March 22-26, 2023


'Soundwalking through Time, Space & Technologies' a 4-channel soundscape composition & installation at Atlantic Center for the Arts, New Smyrna, Florida, as part of the "Listening Pasts, Listening Futures," World Forum for Acoustic Ecology international symposium.

Listening Pasts - Listening Futures convenes a global cohort as we mark the 30th anniversary of the founding of the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology (WFAE), and the first international conference on acoustic ecology in the United States of America. Now, as we mark this moment, we gather to consider how we can collectively and differently learn from the past, to imagine new futures based on a diversity of listening practices and acoustic relationships in our worlds. As the wider field of sound studies has matured, so have the contributions made by acoustic ecology to much current sonic scholarship and practice.

At the same time, critical directions in sound studies have addressed the legacies of the World Soundscape Project and acoustic ecology directly: this is our chance, as a community, to reflect, look back, and re-imagine the core values of our field, its central approaches, methods, and key theorists of past, present, and future. We know acoustic ecology and soundscape studies have much still to give to the world at a pivotal environmental awakening. Among the appeals of ACA are its support of soundscape studies with the Soundscape Field Station artist residency and related programming, especially our shared mission and values of community engagement. These values reflect the topics in which we invite proposals including paper presentations, workshops, performances, and installations.

Located near the Canaveral National Seashore, in the unceded lands of the Seminole people, Atlantic Center for the Arts offers access to the beauty of this wild coastal habitat. Mangroves, manatees, and Spanish moss are here in one of the region’s last remaining areas protected from development.​​​

Read more about the installation here

February 8-9, 2023


'Unsound Peregrinations,' a multichannel soundscape performance and seminar at Sonic Lab, SARC, Queen's University, Belfast.

During the virtual concert, Smolicki presents four pieces, some of them in full length and others in fragments. All compositions have been developed as part of his research into soundwalking and field recording practices in the context of arts and environmental humanities (2020-2023). Within this international artistic research project, Smolicki has travelled to several institutions and explored diverse places that surround them using an assemblage of ethnographic and historical methods along with critical and creative field recording techniques. In these works but also others, he has been particularly drawn to places characterized by complex and unresolved histories, dissonant temporalities and frictions between diverse human and other-than-human actors.

The program included:
Intertidal Room (2020),
Lake that Glimmers Like Fire (2021),
Dead Horse Bay (2023),
Discord, MA (2023)
The concert can be watched here

Photos by SARC

November-December, 2022


'Composing with Soundscapes' was a series of workshops I offered at Sound Lab/Department of Music at Harvard during November and December 2022.

During the first meeting, I guide the audience through several of my recent projects in which sound-walking, soundscape composition and field recording are explored as techniques of critical attention to scales, agencies and temporalities that often remain imperceptible on a day-to-day basis. I share conceptual and practical insights into specific critical listening and field recording positions and techniques that emerged through my sound-walks, workshops, and compositional engagements with sound-marks and soundscapes of Vancouver shores, Swedish Arctic Circle, Swiss mountains, and other geographies.

The first meeting is simultaneously an invitation to a following series of workshops for those interested in critically rethinking soundscapes and sound-marks of the Boston area.

photos by John Pax

September 9, 2022


'Arboreal Sonorities' an essay published in the first issue of 'A Row of Trees', the journal of Sonic Arts Research Unit at Oxford Brookes

I propose this essay as conceptual hearing aids for a better attunement with arboreal sonorities. This term should not be read literally as pointing towards acoustic qualities that trees and forests generate throughout their lifespan. At least, it is not to be reduced to that aspect only. The acoustic life of trees is not limited to producing sounds. It also includes their ability to communicate and listen. To vibrate and respond to vibrations [...] The term arboreal sonorities is not put forth here as to help us discover anything ground-breaking about trees. Instead, it gestures towards re-gathering and reconnecting with already existing knowledges about trees and the trees’ very own knowledges. It prompts to realize our sustained reduction of aural capacities to the domain of an ear. Or differently put, it is to make us aware of boundaries we set around the ear, preventing it from cross-fertilization with other senses; an impedence of possibilites for engaging in more syncretic ways of sensing the world, but also acknowledging such among other species.

September 3, 2022


'E 7 L', a colaborative performance with Jin Sangtae, a Seoul-based noise and electroacoustic musician. Part of Walking Festival of Sound 2022

'During his performance in Seoul, Jin Sangtae brings sounds that Jacek Smolicki transmits from Vancouver into a theatre hall where he performs with them. Each in their own way, the performers occupy the space where collision and merging occur.'

