiences of the soundwalks, a core part of our project, were transformed into more objective, statistical operations through the creation of the soundmap he later generated. We did this work intentionally and thoughtfully and we stand by it. At the same time, the feminist epistemological stance at the core of our project encourages us to question our own motivations and the outcomes of our work. In this post I have reflected on the nature of sound and its relationship with human ideals of pristine Nature and place, and how soundmaps can be interpreted as biopolitical artifacts which in fact deconstruct and transform sound into something else in ways that, upon further reflection, we may not actually want or agree with. I have suggested that soundmaps do to sound what landscape maps do to place, they are transformative in making the complex and experiential more simplistic and fixed. For better and worse, maps make sound and place knowable, shareable, governable. As a team of interdisciplinary academics, we want to know more about sounds and places, and we want to share that knowledge. As feminists, we know that that knowledge is powerful and always partial. As a geographer, I know that maps are the same, and as a person I want to use that partial, powerful knowledge for good.

Elizabeth Barron, 2025


Further reading:

Barron, E.S. and K. Losleben. 2025. “Emplacing watery encounters: Listening, care, and embodied knowledge in places of climate change.” Progress in Environmental Geography 4(2): 190-207. DOI: 10.1177/27539687251342262

Sterne, J. 2003. The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Duke University Press.

Countering the A-V Litany with Maps

Countering the A-V Litany with Maps

After nearly five years of joint planning, doing, retreating to cabins, of lost microphones, lemon risottos, soaked shoes and jackets, frostbitten fingers, harbor porpoises and tern attacks, of listening, drawing, reading, presenting, recording,  writing and shaping, Angus Carlyle, as of September 1st, 2025, continues his path as a sound artist outside of academia and with this, Arctic Auditories.

We are grateful for every shared moment and hour that shaped and elevated the project and will resonate on.

Thank you, Angus; we’ll hear from you.

Angus Carlyle on Countering the A-V Litany with Maps

Jonathan Sterne’s enduringly useful term the “audiovisual litany,” coined in 2003, captures how conventional approaches contrast seeing and hearing according to the perceptual and cognitive affordances each centre. Hearing, according to the audiovisual litany, brings immersive, subjective presence and amplifies the temporal. Seeing foregrounds distance, objectivity and envisions the spatial. In Sterne’s words, “the audiovisual litany…idealizes hearing (and, by extension, speech) as manifesting a kind of pure interiority. It alternately denigrates and elevates vision: as a fallen sense, vision takes us out of the world. But it also bathes us in the clear light of reason”[1]. In Robin James’ interpretation an additional function of the audiovisual litany has been to naturalize “hegemonic concepts of sound and sight and use these as metaphors for philosophical positions. This lets philosophical assumptions pass by unnoticed because they appear as ‘natural’ features of various sensory modalities.” Moreover, “these uses of the litany often appeal only to other philosophers’ accounts of sound or music, not actual works or practices or performances”: this is what James means by their brilliant phrase “sound turn in ontological studies” (a reversal of Marie Thompson’s “the ontological turn in sound studies”).[2]

Even where attempts are made to create space for difference, such as in our Arctic Auditories project, idealisations of sound and hearing can persist in various ways. Such idealisations can inadvertently advance normative approaches to aurality. During the soundwalking phase of our research local collaborators, who we called ‘conductors’, each created a route that was designed to express, through sound, their understanding of environmental change in the Tromsø / Romsa area to a group of listening participants who would follow in their footsteps. Acknowledging that soundwalks may not be a regular activity, we created a manual to support the conductors recruited to our project. In creating the manual, we acknowledged that “some of the advantages attributed to soundwalks relate to how the listeners are led through space, to the way that movement is part of the experience”. We wanted to avoid any assumption that all bodies share the same manoeuvrability, dexterity or tolerance for fatigue. We wrote in the soundwalking manual: “We are conscious that mobility is not a given, that walking is not always possible for everyone. More than this, we appreciate that not all places are as welcoming as they should be, and for some, wandering an unfamiliar shoreline might feel as unsafe as crossing a city square might for others.” Although we suggested that sound-sittings constituted a viable alternative to soundwalking, in practice most conductors did plot routes that involved walking. Aware that environmental listening (rather than musical listening or conversational listening) can be an unaccustomed way to focus energy and that talking about listening can be equally unfamiliar, the manual also offered advice on how conductors could encourage aural attentiveness in their participants. “It can be useful to consider some ‘ear warm up’ exercises before you begin a soundwalk. These give people a chance to concentrate on their hearing and experiment with different ways of articulating their feelings about sound,” we suggested in the manual. The proposed warm-up exercises, drawn from a repertoire of devices familiar from workshops conducted under the auspices of deep listening or acoustic ecology, included suggestions to consider “What do you hear? What is in the foreground? What is in the background? What is the smallest sound you hear, and what is the largest?”

