blog – april 2023

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My april 2023 conscient podcast blog where I’m sharing my learnings and unlearnings for the month of March.

March 2 : balance

During a chat with my colleague Milena Droumena in her kitchen in east Vancouver I spontaneously drew a sketch that helps me find a better balance between life (who we are and how we live) and projects (what we do to contribute to society and make a living). Of course, there is an overlap between the two, but I have been placing a bit too much emphasis on ‘projects’ in recent years and am now in better balance, due in part, to my daily practice of qi gong.

e110 drain – where does your bathwater go? – conscient podcast

(sound of bath draining, at first with a strong oscillating rhythm followed by water flowing and silence)It goes down the drain (again) and into the sewer system to be processed and dumped into the Ottawa river, then it evaporates into the sky and it rains back into our lakes and rivers, bringing with it with many pollutants, and then is pumped into our homes, in our bodies and heated until… (repeated and improvised)Where does your bathwater go? *The rhythm comes from this sound of my bathtub draining, which occurs from the pressure on the tub that creates an oscillation. I am grateful and accountable to the earth and the human labour that provided me with the privilege of producing this episode. (including all the toxic materials and extractive processes behind the computers, recorders, transportation and infrastructure that make this podcast possible).My gesture of reciprocity for this episode is a donation to the Ottawa Riverkeeper. 

March 5 : water poetry

e110 drain – where do your bathwater go? : I recorded the rhythm of my bathtub draining and improvised a poem with it.

I had fun doing this episode. 

Feedback from artist Maria Gomez Umana:

Only the water doesn’t stay in the Ottawa region, as it travels south in the moist of the clouds all the way to the Patagonia glaciers, and in ocean currents to Asia and its skies and then it travels up the Arctic… the water I bathe in contains my cells that are distributed around the world, and particles from the world touch me in the water.

My reply:

Thanks. It’s true that water travels in us, through us and beyond. The sound of water can be either pleasant or a signal of danger but either way we need to listen and understand the language of water…

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March 9: conversation

I had an engaging 90-minute conversation with British sound artist and researcher Richard Bentley, who published this excerpt from our conversation on twitter :

Those sounds in your body… How can you process them? How do you sit with them? Donna Haraway, an American philosopher, uses the term ‘staying with the trouble’. That’s one of the challenges in this kind of work. It’s easy to evade the truth because the truth is very painful. We also talked about grieving. That’s a part of the pain of modernity. If you allow yourself to sit with the trouble, you will be pained by loss and by the disappearance of fellow living beings, not just human.

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e111 traps – what are the traps in your life? – conscient podcast