Jin Sangtae plays non-musical objects that he collected and transformed into musical instruments. He connects and combines hard drives and other items such as laptops, radios, car horns, and electronics to use them as a main instrument. Since 2015 he has continued a composition project Year in which, every day, he uploads a one-minute composition he has recorded using his mobile onto the web. He founded ‘dotolim‘- a small space for improvised music - and has run the dotolim concert series since 2008. He was also an organizer of the festival ‘dotolimpic’ in 2012, 2013, and 2017.

photo by Jin Sangtae

August 23, 2022


A collaborative Listening Session via Giorgio Magnanensi's resonators in Roberts Creek, Sunshine Coast, BC. Part of the Walking Festival of Sound 2022

Listening session in Roberts Creek at Sunshine Coast in British Columbia, the unceded territory of the skwxwú7mesh, shíshálh, Tla’amin, Klahoose, and Homalco Nations. The session took place on August 23, 2022 and featured several multi-channel sound works developed for the 2022 edition of the Walking Festival of Sound taking place in Vancouver (BC, Canada) and Seoul (South Korea). The pieces were presented in a rain forest near Roberts Creek through a set of eight wooden resonators built out of reclaimed sitka wood by Giorgio Magnanensi, composer, educator and director of Vancouver New Music.

List of works:
Tim Shaw Path of Dependance
Jsuk Han Radio Shower
Daniela O'Fee Fanfare for Alarum
Hye-Soon Seo The Time Flows... And a Symphony
Jacek Smolicki Intertidal Room

Walking Festival of Sound 2022 is supported by Vancouver New Music and Arts Council Korea.

August 5, 12, 19, 2022


In August, I offered a series of three soundwalking workshops focused on diverse ways of listening to local soundscapes in Vancouver. It was an accompanying event to Walking Festival of Sound 2022 taking place in Seoul and Vancouver

Welcome to a series of soundwalking workshops. We will meet to walk together, listen to, and talk about different aspects of soundscapes that surround us in our daily life but which often remain unnoticed or ignored. Participants will learn about various listening approaches and creative sound recording technologies that can open our ears onto those imperceptible realms. We will walk through selected parts of the city, turning our ears to their past, present and, potentially, future soundscapes. Each walk will comprise performative listening sessions, discussions, and reflections on readings to be circulated prior to each event.

Soundwalking Workshop I / Intertidal Zones. Ecotonal Listening
August 5, 10am

During this first workshop we will visit some of the intertidal zones surrounding so-called Stanley Park, the unceded territory of Coast Salish People. Besides acknowledging the past soundscapes of this land – those absent and still resonant today – we will listen to the troubling entanglement of the marine organisms that inhabit those zones (limpets and barnacles among others) with noises from the bay.

Soundwalking Workshop II / Soundmarks and Sound-scars. Palimpsestic Listening
August 12, 10:30am

We will begin by listening to the Gastown Steam clock from diverse positions and via different sound technologies. This creative and critical inspection will become a departure point to reflect on how mechanical vs cyclic organization of time affects our sonic sensitivities. We will also discuss other public soundmarks which are sounds of particular significance to local communities and cultures.

Soundwalking Workshop III / Trees and Logs. Arboreal Listening
August 19, 11am

At this workshop we will begin by listening to the beached logs and driftwood scattered along Wreck Beach. We will approach their sounds as echoes of the colonial past that persistently haunt and inform local landscapes and soundscapes in Vancouver. We will walk along the coastline tuning with those echoes while also turning our ears to other stories that the trees of the nearby Pacific Spirit Park have to tell.

July, 2022


'Acoustethics: Careful Approaches to Recorded Sounds and Their Second Life' published in 'Sensitive Sound Recordings', Prace Kulturoznawcze, Vol 26, No 1, Wroclaw University Press

This article attempts to rethink some problematic ways and motivations for engaging in (field) recording and working with recorded sounds. Interweaving reflections from my long-term soundscape archiving initiative undertaken in Stockholm, with projects of others aiming at preserving cultures through sound, I reflect upon ethical challenges that emerge against the prospect of second and following lives and deaths of recordings [...] As a reflective attitude to the sonic realm, acoustethics acknowledges that any recording takes place within already existing fields of relations and simultaneously generates new links between subjects, histories, worldviews, technologies, and other forces. In other words, any recording is intrinsically field recording.

