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

Arctic Auditories is excited to invite researchers, writers, artists, musicians, makers, students and anyone with an interest in storytelling, sonic poems and experimental publishing to join.
No previous experience with sound as a medium is needed!

Sign up here
Admission is free

Friday 23 May, 11am-4pm
Saturday 24 May, 12-5pm
Sunday 25 May, 12-5pm (final presentation at 4pm)

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.