(bell, breath and occasional balloon sounds)Me : have you ever had the feeling that you were being observed?Observer : I’m observing you. Me: Who are you and what are you observing? Observer: Ah, well, I’m a part of you and  I’m observing the traps that you fall into.Me:  Traps?Observer : Do you remember the Facing Human Wrongs course you took during the summer of 2022Me: Ya.Observer: The one about navigating paradoxes and complexities of social and global change and all those trappings along the way?Me: Ya, I remember. Easier said than done, though.Observer: YupMe: So. What are you observing? Observer : Well, what can I say? I notice that you’ve fallen into a trap called ‘exit fixation’ which is where people feel a strong urge to walk out on an existing commitment. For example, when someone realises that the path they are on is full of paradoxes, contradictions, and complicities. Often their first response is to find an immediate exit in hopes of a more fulfilling and/or more innocent alternative or maybe even  an ideal community with whom to continue this work. Me: Like an escape?Observer: Ya, something like thatMe: BTW where are those balloon sounds coming from?Observer : Oh, that’s from your imaginationMe: hum. It sounds like …Observer: (laughter) it could be anything Me: OK. Anyway, what else do you see?Observer: Well. I also see a trap called proselytizing which happens when people try to teach and convince others that a particular issue of interest should be the most important thing for everyone. Me: Wait a second, I do that all the time as a climate activist and with my art and ecology podcast and… Observer :(interrupting) of course you do and well you should – no worries – but, the danger is that your work could be perceived as an effort to assert ‘moral high ground’ and while this trap may be driven by a genuine passion for an issue, and you certainly are passionate about your work, it has the potential to impose onto others in a way that does not respect their own un/learning journey, and often actually has the opposite effect, pushing people away rather than inviting them in. Me: ok. Ya, I see. Let me think about that.Observer: Sure and when this trap occurs, it can be useful to ask, you know, why do I need to teach or convince or inspire others about my learning experience? Where is this perceived need stemming from?  And if you really feel you need to bring something to the attention of others, maybe you can ask yourself: What is the most pedagogically responsible and effective thing to do so that your message can land?Me: ok. What else? Observer:  I also see some virtue signalling and self-righteousness trappings, which is when you assert yourself  as having the best, most righteous, most critical, most insightful, most creative, most valid or, the most marginalised perspective. Observer: This approach tends to be focused on wanting to be seen in a certain way by others or by oneself, and may be motivated by a desire to minimize or deny one’s complicity in harm. Me: maybe subconsciously, but it’s a catch 22, isn’it ?Observer: (interrupting) more like a labyrinth or a dilemma that you need to sit with… You remember when Donna Haraway says that we need to ‘stay with the trouble’. Something like that. (silence) ok. one last trap?Me: SureObserver: This is a tough one for you. Me: hum…Observer: Hey I need you to be strong here buddy, okMe: Ya ya ya I’m listening Observer:. It’s called spiritual bypassing and it happens when spiritual ideas or practices are used to sidestep, avoid, or escape sitting with analyses of historical and systemic violence and the difficulties of one’s complicity in historic and systemic harm. Do you know what I mean? Me: Yes I think I do but I don’t think I do this.Observer: (interrupting) maybe not consciously but spiritual bypassing often manifests itself alongside with cultural appropriation which is something you think about every time you record a soundscape with that microphone of yours, right?  Me: I see what you mean. You’re quite a good observer. Observer:  thank you but right back at you. Think of me as a guardian angel.Me: Or the devil… Observer: Whatever (laughter) Now one of the dangers with spiritual bypassing is to project interpretations of ‘oneness’ that erase the realities of historical and systemic inequalities, and interpretations of ‘Enlightenment’ that tend to reinforce exceptionalism and you tend to do that…Me: Yes, sure, I do, but it’s all part of being an artist.. Observer: (interrupting) True but that does not necessarily make it right, does it? Something to think about…Me: (interrupting) That’s a lot to think about, to learn and unlearn.Observer:  what are the traps in your life? *This episode is longer than the usual 5 minutes ( 7 minutes) because that’s how long it took to tell this story.This episode  comes from learnings I received from taking the Facing Human Wrongs course during the summer of 2022 with support from Azul Carolina Duque.The sound of balloon came to me while I was deflating a balloon while creating sound for a theatre production called Why Worry About their Future, produced by my colleague Sanita Fejzić, as part of the undercurrents festival here in Ottawa, when I realised that the sound of air being released from a balloon was the right sound to accompany this 2 person play. I am grateful and accountable to the earth and the human labour that provided me with the privilege of producing this episode. (including all the toxic materials and extractive processes behind the computers, recorders, transportation and infrastructure that make this podcast possible).My gesture of reciprocity for this episode is to the South American Indigenous Network Emergency Fund (second donation).

March 12: traps

e111 traps – what are the traps in your life? : a fictional conversation between me and an observer of me about some of the trappings of modernity. 

Feedback from composer Hildegard Westerkamp

Proselytizing certainly is one of my traps as well, spiritual bypassing the way your Observer defines it, is probably also one (although I do not do much field recording anymore). Other traps are hanging on to old patterns – they give the illusion of stability – or having expectations even when my mind thinks that I have let go of them, suddenly one is confronted with even subtler, hardly noticeable ones. That’s why, always returning to a practice of listening, can help to recognize the traps at least, perhaps even eliminate them.