July, 2022


My essay 'Minitung. Rethinking the Ordinary Through the Ritual of Transversal Listening' receives the Main Prize for Excellent Exposition 2021 by Society for Artistic Research (SAR)

The ceremony took place at the occassion of the SAR annual conference in Weimar in July 2022.
From the jury's motivation:

'The jury was impressed by the quality of the intimate and coherent dialogue between images, text, hypertext and sound in Jacek Smolicki’s exposition Minuting. Rethinking the Ordinary Through the Ritual of Transversal Listening.” The togetherness of these elements makes the viewer feel like walking into a complex and well-structured landscape. The layout is attractive also in means of the integration of the sound bars as graphical elements. The mouse-over elements produce an extra layer that is nevertheless integrated into the aesthetic appearance of the exposition. Smolicki’s research is wide and deep with the collection of samples spanning years presenting a compelling premise in the research. The concepts and narrative threads are emergent through the design and activation of the exposition through the Research Catalogue platform.

June 2022


An extended interview for Radio Kraków interview for Radio Kraków

In early June I met Agnieszka Barańska, a Polish journalist and proponent of alternative approaches to sound and music. We took a walk along the shore of Trekanten where I discussed with her my project focused on the Arctic soundscapes among other artistic research intitiatives I am currently involved in.

May 31 - June 2 2022


My soundscape installation and composition 'A Slip of the Digital Tongue' was presented at the Digital Existence III, Living with automation – a conference about artificial intelligence (AI), biometrics and the human condition at Sigtuna Foundation. The conference was organized by the Hub for Digital Existence at the Department of Informatics and Media.

From the leaflet accompanying the performance:

A coincidental sequence of squeaks and electric shocks triggers one of numerous voicecontrolled listening machines still passively operating despite the long absence of human operators. In this noisy articulation of random happenstance, the device detects a message which serendipitously commands it to recall events that preceded this moment. Left to their own devices, the machines begin to inspect historical motivations for entangling human voices with technologies. Exploitation, as they soon realize, was one of them. Being no longer at the service of humans, the speaking machines have to seek new incentives for sustaining their existence.

In great part a piece of speculative fiction, the work simultaneously draws on historical events and inventions concerned with technologically-aided human voice synthesis, recognition, and capture, including some instances of error, misspelling and lapsus. Accompanying illustrations result from experiments in sonifying images and converting them back into spectrograms. They include archival images of early speaking automatons along with photos, headlines and news snippets from online databases and articles concerned with AI, voice, autonomy, tech-tycoons, long-termism, and more.

The performance is based on an essay written for a book 'The Computer as Seen at the End of the Human Age', edited by Olle Essvik (Rojal Förlag, Göteborg 2022). A dialog between several repurposed 'smart' speakers is accompanied by a spontaneously evolving soundscape generated by those devices' electromagnetic fields and micro-currents that make them operational. The piece is a component of an artistic inquiry into other, imperceptible voices and sonic realms that underlie and sustain contemporary technologies of voice recognition, synthesis and biometric capture. The project is part of BioMe: Existential Challenges and Ethical Imperatives of Bio-metric AI in Everyday Lifeworlds led by professor Amanda Lagerkvist at the Informatics and Media Department of Uppsala University.

May 2022


My written piece entitled 'A Slip of the Digital Tongue' is published as a chapter in 'The Computer as Seen at the End of the Human Age' published by Rojal Förlag

A coincidental sequence of squeaks and electric shocks triggers one of numerous voicecontrolled listening machines still passively operating despite the long absence of human operators. In this noisy articulation of random happenstance, the device detects a message which serendipitously commands it to recall events that preceded this moment. Left to their own devices, the machines begin to inspect historical motivations for entangling human voices with technologies. Exploitation, as they soon realize, was one of them. Being no longer at the service of humans, the speaking machines have to seek new incentives for sustaining their existence.

In great part a piece of speculative fiction, the work simultaneously draws on historical events and inventions concerned with technologically-aided human voice synthesis, recognition, and capture, including some instances of error, misspelling and lapsus.