Although the prompts were couched in relative terms, and as such invited an inclusive range of perceptual responses, what these well-meaning suggestions were less effective in accommodating was a more sensitive appreciation of what is beginning to be called ‘aural diversity:’ the commitment to understanding that beyond the idealisation of listening are multiple hearing positions, including ones where the normative dichotomies of foreground / background, small / large are less meaningful[3]. In reflecting on our own project, what we have come to realize is that in adopting a version of the audiovisual litany that idealises hearing, we may have unintentionally – no, in point of fact despite our best intentions – contributed to elevating an expert listener standard against which all other auralities are measured as deficient.

One of our Arctic Auditories conductors – we will call them T- created a relatively short circuit that connected participants to both a family dwelling and the headwater above a dam where listeners could hear a river swollen by the season’s first meltwaters descending a valley in a sequence of loud waterfalls. During a rehearsal of the walk, T told us they found one roaring cataract “really nice, it sounds powerful … you don’t want to look at nature like something really vulnerable and small, you want to see that it’s big and … resistant. This river wouldn’t be so big if it wasn’t for this dam, but still, it feels like real nature to me. I think it’s nice to think that something man-made can fit into nature.” T also wanted to connect their listeners to “the sounds of [electrical] powerlines” which had become a political focus for them after previous activism engaging the sounds of airplanes and traffic.

On the first iteration of T’s soundwalk I, Angus Carlyle, could hear no audible corona discharge from overhead electricity lines and, indeed, no participant volunteered these high voltage phenomena as a part of their listening experience. Applying the assumptions enshrined in Sterne’s audiovisual litany, these reported disparities – between my listening, the participants’ and the conductor’s – might be accounted for by the metaphysical accent on presence as arbiter of meaning in hearing experiences. As a corollary of this emphasis on presence that conventional thinking about sound supposedly encourages, what is not directly perceived is less liable to form part of the collective knowledge created during a soundwalk. Britta Sweers, who was analysing the transcriptions, summarised significant themes emerging from both discussions and interviews and compressed these further into a series of “recording recommendations/ identifications.” For T’s soundwalk, the recording recommendations that were derived from transcript analysis included the waterfall, the ski lane, distant airport and traffic sounds, walking bodies and the suggestion of a “static recording: if it is cold enough: the power lines.”

By contrast, in the first synthesis of the soundwalking as a practice – Hildegard Westerkamp’s 1974 essay which the Arctic Auditories manual indicates is a key text – the sonic spectrum is sketched widely and identifies the effect of sounds which are not present, such as ones “our ears perceive … unconsciously” and those sounds that only surface through part of a dialogic process. “What else do you hear? What else? What else? What else? What else?” Westerkamp’s infectious “what else,” attaches to Mark Peter Wright’s highly generative filter of “asking the question: what are we not hearing? [This] draws attention toward the marginal, the forgotten, the inverse, and the underheard: the idea that there is always something beyond the audible when auditioning field recordings.”[4] This “what are we not hearing” was a verbal encouragement we introduced to the focus groups after the soundwalks, discussions we recorded along with the individual conductor interviews, for subsequent analyses that stimulated the process of creating field recordings from which to develop a soundmap, hosted on the online platform Radio Aporee.

Later, creating nodes on the online soundmap to correspond with the sounds of the waterfall below the hydroelectric dam was relatively straightforward. It was a similar situation with capturing an impression of the impact of taxiing jet and propellor aircraft a kilometer across the water and the nearer effects of traffic on the bridge. One participant in the soundwalk discussion thought “the sound of traffic stood out most,” another that the “sound of traffic was most surprising”. The airport featured in terms of claims that its “sound is carried over the water,” that “the sound of traffic is very constant, including airplanes” and that one of the more significant changes experienced during the soundwalk related to a “plane landing or taking off.” As it is represented in Britta’s analysis, the participants’ discussion had its own analytical qualities with sound sources recognized, their inter-relations assessed, and dynamic processes evaluated. The result is perhaps less like the interiority that the audio-visual litany ascribes to the aural and is closer to the statistical operations associated with seeing. For the soundwalk conductor, by contrast, the auditory events generated by airport activities are understood in a subjective register: “[trigger] new thoughts in me. It’s a reminder of how slowly the climate fight is progressing.”