My reply :

Spiritual bypassing is a tough because we think that these are ‘good things’ but it all depends on the point of view. I have found that gentle but deep self-reflexivity is helpful. Some old patterns also are good to let go of, leaving place and space for other places and spaces, but some are worth keeping… Traps, however, abound. Noticing them is the first step.

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March 15: privilege

Mass Culture commissioned me to write this blog,  ‘PERSPECTIVES ON T.R.A.I.N BIAS AND PRIVILEGE WORKSHOP’, about my experience taking the February 15 T.R.A.I.N. workshop on ’equity versus equality, anti-oppression and reflecting on privilege’ where I noted that ‘as someone interested in the ethics of listening, I thought listening to those with lived experience was especially important to avoid falling into the pitfalls of arrogance and privilege.’

e112 listening – how can listening help ? – conscient podcast

(various layered excerpts from my soundscape compositions throughout this episode) Conclusion 1 : we need to face reality and learn how to unlearnMayer Hillman, e01: ‘We’re doomed. The outcome is death, and it’s the end of most life on the planet because we’re so dependent on the burning of fossil fuels. There are no means of reversing the process which is melting the polar ice caps. And very few appear to be prepared to say so.’Joan Sullivan, e01 terrified ‘even if we are doomed, and I think we are, I refuse to do nothing…’ Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures collective : ‘we need to walk a tightrope between desperate hope and reckless hopelessness, balancing rational and relational rigour.' Conclusion 2: we need to develop and implement a radical theory of change through the artsDavid Haley, e19 : ‘we now need aesthetics to sensitize us to other ways of life and we need artists to sensitize us to the shape of things to come.Jen Rae, e19 : ‘The thing about a preparedness mindset is that you are thinking into the future and so if one of those scenarios happens, you’ve already mentally prepared in some sort of way for it’. David Maggs, e109: ’If we only speak with our arts, and do not listen with them first, revelation is replaced by dictation…’ Conclusion 3: we need to transition out of modernityGesturing Towards Decolonial Futures collective : ‘We are part of a much wider metabolism, and this metabolism is sick. There is a lot of shit for us to deal with: personal, collective, historical, systemic. Our fragilities are a big part of it. This shit needs to pass, so that it can be composted into new forms of life, no longer based on the illusion of separability.’Eric Beinhocker: e19: ‘Humankind is in a race between two tipping points. The first is when the Earth’s ecosystems and the life they contain tip into irreversible collapse due to climate change. The second is when the fight for climate action tips from being just one of many political concerns to becoming a mass social movement. The existential question is, which tipping point will we hit first? Conclusion 4 : we need to change the storyGeorge Monbiot, Out of the Wreckage: ‘Despair is the state we fall into when our imagination fails. When we have no stories that describe the present and guide the future, hope evaporates. Political failure is, in essence, a failure of imagination. Without a new story that is positive and propositional, rather than reactive and oppositional, nothing changes. With such a story everything changes’. George Marshall, e01 : ‘we need passionate storytellers to break habitual patterns, discover alternative values and consider new perspectives’. Conclusion 5 :  we need to connect our effortsTodd Dufresne, e19: ‘whoever survives these experiences will have a renewed appreciation for nature, for the external world, and for the necessity of collectivism in the face of mass extinction.’Asad Rehman, Green Dreamer podcast (e378) : ‘Our goal is to keep our ideas and policies alive for when the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable’. George Monbiot,  tweet November 13, 2021 :  ‘We have no choice but to raise the scale of civil disobedience until we have built the greatest mass movement in history.’My question to you is ‘how can listening help’?*This episode is longer than the usual 5 minutes because that’s how long (8m 30s) it took to tell this story.This episode is a selection of quotes and findings from my learning and unlearning journey about art and the ecological crisis that I presented during my keynote speech to the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology ‘Listening Pasts – Listening Futures’ conference on March 24, 2023 at the Atlantic Centre for the Arts in New Smyrna Beach, Florida. I warmly thank the authors I have quoted.I also thank the Canada Council for the Arts for their support of the Sounding Modernity project and travel funds to attend the conference. I am grateful and accountable to the earth and the human labour that provided me with the privilege of producing this episode. (including all the toxic materials and extractive processes behind the computers, recorders, transportation and infrastructure that make this podcast possible).My gesture of reciprocity for this episode is a donation to Atlantic Center For The Arts.