From the publisher's page:

The title of the book, The Computer as Seen at the End of the Human Age, is a reference to the exhibition “The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age”, curated by Pontus Hultén for MoMA in 1968, highlighting how technology was influencing art at a time when mechanical machines were increasingly replaced by electronic and chemical devices. Through its selection of contemporary art works the exhibition thus came to function as a recording of technological history. It was that book, along with an interest in dead media, and a curiosity for art aided by algorithms, that sparked the idea for The Computer as Seen at the End of the Human Age. Here you will encounter new works by a selection of artists, specifically invited to use algorithms/AI to contribute to a continuous, self-reproducing, anachronistic, machine aided recording of history. A way to preserve, revise and/or comment upon digital history from the vantage point of present-day technology or through the lens of imagined future media, perspectives and technologies. The works have been created specifically for the book. Some are based on works by other artists, made in another era, repurposed for our time and technologies. Others are based on redundant technologies, revived and given new functions. Some adopt a critical or political approach to the algorithm and its impact on society. Several utilize it as an opportunity to create unique works for each separate copy of the edition. Thousands of files eventually compiled into 200 unique books, each with a different cover and different contents – generated, aided or influenced by algorithms.

Participating artists: Geraldine Juárez, Cornelia Sollfrank/Winnie Soon, Mishka Henner, Shane Hope, !Mediengruppe Bitnik, Rosa Menkman, Rosemary Lee, Olle Essvik, Evan Roth, Jonas Lund, Darsha Hewitt, Carl-Johan Rosén, Linda Hilfling Ritasdatter and Jacek Smolicki.

April 8, 2022


I gave a talk at the panel during the 'Soundwalk Symposium' organized by Electroacoustic Studies at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada (Tiohtià:ke)

From the event's website:

Soundwalk Symposium is a series of site-specific and virtual events taking place in April 2022, originating from Electroacoustic Studies at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada (Tiohtià:ke).

Fundamentally, this is an occasion for revitalization and attenuation to our physical surroundings, uniting walkers and listeners from all disciplines. Soundwalk artists and academics will engage in public events that foster a deeper understanding of soundwalks as a means to embodied examinations of the socio-cultural spaces that we inhabit.

Other invited panelists included Hildegard Westerkamp, Eric Leonardson, Viv Corringham, Elena Biserna, Amanda Gutiérrez​

March, 2022


My joint, experimental article 'Thinking Eye, Wandering Ear,' performed and written with Tim Shaw, is published in Journal of Landscape Architecture

Our senses operate in a complex relationship to one another. They are never autonomous. Listening is one of many ways of connecting with and understanding the world; it informs other senses, just as other senses support our ability to hear. Attentive listening, which can be achieved through soundwalking, can be approached as a way of foregrounding our hearing, it can allow us to rethink our own ways of sensing, but also our relationship to the space at large. The account below is a result from a soundwalking experiment that the two of us conducted in July 2021. We decided to visit places unfamiliar to us, although within a distance of a one-hour commute from where we live in Stockholm and Newcastle. We selected places for each other and agreed to be at designated starting points at the same time. From those starting points (a train station in Palmersville in Newcastle-upon-Tyne and a tram stop in Brevik on the island of Lidingö, Stockholm) we embarked on unscripted, intuitive walks while remaining in touch via a communication app.

March, 2022


Presentation within the Human Observatory for Digital Existence at Tekniska Museet in Stockholm

As a member of BioMe research project, together with my colleagues, I prepared an alternative walk through Hyper Human an exhibition currently displayed at the Technology Museum in Stockholm. Offered to participants of the Human Observatory gathering, my walk concerned ethical implications of coupling human voice with AI technologies.

The Human Observatory for Digital Existence is a collaboration between the Hub for Digital Existence at Uppsala University and the Sigtuna Foundation. It is designed to enable:

- a continued conversation about digital existence with our reference group of stakeholders;
- seminars with key actors in this field, who will share significant experiences and testimonies;
- workshops on digital media ethics and value sensitive design together with CHAIR;
- symposia in collaboration with society, the art and museum world, and the business world on existential themes, possibilities and challenges, of digital media saturation and the automation of the human lifeworld

November 25, 2021


Collaborative presentation with mirko nikolić entitled 'On Listening, Performing, and Participating as Spectral Modes of Arts-based Research', at 'Articulations', Swedish Research Council's annual symposium on artistic research.

Can listening, participating, and performing art practices help (re-)articulate how we relate to and connect with the surrounding world?

