regathering #wildfires

Forest fires are increasingly mediatised events - captured by drones, dashcams, helmet cams and phones and circulated through social media feeds, news reports, field recordings, scientific repositories and machine learning datasets. These media infrastructures and devices give rise to many ways of listening, knowing and responding to forest fires.

regathering #wildfires explores the politics, possibilities and limits of listening across these different kinds of networked sound materials. Fire sounds are more than ephemeral traces captured by machines; they also participate in producing, archiving and shaping responses to fires as environmental events.

In contrast to listening as simulated immersion or the recreation of catastrophe, this session is an experiment in collective listening, surfacing different ways of narrating, relating to and living with burning ecologies. It explores how layering and algorithmic recomposition can create unexpected resonances and ways of noticing. How might collective listening with patchy, ambiguous, and troubling materials nourish other modes of attention and repertoires of response?

regathering #wildfires will be shared at Burning Silence at Spore (Berlin).

It draws on supercollider scripts and approaches developed as part of forestscapes.