March 19: listening

e112 listening – how can listening help? : 5 conclusions from my keynote presentation at the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology 2023 ‘Listening Pasts – Listening Futures’ conference.

Note: this was the first episode in season 4 to surpass 5 minutes.

Feedback from Hildegard Westerkamp:

Listening every day and always, will answer this in ever new ways. Love the composition of this episode, the gorgeous gong/bell sounds, the pacing. 

My reply: 

I’m pleased with this episode. As I wrote to you in an email a few days ago: ‘because it does what I like soundscape composition to do, which is to very gently move people towards a moment of silence or a very simple moment of awareness that allows them space to be in an experience. Nothing flashy. Like a photograph that invites you to ponder…’ 

It reminds me that Buddhism teaches us that each moment is unique and fleeting and that we should pay attention to the present. One of the problem with soundscape composition is that it is fixed in time, a snapshot of one person’s artistic interpretation, whereas, as R. Murray Schafer often mentioned ‘soundscapes are continuous musical compositions’ which open up listening as an ongoing creative act, which I think is what you mean, and as our understanding of listening evolves, we’ll see (and feel) that all our sense are deeply connected and that notions like ’embodied listening’ will become the new norm, or we will perishes a species out of an absence of listening.

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March 21: dialogue

ecoartspace in the US set up a series of member meetings (January to April) called sound dialogues to discuss issues in eco-sound art practice around my Sounding Modernity project, as a point of departure. Session 3 took place on March 21. I presented a practice run of my WFAE keynote presentation. Their thoughtful feedback included a critique of my use of the concept of ‘we’, as in ‘we must…’ They felt I should not use ‘we’ in this way in the narrative. I agreed and adjusted my script.

During this exchange, I also realized that I was very angry about the ecological crisis and that this anger needed to be channeled in more positive ways. For example, by inviting people to consider issues rather telling them what is right or wrong. My dilemma is how to draw people out of a state of denial or stupor about the ecological crisis.  This is an ongoing investigation…  For example, they suggested that it is better to help people ‘learn to listen’ rather than insist that they ‘listen to me’.

In a Facebook posting on April 1, Sanita Fejzić noted that:

I wonder also if it had to be just one or the other and if it can’t be singular-plural, I-we, the accountable and autonomous I and the collective, porous we?

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March 23-26: wfae

I agree with the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology (WFAE) Listening Pasts – Listening Futures Conference’s conclusion from this event: 

At a time of pivotal environmental awakening, the convening of this community of international specialists allowed time and space to reflect on and re-imagine core values of the field, central approaches, methods, and key theorists of past, present, and future.  Emerging from this reflective process is our collective conviction that acoustic ecology and soundscape studies have much to offer the world.

I had the privilege of attending the WFAE conference at the Atlantic Center for the Arts (ACA) in New Smyrna Beach, Florida. Over 80 people from 20+ countries were joined by 109 remote participants. I gave a keynote presentation on the theme ‘how can listening help?’ on March 24 which included a ‘performance’ version of conscient e112 where I narrated my 5 conclusions (facing reality, radicalizing art, hospicing modernity, changing the story and connecting efforts) and then walked around the dance studio at the ACA calling out ‘how can listening help?’ to the audience, the forest and to an empty chair I placed beside me to symbolize those not present at the conference.  I also asked everyone to gather in a circle to speak their minds on the key issues facing the acoustic ecology movement. 

I also participated on a panel at Stetson University in Deland, Florida on March 22 with David George Haskell, Amanda Gutiérrez and Jacek Smolicki (see Acoustic Ecology Panel Kicks Off International Conference On Soundscape Studies) and in a pre-conference panel on Sunday March 19 about on the impact of the 1993 Tuning of the World Conference in Banff, Alberta.  

One reoccurring idea from the conference was our need to connect deeply with our local communities and ecosystems while reaching out to every region in the world to create a network of solidarity and cooperation through listening and sounding. I alsowas elected treasurer of the WFAE.