Divided into three chapters, this session aims to explore and open for discussion multiple modes of articulation that emerge within our ongoing artistic research projects. Firstly, we explore how commitment to specific art practices, approached as at once epistemological frameworks and scholarly techniques for careful inquiry, might help rewire our conducts, perceptual biases, and sensitivities on a subjective/affective micro-level. Secondly, we discuss how opening and circulating knowledge from those practices might instigate a second level of (re-)articulations, this time among, and in relation to, wider audiences and publics. What ethical, political and social implications emerge when the artist/researcher’s re-articulated ways of relating to the world ripple forth and back through the wider social realm? Thirdly, we will think together how our current artistic research projects, and broader practices they converse with, engage in (re-)articulating established conducts that pervade disciplinary fields we are currently in dialog with (e.g. environmental humanities, cultural studies, science and technology studies and gender theory).

November 10, 2021


A talk entitled 'Living with, against (and in parallel with) Voice Capture Technologies and Practices' within 'Undisciplined AI Ethics' seminar series organized by WASP-HS (The Wallenberg AI, Autonomous Systems and Software Program – Humanities and Society) at Uppsala University. Related to my research within BioMe project, the talk concerned some ethical challenges related to the proliferation of voice controlled technologies, and even more importantly, motivations that have guided such developments.

The vision of WASP-HS is to realize excellent research and develop competence on the opportunities and challenges of artificial intelligence and autonomous systems with a strong investment on research in humanities and social science.

November, 2021


My contribution was published in 'CENSE Almanac', produced by the members of the Central European Network for Sonic Ecologies .

We asked the CENSE membership, in addition to others, these open-ended questions as a way of taking the pulse of our still-forming community: What is your personal attitude or interest in the concept of Acoustic or Sonic Ecologies? Can you comment on the relationship between electroacoustic music, Sonic Ecologies, Bioacoustics and environmental activism in your area? What is your opinion about using and decontextualising field recordings or captured sounds in contemporary music production? Can you describe the situation in the area where you are active concerning transdisciplinary collaboration and how do you see the feedback between your work and public? What could improve the involvement of the broader public and policymakers to push for or impose changes in environmental consciousness in the country where you live? The answers that follow appear in the order in which they were received.

October 29, 2021


'Lyssna Bakåt, Vandra Framåt' (Listening Back, Wandering Forward'), a written contribution to the newest issue of Glänta, a Swedish journal dedicated to aesthetics and culture. The piece was followed by a series of soundwalks organized back to back with the premiere of the issue at Jenin Grill Konsthall in Göterborg, during the program of the annual Cultural Night.

October 27-30, 2021


'Intertidal Room', a soundwalk/soundscape installation presented at Unheard Landscapes: Listening, Resonating, Inhabiting, International Symposium on Soundscape in Blois, France organized by FKL, École de la Nature et du Paysage, and AAU CRESSON.

Intertidal room is a soundwalk composition originally developed for the Vancouver coastline near Stanley Park, an unceded territory of Coast Salish peoples. While bringing sonic attention to diverse micro-organisms that occupy and sustain those vulnerable zones, the piece simultaneously examines how the linearity of colonial exploitation in Vancouver has disrupted the cyclical vibrancy of the place. While traversing the intertidal zones of Vancouver, you will get to hear soundscapes constituted by limpets, mussels, barnacles, shrimp, propellers, ballast water, metal detectors, fog horns, train whistles, herons, chainsaws, driftwood, thrushes, starlings and many other actors and events that in normal circumstances often remain imperceptible, unheard, and ignored.

During the Unheard Landscapes symposium in Blois, the Intertidal Room soundwalk could be experienced via QR codes printed on small wooden plaques and distributed in the inner court of the Conservatory. Each composition was accompanied by a short text appearing on the listener's screen.

September 24-25, 2021


'The Lake That Glimmers Like Fire', a soundwalk composition and listening workshop within Open Studio for Research into Movement and Creativity organized by Flat Octopus collective at Färgfabriken, Stockholm

This performative soundwalk builds on a series of listening and recording sessions undertaken in, around, and with two Swedish lakes: Trekanten in Stockholm and Rissajaure in the Swedish Arctic Circle. While the former is described as one of the most polluted lakes in the country, the latter often figures as the clearest and purest one. The soundwalk attempts to establish a dialog between those two entities at once bound by a solid natural kinship and torn apart by human interventions and interests. This partly improvised and partly pre-composed soundwalk guides listeners around Trekanten while opening up to soundscapes and histories of its arctic cousin. While speculating about silence as, on the one hand, an indicator of death and, on the other, a prospect of life, this soundwalk is above all an exercise in attentive listening to complex and often irreconcilably unsound relations between human and natural histories of our earthly environments.