To create field recordings that could function on the Arctic Auditories soundmap as representations of the importance of electricity sounds, to our conductor T, was a less simple task. In an earlier soundwalk, a prototype devised by Angus, the “what are we not hearing” prompt had already brought the question of electricity sounds to the fore. “As we were walking underneath the powerlines, I realised we weren’t hearing the electrical lines, which sometimes, when the voltage is high enough, has a very distinctive sound,” I reflected in my journal at the time. This suggested the appropriate strategy would involve locating higher voltage infrastructure to record, while Britta’s recording recommendation aligned audible ionisation with low temperatures. In the end, an alternative solution was adopted, one that deployed sensors and receivers that could ‘hear’ electro-magnetic activities considered outside the narrow bandwidth allocated to the human sensorium, a process that inspired a sub-project for me, which lead to an album of audio compositions[5].

T’s discussion of the multiple motivations behind their own soundwalk point to a more fundamental way in which the sensory idealisation of the audio-visual litany can be disrupted: rather than listening being a pleasure and valorised as such, the soundwalk can be deliberately designed to deliver unpleasant listening experiences in close proximity to ones that access to “really nice … powerful … big and … resistant” energies from places where the “man-made can fit into nature”.

Angus Carlyle.


[1] Jonathan Sterne The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Duke University Press, 2003), 15

[2] Robin James “Look Away and Listen,” https://soundstudiesblog.com/2018/03/05/look-away-and-listen-the-audiovisual-litany-in-philosophy/ [accessed 8/8/2025]

[3] For more on aural diversity see William Renel, “Sonic inclusion : opposing auditory normalism in design through the lived experiences of d/deaf and disabled people in socially public spaces” (2019) https://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?did=3&uin=uk.bl.ethos.782002 and John Levack Drever, “’Primacy of the Ear’ – But Whose Ear?: the case for aural diversity in sonic arts practice and discourse,” (2019) Organised Sound 24(1).

[4] Mark Peter Wright, Listening After Nature: Field Recording, Ecology, Critical Practice (Bloomsbury, 2022), 61

[5] Angus Carlyle, Powerlines, Rural Situationism, RS0201, 2024

Flowing, flushing, freezing, streaming – Experimental Audio Zine Workshop

Flowing, flushing, freezing, streaming – Experimental Audio Zine Workshop

Photo by Martha Steinmetz

Experimental Audio Zine Workshop

23-25 May, Tromsø Kunstforening, Music Academy

organised through Arctic Auditories and developed by Polina Medvedeva and Andreas Kühne

A group of twenty people. Different backgrounds, a shared interest in sound, water and creative experimentation. Three days of discovering, trying things out and creating together.

Curiosity.

Water flows, both independently and influenced by external factors. Where does water come from? Where does it go? Where do we encounter water? It is a give and take, a constant exchange.

Equipped with hydrophones, contact microphones and electromagnetic microphones we search for sounds within this cycle. From the freshwater water source to the sewage plant. From snowfields to kelp forests. We are amazed, intrigued, disgusted, surprised. We fluctuate between discomfort and fascination. We attempt to share our auditory experience and put it into words. It is movement that we perceive. We feel vibrations with our bodies. We try to make connections, to recognize relationships. An in-between. Rhythmic beats. Invisible humming. If we cannot see, hear of feel it without the aid of technical devices, does it exist?

We think about space. How do sounds spread? Where are we in this space? Exploring perspectives. Seemingly clear boundaries between spaces. What sounds can be heard underwater and how do they travel through water? What does the transition between different aggregate states of water sound like?

We collect ideas, thoughts, sound recordings, photos and videos. These are collaged into a one-hour collective audio work, a polyphonic assemblage[1].

A collection of experiences,

a space to dive into.

 


[1] Tsing, A. L. (2017). The mushroom at the end of the world : on the possibility of life in capitalist ruins. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.