Some of the ideas and presentations that caught my attention and that are on my ‘radar’ include: 

• listening to our listening by Freya Zinovieff and Stephanie Loveless
• #savequiet and https://www.quietparks.org/
• being quiet allows for other voices to emerge 
• creating a manifesto about the ethics of field recording is coming 
• the omnipresence of quotes and references to dylan robinson’s hungry listening book 
• how can we gain knowledge in non-extractivist ways ?
• infra-ordinary by Georges Perec
• listening is not neutral: one can listen and become a fascist
• listening with and through 
• soundwalking is not only an art form but a way of life
• the potential and dangers of sound and artificial intelligence
• we need more stories that repair our relations with non-human life 

Note: all recordings from this conference will be available on the WFAE web site.

e113 soundwalk (part 1) – what is my position in listening ? – conscient podcast

(Claude Schryer)Jacek, what is soundwalking? (Jacek Smolicki)That's a very broad question, but I'll try to answer from two perspectives: my own and from what is kind of more generally considered soundwalking. So, to quote Hildegard Westerkamp, one of the pioneers of that practice, basically, a soundwalk is any kind of excursion into an environment which is motivated by us listening to it. Whether we do it with or without technologies or whether we do it on our own or in a group and the point of soundwalking is to connect or reconnect us with the environment, with how it sounds at the very moment to kind of reaching this sense of immersion in the here and now. My approach to sound is slightly different. I treat soundscapes as a kind of gateways to not only the momentary – the way that the sound  expresses itself in the moment  or the sound expresses events that happen at the moment – but also as gateways into the past and into the future. I like to kind of expand the perspective of soundwalking and use it as a kind of a vehicle to move us between different scales, between different temporalities and between different standpoints or different angles from which we can engage in this act of connecting with the environment. And the way I do it is by encouraging people to listen with whatever listening capacities they have, but also through technologies. And, as a scholar in media, in communications and within a personal interest in technological developments within sonogram, I'm trying to treat technologies as our companions rather than enemies or something that is alien to our human nature and try to build kind organic synergies between the way we implement technologies in our lives and in our ways of understanding nature around us. (Claude Schryer)And all the ethical ramifications of that…(Jacek Smolicki)Exactly and of course, ethical ramifications, so I like to call my approach to soundwalking as kind of a kind of transversal listening or hybrid listening where basically listening becomes like a vector that cuts through different layers of the environment in a kind of geological material sense, but also in a temporal sense. So as we stand here for example, we're not standing only here in this particular geography, but we are at the same time kind of benefiting from other geographies that surround us and we can actually hear, for instance, air traffic and through that sound we can connect with very distant geographies in a most direct sense, the geographies from which those planes arrive or are destined to, but we can also think of the plans around us as some of them are not necessarily native to this geography, right? They come from somewhere else. They pertain to different histories of, for instance, colonization and so on. And the same applies to temporalities. The sounds we hear today are here for some reason, right? They have roots in other sonic events that might not be directly accessible to us and this is also why I like to encourage imagination as a kind of natural component to soundwalking and listening and to enable a more speculative approach to how we listen. So instead of really trying to dissect and understand all the sounds around us to also think more imaginatively about what kinds of sounds existed before we stepped into that environment and what kind of sounds might exist in the future also because of our actions at the very moment.