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 was shared at Burning Silence at Spore (Berlin), curated by Hanna Grześkiewicz and Yasemin Keskintepe, with works from Areej Ashhab, Sanaz Azimipour, Asia Bazdyrieva, Cooking With Mama, Silvia Dal Dosso, eeefff, Edka Jarząb, Valentina Karga, Garance Maurer, Ariel William Orah, Otucha Collective, Pisitakun, Nour Sokhon, Sinthujan Varatharajah and more.
soundscaping scripts
The soundscapes are created live with supercollider scripts and approaches that were developed as part of forestscapes, together with Liliana Bounegru, Maud Borie, Angela Y. T. Chan, Andrés Saenz de Sicilia and Zack Scholl.
sounds
The sounds for regathering #wildfires are gathered from many different places, including online archives and repositories (e.g. Internet Archive, Freesound, BBC Archives), machine learning datasets, social media (e.g. TikTok, YouTube) and field recordings taken by fire practitioners, conservationists, researchers and groups undertaking cultural burns. Further sounds were gathered and soundscapes cocreated through a workshop with the Leverhulme Centre for Wildfires, Environment and Society and forestscapes.
regathering #wildfires includes sounds from:
- Adriana Ford’s recordings of prescribed burning in Brazil, FIRE-ADAPT project
- Biripi and Worimi Elders at Curricabark
- Cache Creek Nature Preserve in Woodland during the Cultural Burn Awareness Workshop
- Corangamite Catchment Management Authority
- Edgar Correa, Forest Department, Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries, Forestry, the Environment, Sustainable Development and Immigration, Belize
- Gunditjmara people at the Kurtonitj Indigenous Protected Area
- Jay Mistry’s research in Sawariwau, a Wapishan village in South Rupununi, Guyana
- Kapil Yadav’s research in Uttarakhand Himalayas, India
- Kayla de Freitas’s research in Guyana
- Maidu and Wintun groups in Yolo County, California
- Mark Grosvenor’s research in Canada
- North Fork Mono people in California
- Sunshine Coast Council
- Women of Capoto village, Capoto/Jarina community, Raoni Institute, Juliana Martins and Michel Valette
- Yahaira Urbina, Wildlife Conservation Society, Belize Program, Maya Forest Corridor Working Group
- Online reporting from fires in Australia, Botswana, Brazil, Canada, Chile, France, Greece, Hawaii, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Lebanon, Mexico, Namibia, Nepal, Pakistan, Singapore, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Syria, Turkey, United States and beyond