Sonic Cartography

Sonic Cartography maps the psychic terrain of the city through sound works that bring together the felt experience, political ambience and hidden infrastructures of place.

This article is based on my sound presentation at The Showroom Gallery.

Drone Planes Over Westfield explores the paranoia surrounding the London Olympics as anti-aircraft missiles were stationed on the top of East London tower blocks. A missile battery was installed on the Lexington Building apartment complex, part of the former Bryant & May match factory famous for the matchgirls’ strike and later regenerated to create Bow Quarter. 2012 was also a changing point in the war in Afghanistan. Military personnel were withdrawn from the field whilst at the same time, there was a massive escalation in the use of unmanned drone planes.

ANTI-GENTRIFICATION GHOST DANCE: was produced through field recordings of electromagnetic emissions encountered on a drift around the Robin Hood Gardens estate as compulsory purchase orders were enforced, slowly clearing the estate. This recording presents a brutalist record of one moment in the ongoing class clearances hallucinated as an insurrectionary carnival of resistance.

They Communicate With Ghosts To Give Birth To An Already Dead Future: was constructed from Electro-Magnetic field recordings within the Museum of London's Osteology Store. As the museum prepared to relocate to its new site at West Smithfield. The composition provoked questions of memory, place and movement. The recording was performed live on 17 June 2017 inside the Museum of London.

Teufelsberg Sunset: It is concerning how an NSA monument to the paranoia of the cold war, built upon the rubble of WW2 Berlin, concealing the Wehrtechnische Fakultat, a Nazi military-technical college designed by Albert Speer, could momentarily induce feelings of absolute serenity. Teufelsberg Sunset is a four-channel algorithmic sound work created from field recordings made on an overnight exploration of Teufelsberg.

From May to the end of August 2013 I worked with Tatiana Bazzichelli, at Transmediale, on a project to map the reSource network of independent technology-based art/hackerspaces in the city of Berlin.

Network Noise Drift mapped the usually invisible non-human aspects of the network’s technological infrastructure. I made field recordings of the machine processes that enable the social network through the practice of electromagnetic audio drifting, allowing myself to be guided by the invisible intensities, textures, and ambiences of a space’s specific electromagnetic geography. The field recordings were composed into sonic abstractions of each space. I coded an android mobile phone application using OpenStreetMap to geo-spatially sited the compositions at specific locations in Berlin.

The sonic map of the reSource network was performed as a sonic walk at reSource006 on 12.09.2013 at Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien. I guided the walkers through the streets of Berlin, passing through the varied ambiences and nodes of the sonified and abstracted map of the reSource network of technology-based art and hackerspaces.