How to make a swampy audio archive. A field recording lecture performance in four parts.
Part one, an encounter. I propose we start with a quote from Alexis Pauline Gams, always a good idea, from her book Undrowned.
Alexis Pauline Gams asks, how can we listen across species, across extinction, across harm?
This is where we start our trans-species communion.
Opening a space to uplift the practice of listening, even more than the practices of showing and proving and speaking up.
Listening is not only about the normative ability to hear, it is a transformative and revolutionary resource that requires quieting down and tuning in.
I want to start by telling you an encounter ahead in Lobau.
Once I sat at the Tischwasser, which is a place near Mühlwasser, or actually it's a part of Mühlwasser, it's the last little tale of Mühlwasser, if you're familiar with the place, it's very close to Josef Steg.
It was a really beautiful day, end of July, and Mühlwasser, you maybe know it, it's this big oxbow that goes through Lobau.
So oxbow, it means it used to be an arm of the Danube, but it eventually got cut off, in this case by the regulation of the river.
And here, even if there are houses and there are people and you see people walking their dogs all the time, it still, it feels, you have this floodplain aesthetics, it feels kind of wild and jumbley.
And I was sitting there at Tischwasser and just listening to some birds and insects and amphibians and reading a bit, doing some field recordings.
And eventually somebody called me and it was from work, so I had to pick up and I had to talk for a bit.
And actually it was a moment when I was not quiet at all and also not really tuned in to the space, but it was also the exact moment that a deer decided to appear in front of me.
And this deer and a ree, Capriolus capriolus, is on the other bank of Tischwasser, but it's pretty close, it's just like 15 meters, 20 meters away.
And Capriolus capriolus is completely unimpressed by my presence and it starts actually to push the reeds away that overgrow the shores there, the shilf.
And it comes through and it starts eating water lilies.
And I was aware that deers eat roses, but seerosen, like water lilies, I was really baffled.
So it looked very strange, the deer was standing in the water to his knees, maybe to his chest, and it was eating these water lilies.
And like really enjoying it, chewing it, looking at me casually, and I tried to not lose the thread of the conversation I had, but eventually I failed.
And I was like, wow, something really strange is happening here. There's a deer just in front of me and it's eating water lilies.
This is an encounter actually I often think about, and then I think, can this story, I mean if you want to call it a story at all, can this experience, should this experience be part of our audio collection?
Part two, listening.
Let's hear once more a quote from an essay by Paul Carter with the title, Ambiguous Traces, Mishearing and the Auditory Space.
How could our audio archive look like?
Listening is engaged hearing. Its social equivalent in the visual sphere is the experience of eyes meeting and the sense that this produces of being involved in a communicational contract.
Listeners listen with both ears, monitoring their own mimetic responses to what is said and heard.
Listening, unlike hearing, values ambiguity recognizes it as a communicational mechanism for creating new symbols and word senses.
So how could an audio archive look like when we try to make a collection of listening experiences rather than of what is heard?
And when I say we, I'm actually talking about the LLC, which is an artistic research project by the artist and freshwater ecologist Christina Gruber and by Sophia Ruth, who is a social ecologist who specializes in environmental history.
For example, she's an expert on the history of activism in this area. So think Hamburg, for example.
And also by me, who is a cultural historian and science fiction researcher.
So LLC stands for Lobau Listening Comprehension and people often like listening comprehension like these, like in school, these exercises where you listen to a language that you don't understand and you still don't understand everything, but you try to fill in the blanks, these exercises like in school.
And we're like, yes, exactly. This kind of listening comprehension.
However, not in regard with competence in a human language, maybe not even language at all, but at least not only.
So what we proposed when we started working on this project is to make an acoustic portrait of the Lobau, a collection of sounds put in constellation and presentation that could convey our listening experiences, but also a deep admiration for this place and also the stories and histories, how it became the place of the Lobau.
And also the stories and histories, how it became what it is today, what will happen maybe in the future.
And also information about the flora, the fauna, the funga that inhabits it and that makes it up.
But also collection and presentation that would convey the ecological importance of wetlands like this.
So LLC is an artistic research project and not an activist endeavor.
However, we thought if you listen to our archive, it would be cool if you showed up to the next demonstration against the many highway and roadway construction projects that are planned in the area.
So this would be ideal.
Lobau, live!
So how to build such an archive?
And how would, for example, my little story of deer eating water lilies be integrated to it?
A sonic sensibility, and this is part three sonic possibilities, but a sonic sensibility reveals the invisible mobility below the surface of a visual world and challenges its certain position.
Not to show a better place, but to reveal what this world is made of, to question its singular actuality and to hear other possibilities that are probable too, but which for reasons of ideology, power and coincidence do not take equal part in the production of knowledge, reality, value and truth.