(Claude Schryer)We're doing a soundwalk now here, mostly talking about sound walking, but it's an experience and I've done it over the years and I encourage my listeners to do it because it's a very rewarding practice and it's one you can do anywhere, anytime. So before we run out of time, what would be a good question for people to ask themselves or to keep in mind as they soundwalk? (Jacek Smolicki)I think one important question would be what is my position within the soundscapes that I'm working through and how do I approach the soundscape? What kind of associations dominate my way of experiencing it, for instance, and start basically there and then trying to maybe gradually leave that zone and consider other ways of positioning ourselves in the soundscapes and by doing that, acknowledging the possibilities of other perspectives on the soundscapes and other ways of understanding and coexisting with it. (Claude Schryer)In other words, what is my position in listening ?*This episode with artist Jacek Smolicki was recorded on Friday March 24th, 2023 at 8.38am at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in New Smyrna Beach, Florida. It’s a soundwalk about soundwalking but also about the role of acoustic ecology in the ecological crisis. After completing our 5 minute conversation we heard a passing train and continued our conversation, which is part 2 of this episode.I encourage listeners to do your own soundwalks. There are many guides and methods. One of my favorites is Soundwalking by Hildegard Westerkamp and also Jacek's book Soundwalking through time, space and technologies.I am grateful and accountable to the earth and the human labour that provided me with the privilege of producing this episode. (including all the toxic materials and extractive processes behind the computers, recorders, transportation and infrastructure that make this podcast possible).My gesture of reciprocity for this episode is to the Children and Youth Artists' Grief Deck! Artists’ Literacies Institute.*Jacek Smolicki (born during martial law in Kraków) is a cross-disciplinary artist, designer, researcher and educator. His work brings temporal, existential and critical dimensions to listening, recording and archiving practices and technologies in diverse contexts.Besides working with historical archives, media, and heritage, Smolicki develops other modes of sensing, recording, and mediating stories and signals from specific sites, scales, and temporalities. His work is manifested through soundwalks, soundscape compositions, diverse forms of writing, site-responsive performances, experimental para-archives, and audio-visual installations.He has performed, published, and exhibited internationally (e.g. In-Sonora Madrid, Moscow International Biennale for Young Art, AudioArt Kraków, Ars Electronica, Linz, and Historical Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Sarajevo). His broad scope of site-responsive artistic and research work includes projects concerned with the soundscapes of the Swedish Arctic Circle, the Canadian Pacific Coast, the world's tallest wooden radio mast in Gliwice, the UFO testimonies from the Archive for the Unexplained in Sweden, the Jewish Ghetto in Kraków, the former sites of the Yugoslav Wars, Madrid's busking culture, and Alfred Nobel's factory complex in Stockholm, among many other places.In 2017 he completed his PhD in Media and Communications from the School of Arts and Communication at Malmö University where he was a member of Living Archives, a research project funded by the Swedish Research Council.Between 2020-2023 Smolicki pursues an international postdoctorate funded by the Swedish Research Council. Located at Linköping University in Sweden, Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, and Harvard, USA, his research explores the history and prospects of field recording and soundwalking practices from the perspective of arts, environmental humanities, and philosophy of technology.In 2022/2023 he is a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at Harvard.He is also an associate scholar at the Informatics and Media Hub for Digital Existence at Uppsala University. From January 2020 he is a member of BioMe, a research project that investigates ethical implications of AI technologies on everyday life realms. Smolicki explores sonic capture cultures and the impact of AI technologies on human and other-than-human voices.He is a co-founder of Walking Festival of Sound, a transdisciplinary and nomadic event exploring the critical and reflective role of walking through and listening to our everyday surroundings.Since 2008 Smolicki has been working on On-Going Project, a systematic experimentation with various recording techniques and technologies leading to a multifaceted para-archive of contemporary everyday life, culture, and environment. The On-Going Project includes Minuting, a record of public soundscapes performed daily ever since July 2010, for which he received the main prize at the Society for Artistic Research conference in 2022.For info see https://www.smolicki.com/index.html