Photos by Anders Eriksen

During these three days, we listened closely to the waters that flow in and out of Tromsø/Romsa, responding to the streams that enable our daily existence and infrastructure. The programme included soundwalks, a sound meditation, a guided tour of local wastewater treatment facilities, a reading group and an editing session.

The resulting collectively improvised audio zine was streamed live on the last day of the workshop. It will additionally be broadcast on Resonance FM’s Clear Spot and published in partnership with Radio Arctic.  

Many thanks to Andreas Kühne, Polina Medvedeva, Angus Carlyle, Tromsø Kunstforening, Strandvegen Renseanlegg (Tromsø Kommune) and all participants

Experimental Audio Zine Workshop

Experimental Audio Zine Workshop

23-25 May, Tromsø Kunstforening, Music Academy

Flowing, flushing, freezing, streaming: Listening at the intersection of human interference. 

How do we attune to our surroundings and care for the lives in it?
How do we negotiate with beings that communicate in other languages?

Through exercises in improvisation, relational listening and sounding, the 3-day workshop invites participants to develop experimental sonic assemblages through listening closely to the waters that flow in and out of Tromsø/Romsa and responding to the streams that enable our daily existence and infrastructure.

What is the memory of the water that gushes into our sinks, warms pathways, drains through tubes and gutters, shifts from icy lakes to artificial snow? How have the currents witnessed the change in life around them, the waters always already listening? And what does it take to sustain a city like Tromsø in a warming sub-arctic environment? 

Thinking through the prism of water, the workshop will engage with the concept of ‘listening at the bundling of trajectories’ through intersectional methodologies and the writings of Dylan Robinson, Liisa-Rávná Finbog, Anna Tsing, Pauline Oliveros, and Susan Schuppli. 

Participants will work individually and in groups with a recording device, various microphones, a vibrotactile feedback setup, and a computer with audio editing and effects processing software. Please bring your preferred headphones (with wire) as we have only a few sets available. You’ll decide whether your focus for the audio zine will be on sound collage or writing and reciting in your language(s) of choice. We’ll conduct soundwalks and visit local heating and wastewater handling facilities. The resulting sound works will be shared as a live collective broadcast on the last day at Tromsø Kunstforening. 

*There are no stipends available for travel and accommodation, unfortunately. However, participation in the workshop is for free for all.

About us

In our collaborative practice creating storytelling experiences from transdisciplinary assemblages, sound artist Andreas Kühne and artist, filmmaker Polina Medvedeva engage ways of listening-with landscapes and its agents to produce a feedback of the patchwork of historical, geopolitical and socio-economic layers.

Arctic Auditories

This workshop is part of Arctic Auditories, a collaborative project engaging scholarship and methods from feminism, sound arts, human geography and applied ethnomusicology to develop strategies for understanding environmental change through sound. Focusing on water environments, the ultimate aim of the project is to deliver innovative inter-disciplinary, empowering, and democratic listening strategies to help individuals and society cultivate radical imaginations of futures beyond environmental anxiety.

Tromsø Kunstforening / RomssaDáiddasiida / Tromsø Center for Contemporary Art is a free space for contemporary art, exhibiting new, experimental art and artists. Starting in 1924, we continue to present boundary-pushing exhibitions, projects in public space, performances and workshops that are open to all.

Our programme includes internationally recognised artists and new, emerging artists, giving special attention to projects that are rooted in the region. We strive to collaborate with, support and give space to other local independent arts initiatives.

Photo by Camilla Fagerli

Photos by Angus Carlyle

Merging with Water

Merging with Water

On 30 April 2025, Arctic Auditories organized the online workshop “Merging with Waters” together with the Environmental Humanities Research Group (UiT). The aim of this workshop was to provide information about the current research processes and invite participants to reflect critically on them. There were presentations and discussions on three working packages as well as a joint listening to our sound stream.

Although the working packages consist of individual parts, there are various connections and overlaps between them. The diverse backgrounds of the researchers in the Arctic Auditories project team enabled each member to view their own working package from new, inspiring perspectives and learn from each other.

Making these mergings visible, and audible, were the focus of this afternoon.

Mapping Arctic Waters

In the first part, Britta Sweers talked about the soundwalks conducted in collaboration with diverse groups in and around Tromsø/Romsa which serve as a basis for many further processes of the project, in particular a multi-layered detailed soundmap. The evaluation of the huge amount of qualitative data collected, ranging from interview to photographs to recordings, is still in progress.