This is from Salome Voegelin's book Sonic Possible Worlds.
Archive is maybe the wrong word.
An archive would require that we record systematically and that we put our recordings into a coherent order and categorize them.
So then I could present to you, for example, these are 52 recordings of 2023 of Tischwasser, made every Thursday at noon, and on week 31 something really unusual happened.
A capriolus capriolus came through the Fragmitis austrialus, the grace on some Nufalutea.
And it would be really hard for me to make such entries because I'm not an ecologist.
And maybe the capriolus capriolus was actually not eating Nufalutea, but Nufea alba, and maybe this is actually not that usual at all.
So this is not really the point of what we are trying to do.
Also, on the recording, the capriolus capriolus, the deer, is not the most exciting voice.
Merely listening, you will rather focus on maybe one of the acrocephalus bird family, so the Teichrohrsinger or the Sumpfrohrsinger.
Or you will maybe hear the significant tremolo of the dendrocopos, one of the woodpecker family.
Indeed, what interests us is to point out that by listening, your attention of this place will shift.
To identify different elements in the recordings is super interesting, but it's not our goal and also not my strength.
Our archive, let's maybe stick to this inappropriate term, would point out something else.
It would point out that everything you hear on this place is already really intermingling.
The Lobau is a cyborg and we are collecting a cyborg archive.
What you will hear, besides birds, amphibians, insects, the water, is always also humans, dogs, cars, planes.
On my recordings I often hear my own breathing, which annoys me a lot, but maybe it should not.
We are not trying to make an archive of Lobau nature without humans, but recordings that show that all these interminglings take place.
Recordings that celebrate the opacity and the complication, the surprise of the muddle.
And recordings that maybe can also introduce some speculation as well, to maybe also reference the overall topic of this exhibition.
What if the Tischwasser had more space? Could we listen for the possibilities, what is happening there?
What if it was connected to the Danube again? Who would show up then? What kind of people, human and non-human, and what would they do?
What if this was a swamp again, with more water and more swampiness?
Where's all the slippery, slithery, crawling, creepy things that you can look?
I have an immoderate passion for water, especially for marshes, teeming with all that mysterious life of the creatures that haunt them.
A marsh is a whole world within a world, a different world, with a life of its own.
With its own permanent denizens, its passing visitors, its voices, its sounds, its strange mystery.
So what we are listening for in this archive of Lobau in the making is also a certain kind of hope, maybe,
for the marshes, for the swamps, for the bogs, for the fens, for the oxbows, for the wetlands, for the floodplains of Lobau.
And it is a hope that should not be too nostalgic.
Not too nostalgic because we don't want to return to some pristine, original state of the place,
but it's once again rather a cyborg hope that indeed looks back in history and points out what is lost and what we are about to lose, maybe.
But also shows what and who is still here.
Our listening is at best a speculation against the probable, against the business of usual of motorway through forests and the drying out of floodplains.
Our swamps are safe. Don't you realize politicians always make extravagant promises? Fortunately, I can see through their little games.
Darling, you're so clever.
Drain the swamps. Drain our lovely swamps. The man's an extremist.
Caridamia, our swamps are safe. Don't you realize politicians? Don't you realize politicians? Don't you realize politicians?
Don't you realize politicians? Don't you realize politicians?
Sound can actually be a powerful medium to try to do this because, as has often been pointed out, we cannot distance ourselves from sound.
Even if we categorize it and analyze it, we are always in sound when we are listening. We are already in the muddle, maybe.
What we can do is create more attention to what we hear.
And in our case, this is not necessarily attention in the sense of knowing exactly who and what produces sound, but in the sense that we can listen for the elements that we want to amplify.
And what would it mean if I want to amplify such an element that I hear of these sounds, a voice that I want to amplify?
It means to take action, to educate myself and to make demands, political action.
What we are trying to do is to listen to a stupefying roar of all the people who inhabit and who used to inhabit this landscape.
A roar that signifies diversity and thriving.
A roar that we are risking to lose, as Annie Proulx points out in her book, Fen, Bog and Swamps, a short history of peatland destruction.
Yes, this is not the happiest of notes to end such a lecture, but even in Annie Proulx's diagnosis, you can actually listen for some elements of hope, some threads you can pull out and play with,
some voices that call on you and motivate you to get involved.
So also to Annie Proulx, the last words of this lecture should belong, or at least the last human words.
In ancient days, fen, bogs, swamps and marine estuaries were the earth's most desirable and dependable resource places,
attracting and supporting myriad species.
The diversity and numbers of living creatures in springtime wetlands and overhead must have made a stupefying roar audible from afar.
Thank you.