e113 soundwalk (part 2) – how can we deepen our listening? – conscient podcast

(Jacek Smolicki)The ultimate question I'm asking is how can we move away from soundwalk as a kind of framed aesthetic experience or artistic experience and turn it into an existential practice or basically something that is just ingrained in our everyday life and we don't have to frame it anymore. It's just basically part of our way of living. (Claude Schryer)Can you give an example of that? (Jacek Smolicki)An academic example would be the concepts developed by Steven Feld, acoustemology, where basically listening, a kind of sonic way of being in the world is part of your culture, part of existence. You don't tell yourself, okay, I will listen to the world more carefully from now for another hour, and then I can just return back to my everyday life but you basically just keep listening, right? A kind of sonic sensitivity is one of the most important ways of understanding the world as opposed to being pushed to the background and only lifted up during those kinds of frame situations such as a soundwalk. (Claude Schryer)I've been sound walking in an analytical way, so I'll try to make sense of the sounds and where they are and what they're about but there's also an absorption factor where you allow the sounds to speak to you in their own language, right? As opposed to sort of rationally figuring them out. So, if we stop here and listen, what are you hearing? (Jacek Smolicki)I hear a coexistence of culture and nature and at the same time a kind of friction between two realms that in fact are just one realm and we kind of try to maybe separate them. We talked a little bit about this positionality and we hear the whistle of the train. From one perspective, we heard some people here referring to that sound as being very calming and reassuring, but if you think of indigenous people, that sound might mean a completely different thing. It's a form of bordering and creating, some kind of a division, of cutting the land and deciding how the land is to be traversed and utilized. So it definitely has a violent connotation if we look from that perspective and if we listen from that perspective. I think that this is some kind of sensitivity that I'm aiming at, also, while teaching, to be able to also take that thought into consideration when we try to value or kind of assign value to different sounds. I think Dylan Robinson is talking about oscillation. I think he calls it to be able to constantly oscillate, to move from one way of understanding sound to another. And basically by doing that it destabilizing certain certainties that characterizes our way of listening and, and by doing that, becoming open to those other understandings and perceptions… (Claude Schryer)And asking questions. You know, we were on a panel together a few days ago (Stetson University) when we were asking the question, how can listening help the world that is in crisis? and it's an open-ended question because with listening everybody has their own way of listening, but there are certainly deeper ways of listening that we can learn and unlearn as we work our way through these issues. (Jacek Smolicki)Exactly and that we've been talking a lot about hope. We've been talking a lot about how this openness is almost inherently good. I have that feeling. People talk about if we open up our listening and if we invite other perspectives, then we are doing something good. But I think that opening comes with certain responsibilities too, right? I like to think of it in a way that the more open we become to those different perspectives, the more troubled, actually, we should become more concerned rather than content and calm, so there's this disruptive aspect to listening that Hildegard Westerkamp has been writing about, but as we open ourselves, as we include other perspectives, we at the same time disrupted something, right? That we at the same time should be calling ourselves to action and becoming more responsible. So, there's some kind of an obligation I think that should follow that act of opening and deepening our listening. (Claude Schryer)I agree. Thank you for this moment. We will listen again.*This episode with artist Jacek Smolicki was recorded on Friday March 24th, 2023 at 8.44 am at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in New Smyrna Beach, Florida. It’s a soundwalk about soundwalking but also about the role of acoustic ecology in the ecological crisis. After completing our first 5 minute conversation (e113 part 1) we heard a passing train and continued our conversation, which is this episode (part 2).I encourage listeners to do your own soundwalks. There are many guides and methods. One of my favorites is Soundwalking by Hildegard Westerkamp but also Jacek's new book Soundwalking through space, time and technologies.I am grateful and accountable to the earth and the human labour that provided me with the privilege of producing this episode. (including all the toxic materials and extractive processes behind the computers, recorders, transportation and infrastructure that make this podcast possible).My gesture of reciprocity for this episode is to the  Children and Youth Artists' Grief Deck! Artists’ Literacies Institute.*Jacek Smolicki (born during martial law in Kraków) is a cross-disciplinary artist, designer, researcher and educator. His work brings temporal, existential and critical dimensions to listening, recording and archiving practices and technologies in diverse contexts.Besides working with historical archives, media, and heritage, Smolicki develops other modes of sensing, recording, and mediating stories and signals from specific sites, scales, and temporalities. His work is manifested through soundwalks, soundscape compositions, diverse forms of writing, site-responsive performances, experimental para-archives, and audio-visual installations.He has performed, published, and exhibited internationally (e.g. In-Sonora Madrid, Moscow International Biennale for Young Art, AudioArt Kraków, Ars Electronica, Linz, and Historical Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Sarajevo). His broad scope of site-responsive artistic and research work includes projects concerned with the soundscapes of the Swedish Arctic Circle, the Canadian Pacific Coast, the world's tallest wooden radio mast in Gliwice, the UFO testimonies from the Archive for the Unexplained in Sweden, the Jewish Ghetto in Kraków, the former sites of the Yugoslav Wars, Madrid's busking culture, and Alfred Nobel's factory complex in Stockholm, among many other places.In 2017 he completed his PhD in Media and Communications from the School of Arts and Communication at Malmö University where he was a member of Living Archives, a research project funded by the Swedish Research Council.Between 2020-2023 Smolicki pursues an international postdoctorate funded by the Swedish Research Council. Located at Linköping University in Sweden, Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, and Harvard, USA, his research explores the history and prospects of field recording and soundwalking practices from the perspective of arts, environmental humanities, and philosophy of technology.In 2022/2023 he is a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at Harvard.He is also an associate scholar at the Informatics and Media Hub for Digital Existence at Uppsala University. From January 2020 he is a member of BioMe, a research project that investigates ethical implications of AI technologies on everyday life realms. Smolicki explores sonic capture cultures and the impact of AI technologies on human and other-than-human voices.He is a co-founder of Walking Festival of Sound, a transdisciplinary and nomadic event exploring the critical and reflective role of walking through and listening to our everyday surroundings.Since 2008 Smolicki has been working on On-Going Project, a systematic experimentation with various recording techniques and technologies leading to a multifaceted para-archive of contemporary everyday life, culture, and environment. The On-Going Project includes Minuting, a record of public soundscapes performed daily ever since July 2010, for which he received the main prize at the Society for Artistic Research conference in 2022.For info see https://www.smolicki.com/index.html.