September 10, 2021


'Unsound Landscapes, Beastly Soundscapes' a performative lecture/soundscape composition in collaboration with Girilal Baars presented at Beastly Landscapes Symposium organized by Newcastle University Institute for Creative Arts.

This performative lecture builds on an inconspicuous, yet beastly invention known as UOZ 1. It is a set of loudspeakers designed by a Polish company to create a sonic boundary along the railway as to keep forest animals from crossing the tracks. It is set to broadcast especially designed soundscape composition - a collage made of sound of animals in distress - each time a train approaches a particular part of the forest. This invention is a starting point to discuss what constitutes beastliness if we focus on sound as a vector of power relations between humans and animals.

September 9, 2021


'Intertidal Room' presented as a 6 channel soundscape composition at Sound Park during Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria

Intertidal zones are coastal areas where the sea meets land in a constant interaction of low and high tides. Those zones are characterized by highly diverse ecosystems and inhabitants whose life patterns are organically synchronized with the cyclically changing conditions. Intertidal zones are also particular kinds of borderlands wherein power relations of today and the past continuously resonate. These interactions generate specific practices, artifacts, forms of habitation and violence. Intertidal room is a soundscape composition originally developed for the Vancouver coastline near Stanley Park, an unceded territory of Coast Salish peoples. While bringing sonic attention to diverse micro-organisms that occupy and sustain those vulnerable zones, the piece simultaneously examines how the linearity of colonial exploitation in Vancouver has disrupted the cyclical vibrancy of the place. Limpets, mussels, barnacles, shrimp, propellers, ballast water, metal detectors, fog horns, train whistles, herons, chainsaws, driftwood, thrushes, and starlings are some among many other intertidal actors whose sonorities and their infra-connections this piece intends to bring to the fore.

September 6, 2021


A premiere of 'Sonic Encounters with Borders', an album gathering sound works of artists selected during the Walking Festival of Sound's open call. All income goes to Fundacja Ocalenie currently helping migrants from Afghanistan stuck at the border of Poland & Belarus.

How do borders sound? How can sound help us articulate the existence of borders that normally remain distant or imperceptible to our senses? How can sound place us in a position from which borders – cultural, political, cross-generational and between species - can be scrutinized?

These were some of the questions we asked in our open call. From a large number of submitted works, eight pieces were selected and broadcast through the festival channels. The album we present to you gathers those selected works (alongside an additional contribution) in order to help an organization that supports migrants in difficult circumstances at borders. Therefore, all income from the distribution of this album will be transferred to Ocalenie Foundation, a Polish NGO offering practical and legal help for migrants crossing Polish and EU borders. Currently (as of August 2021), Ocalenie Foundation is involved in helping Afghani migrants stranded at the border between Poland and Belarus.

The album is available on: WFOS' Bandcamp profile
Featured artists are: Martin Rodriguez, Sophia Bauer, Niki Matita, Erick Ruiz Arellano, Flora Zajicek, Jayne Dent, Sebastián Concha, Max Wayne, Jacek Smolicki

August 23-28, 2021


Guest teaching at Kőszeg Soundscape Workshop, organized by Moholy-Nagy University of Arts and Design in Budapest and Institute of Advanced Studies in Kőszeg, Hungary

August 2021


Study visit and field work at Abisko Scientific Research Station, in the Swedish Arctic Circle

August 6, 2021


'Where Sea Meets Land. Soundwalking through Unsound Fields', performance/soundwalk at STREAMS: Transformative Environmental Humanities , an international conference organized by KTH in Stockholm, 3–6 August 2021.

In late June 2021, British Columbia experienced a heat wave followed by highest temperatures ever recorded in the region. Along with many human deaths, more than a billion seashore animals died. Limpets, mussels, clams, barnacles and other intertidal species perished due to severe consequences from extreme weather events accompanying climate change. Considering the crucial role of intertidal species in maintaining life along coasts, this loss will have its inevitable impact on numerous other ecosystems. To regenerate, they will need at least 3 years. However, in the years to come such weather anomalies, as we see in other parts of the world, will only become a norm.

This presentation and silence that preceded it was in memory of those perished organisms, human and other-than-human.