This working package is full of interdisciplinary aspects which, as became clear in the subsequent discussion, were found to be challenging but above all highly enriching. Which methodologies and methods do we consider to be scientifically valid? Generosity, curiosity and openness to learning from the perspective of others enable us to expand our own expert knowledge.

At the same time, this working package has shown how complex listening is, but also how much we know through bodily sensory experiences. To learn from this knowledge, we need dialogue and interpretation.  

Sound Archives

The second presentation focused mainly on sound maps. How can you organise sound recordings and merge them into a system that others can access? Angus Carlyle presented different formats of sound maps, and presented the various layers that informs the Arctic Auditories soundmap. In the workshop, we listened to some sound recordings made at the locations where the soundwalks had taken place.

An important aspect that was discussed is the connection between sound and text. Text itself can be a possible form of listening and sounding. Regarding the sound map – when is a textual description of a sound recording a useful guide, and when is it a limiting restriction? The question of how much textual description one wants to offer also arose during the planning and the realization of the soundwalks. The conductors were free to decide how much information they wanted to provide in advance, such as about the location or specific sounds.  

Another point that was discussed is the visual representation of sound maps. A sound map is always just one possible way of representation and never displays actual reality. What do we want to convey to the listener? And what decision do we therefore make about what and how we filter, or what and how we represent it on the map?

You can dive into these questions and some places in and around Tromsø/Romsa yourself while listening to the Arctic Auditories sound recordings: https://aporee.org/maps/work/projects.php?project=arcticauditories

Flowing, flushing, freezing, streaming: Audio zine workshop

Part of working package two is also the three-day “Experimental Audio Zine Workshop”, which will take place from 23 to 25 May 2025 at Tromsø Kunstforening in collaboration with the artists Andreas Kühne and Polina Medvedeva. The workshop is open to researchers, writers, artists, musicians, creators, students and anyone interested in storytelling, sound poetry and experimental publishing. Further information about the workshop and the sign up form can be found via this link: https://uit.no/tavla/artikkel/878919/arctic_auditories_experimental_audio_zine_works

Listening to the Soundstream

In the middle of the workshop, we immersed ourselves for a few minutes in the soundscape of Tromsø through our sound stream, which streams live from the roof of a building at the University of Tromsø. Pleasant sounds, such as birds heralding the arrival of spring, but also annoying sounds, such as an indefinable deep drone, moved us as listeners.

The stream transmits what the microphone picks up directly without any further sound manipulation. But as with the sound recordings, the stream does not reproduce reality, but rather translates the sound environment through technical processes. Every listening situation, whether listening in the physical space around us or listening to sounds from loudspeakers, is a unique bodily experience in its own way.

Online Writing League

In the last part of the workshop, Elizabeth Barron and Paula Ryggvik Mikalsen talked about the Online Writing League, which is part of working package three. In the Online Writing League, participants in two groups, one English-speaking and one Scandinavian-speaking, met digitally once a month over half a year. Based on the concept of emplacement (Barron et al., 2020) and inspired by prompts, key questions and keywords, the participants created artistic works in a wide variety of formats, from poetry to video to audio, and in various languages.

As demonstrated by the OWLs symposium the day before and the few works presented in the workshop, the intensive engagement with place, water and sound from different perspectives gave rise to an infinite variety of works that inspire further rich reflection and exchange. Based on these artistic explorations and further research on text and language, a glossary will be compiled, collecting ideas and thoughts on terms that have proven essential in all working packages throughout the project.

Connections, the focus of our workshop, emerged at various levels throughout the afternoon. Together, we were able to trace connections within the project between the individual working packages and recognize that each task is related to and influences the others. By listening together and to each other, we were able to establish connections between us that enabled a rich exchange. By listening to sound recordings and the sound stream, we were able to create connections to places, to our imaginations and to our bodies. By listening to our thoughts and perceptions, we were able to connect different water identities conceptually and think about how they are related and what role we play in this.

And what role can this project play? How can looking at climate and other environmental crises through a feminist lens and using the methods of our project lead to new, actionable changes?

Thank you to all participants for this inspiring afternoon!

Some links to resources shared by participants during the workshop:

All images and artistic works are displayed with the permission of the artists. Copyright: all individual artists