March 25 : soundwalking

 e113 soundwalk (part 1) – what is my position in listening? : a soundwalk about soundwalking with artist Jacek Smolicki at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, New Smyrna Beach, Florida and e113 soundwalk (part 2) – how can we deepen our listening? (bonus episode)

This episode with artist Jacek Smolicki was recorded on Friday March 24th, 2023 at 8.38am at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in New Smyrna Beach, Florida and features a conversation instead of a sound artwork. It’s actually a soundwalk about soundwalking exploring the role of acoustic ecology in the ecological crisis. After completing our 5-minute conversation we heard a passing train and continued our conversation, which is part 2 of this episode.

March 29: consultation

I attended the Canadian New Music Network’s Sustainable Futures Consultation at Carleton University hosted by the Research Centre for Music, Sound and Society. Questions raised at this event included: 

• How can music and sound organizations support artistic works and initiatives that both promote greater awareness of climate issues and engage in the authoring of a healthier world?
• How is language and policy shifting to address the impact of climate on music and sound practice and presentation?
• What tools and support can arts organizations like CNMN offer to support the continued relevance and viability of our sector? What is reasonable or radical?
• How can we as individuals and as a community process and move through the challenging emotions that transformation and sustainability may evoke: from (eco)grief, complacency, complicity, to overwhelm and isolation. 
• How do we ground our organizations and ourselves in practical optimism, taking tangible steps towards a more sustainable world?

I enjoyed the exchange and learned a lot with thanks to Ellen Waterman and Terri Hron. I wrote in my journal that ‘I envy those who are more protected from the reality of the ecological crisis. It’s less stressful for them.’ During this event, I mentioned that I was not looking to ‘feel good’ about our times but rather to ‘do what was right in this moment’ which means facing the harsh reality of our existential threats with the mostly powerful tool I know: art. I also mentioned that I was shifting my energy from mitigation and adaptation work towards ‘survival and regeneration’.

In particular I appreciated a comment about how we needed more positive stories about sustainability in our communities, for example, what musicians are already doing to lower their carbon footprint and lead happy lives with low energy consumption…

My colleague Tanya Kalmanovitch (who performed her brilliant http://www.tarsandssongbook.com/ on March 28) reminded us that (I’m paraphrasing) that ‘times of crisis are also times of action and massive change’ and so they are. 

There’s more, but that’s enough.

Thanks for reading and listening. 

See you in May.