Common Grounds - Bayelva Research Station, Photo credits ©EstherHorvath
‘Common Grounds’ is an artistic-scientific research exploring strategies for sonifying environmental data. Initiated in 2020 by the Sono-Choreographic Collective and Julia Boike, head of Energy- and Water fluxes research group at the Alfred-Wegener-Institut Potsdam. Through 2025 this research asks how a long-term collaboration between climate science and sonic arts can be translated into public experiences that offer embodied, sensorial connections to the fragile complexity of planetary systems.
Climatic changes occur on spatial and temporal scales much larger and slower than those we humans can sensorially perceive. Therefore even in the face of palpable damages to the earths atmo-, hydro-, cryo- and geo-spheres, the climate crisis still remains for many but an inaccessible, looming threat. Drawing on long term datasets from the fastest warming place on earth - the circumpolar region of the Arctic, the collective develops custom software, sonic instruments, storytelling strategies and participatory somatic practices towards producing a constellation of artistic outputs including a sound installation, a concert-lecture, a music record, a video work and an art-science publication.
‘Twenty Springs’ is a sonic environment drawing on their artistic-scientific research Common Grounds This installation uses a detailed set of hourly environmental data points recorded since 1998 at the Bayelva permafrost measurement station at the Svalbard archipelago in the high arctic region of Norway. Through custom software developed by the collective in collaboration with Tobias Grewenig, the 33 parameters of the dataset are translated and fed into an array of multi-channel sounding sculptures. Compressed into a single hour, it sonifies the first twenty springs of the current millenium as a navigable, storied, sound-light environment.
Read more here on the project’s wiki︎︎︎
Climatic changes occur on spatial and temporal scales much larger and slower than those we humans can sensorially perceive. Therefore even in the face of palpable damages to the earths atmo-, hydro-, cryo- and geo-spheres, the climate crisis still remains for many but an inaccessible, looming threat. Drawing on long term datasets from the fastest warming place on earth - the circumpolar region of the Arctic, the collective develops custom software, sonic instruments, storytelling strategies and participatory somatic practices towards producing a constellation of artistic outputs including a sound installation, a concert-lecture, a music record, a video work and an art-science publication.
‘Twenty Springs’ is a sonic environment drawing on their artistic-scientific research Common Grounds This installation uses a detailed set of hourly environmental data points recorded since 1998 at the Bayelva permafrost measurement station at the Svalbard archipelago in the high arctic region of Norway. Through custom software developed by the collective in collaboration with Tobias Grewenig, the 33 parameters of the dataset are translated and fed into an array of multi-channel sounding sculptures. Compressed into a single hour, it sonifies the first twenty springs of the current millenium as a navigable, storied, sound-light environment.
Read more here on the project’s wiki︎︎︎
Common Grounds is an artistic-scientific project and is being developed in collaboration with the Permafrost research group led by Julia Boike at Alfred-Wegener-Institut Potsdam. And with
Tobias Grewenig who works with us on the sonification methods and software.
The Audio Guide Voice is narrated by Atalya Tirosh and the audio-guide programming is by Moshe Levine.
Up to now Common Ground has been supported by the HIDA X ATD fellowship of the Academy for Theater and Digitally, the HIDA Helmholtz Information and Data Science Academy and the the wilo foundation, by the Alfred-Wegener-Institut Helmholtz Zentrum für Polar- und Meeresforschung AWI, by a NEUSTART_Stipendium of the STIFTUNG KUNSTFONDS, by the Malmö City Cultural Council and the Sound Environment Center at Lund University.
Tobias Grewenig who works with us on the sonification methods and software.
The Audio Guide Voice is narrated by Atalya Tirosh and the audio-guide programming is by Moshe Levine.
Up to now Common Ground has been supported by the HIDA X ATD fellowship of the Academy for Theater and Digitally, the HIDA Helmholtz Information and Data Science Academy and the the wilo foundation, by the Alfred-Wegener-Institut Helmholtz Zentrum für Polar- und Meeresforschung AWI, by a NEUSTART_Stipendium of the STIFTUNG KUNSTFONDS, by the Malmö City Cultural Council and the Sound Environment Center at Lund University.
An artistic research into the collaborative potential of ritual, spiritual and digital practices and discourses for the 21st century.
At a juncture where the vulnerability of human and planetary health have been foregrounded, and where the digital turn risks being enacted uncritically along a linear progressive model, it is imperative to ask: unlike its industrial counterpart, can the digital milieu expressly refute the vectors of violence motored by colonialism?
This research proposes that digital practices and discourses open up decolonial dialogues with Indic ritual and spiritual practices that offer already-ecologized ways-of-being (human or other-wise) in the world.
At a juncture where the vulnerability of human and planetary health have been foregrounded, and where the digital turn risks being enacted uncritically along a linear progressive model, it is imperative to ask: unlike its industrial counterpart, can the digital milieu expressly refute the vectors of violence motored by colonialism?
This research proposes that digital practices and discourses open up decolonial dialogues with Indic ritual and spiritual practices that offer already-ecologized ways-of-being (human or other-wise) in the world.
‘Templuralities’ is a long-term artistic research into cosmologies that offer alternatives to the linear-progressive model of time. Through a polysensorial practice of experiencing and knowing, this research proposes re-tuning our senses towards re-embodying time, for every-body keeps time.
‘Keeping’ time is both an act of scientific inquiry and artistic intimacy. This research proposes a triad of artistic-scientific things that hold and unfold time: instruments, myths and codes. Instruments - musical, scientific or those of the human body-mind itself; myths - aural and textual forms of stories that tell time; and codes - sacred-geometries and intelligent-algorithms from digital to occult. This time keeping triad calls into focus the ecological implications of temporal structures and therefore to our entangled relation with the environment. Responding to the extractive-exploitative bent of colonial thought that still motors modernity and its globalised malaise, Templurlities assert that acts of decolonisation are always also acts of environmental affirmation.
Initiated by the Sono-Choreographic Collective in 2020, the research unfolds through collaborative practices and shared presentations which we call Environments & Playgrounds.
‘Keeping’ time is both an act of scientific inquiry and artistic intimacy. This research proposes a triad of artistic-scientific things that hold and unfold time: instruments, myths and codes. Instruments - musical, scientific or those of the human body-mind itself; myths - aural and textual forms of stories that tell time; and codes - sacred-geometries and intelligent-algorithms from digital to occult. This time keeping triad calls into focus the ecological implications of temporal structures and therefore to our entangled relation with the environment. Responding to the extractive-exploitative bent of colonial thought that still motors modernity and its globalised malaise, Templurlities assert that acts of decolonisation are always also acts of environmental affirmation.
Initiated by the Sono-Choreographic Collective in 2020, the research unfolds through collaborative practices and shared presentations which we call Environments & Playgrounds.
Photo credits ©SCC
To answer the issue’s provocation:what does decolonization look like in this age of hybridity?‘ this poly-modal essay offers glimpses into Scc’s transdisciplinary and cross- cultural artistic research processes by reaching into our desktops and drawers, our lab, kitchen and garden spaces.
This assemblage of text, sound, images and video is an expanding portrait of our still growing and spinning musical instruments.
Read here︎︎︎
This assemblage of text, sound, images and video is an expanding portrait of our still growing and spinning musical instruments.
Read here︎︎︎
Commissioned by herri magazine