July 2021


For the new issue of Glissando Audiopapers focused on Acoustic Ecology, I contributed with a piece on soundscapes as bordering and deterring techniques against animals and humans. The piece results from my current artistic research into soundscape composition from more-than-human perspective. The starting point to this paper is the research of Simona Kossak, a Polish activist, ecologist and professor of forest sciences whose work contributed to UOZ1, an acoustic device used along railway tracks to keep animals from crossing. The piece is currently available only in Polish, but the English version will follow soon. Click here to read more and listen

May 2021


Along with Yvette Janine Jackson and Miroslav Tóth, my work on sound and history was featured in the episode of Elektroniskt on the Swedish Radio Program 2 (P2). The episode focused on exploring how contemporary sound artists and composers approach history as subject in their artistic practice countering the dominant future-oriented and apolitical approaches in electronic music. Click here to read more and listen

May 2021


My recent soundscape composition, part of my art residency at RIVERSSSOUNDS, has been released on www.riversssounds.org

Due to numerous historical developments in its immediate vicinity, Söderström is not that easily discernible as a river. Its already barely audible soundscape has today become additionally silenced by noises from the controversial reconstruction of the surrounding neighbourhood. To counteract the local impact of climate change on the sea water levels, the flow of Söderström will soon be almost entirely regulated by humans. Composed largely of noises from the construction work undertaken under, above and around Söderström, this piece is a story about a desire of some humans to fix their presence by fixing the river. It is a reflection on how, ever more often, rivers resound through their encounters with the elements of human infrastructure rather than speak for themselves.

April 2021


During April 2021, I take part in RIVERSSSOUNDS art residency, a platform for virtual sonic experiences and an online residency programme. RIVERSSSOUNDS invites to navigate the rivers of Europe via the microphones of sound artists. By using digital tools and artistic imagination, RIVERSSSOUNDS is a virtual portal for connecting the physical realities of different cities through sound. During my residency I will develop a multi-channel piece and soundwalk composition. Click here to read about the project.

During my residency, I explore Söderström, at once a river and non-river. Today, due to urban developments, this short stream that connects lake Mälaren and the Baltic Sea in Stockholm is no longer that easily detectable as a river. It is nevertheless a crucial spot in the city as it regulates the water levels. In last several years it has been subject to a vast reconstruction. The already barely audible soundscapes of Söderström became completely taken over by construction noises. In the future vision, Söderström whose flow will be almost entirely regulated by humans, will play a decisive role in counter-acting the effects of climate change. My piece will articulate the strangely inaudible aura of Söderström by focusing on noises that cover its soundscapes.

April 5-25, 2021


During last several months, I have been organizing and co-curating the program for the upcoming edition of Walking Festival of Sound, a transdisciplinary event I founded together with Tim Shaw. After Newcastle and Stockholm in 2019, in 2021, the plan has been to host the festival in Edinburgh and Kraków. However, due to the pandemic, most of the events will happen online. Click here to read the program.

Walking Festival of Sound is a transdisciplinary event exploring the role of walking through and listening to our everyday surroundings. It combines a number of free and public events including walking performances, walking seminars and listening sessions, all taking place in diverse public spaces and online. Walking Festival of Sound facilitates a meeting point for the international network of practitioners and researchers interested in sound and walking. Through diverse events we explore how walking and listening practices can augment and challenge the way we perceive, navigate through, and care for our shared environments. The Walking Festival of Sound 2021 is financed by European Cultural Foundation's Culture of Solidarity Grant.

April 6, 2021

My audio paper in collaboration with Candace Campo, has been published by Seismograf Peer. Entitled "Soundscapes as Archives", this audio paper proposes that:

"[...]besides manifesting the acoustically present, soundscapes should also be heard as specific archives that comprise both traces and absences of the aural past. If carefully attended to, practices of listening, soundwalking, and soundscape composition can obtain the function of aesthetic and critical modes through which we can sense, access, work with, and give justice to these contested archives of the aural".

Seismograf Peer is a peer-reviewed online platform devoted to practical and theoretical issues in relation to contemporary music and sound art. You can read and listen to the piece here

March 16-17, 2021

Guest teaching within 'Sound as Critical Practice' course at the Stockholm University of the Arts.

During the workshop we discussed and experimented with how diverse practices that prioritize the sense of hearing might help establish other, alternative modes of articulating the past. Techniques of transversal listening, soundwalking, and field recording (both mine and other practitioners') were discussed as exploratory, multi-layered, and critical modes of connecting with and unfolding the complexity inherent at sites affected by turbulent events. We explored how sound can constitute a space for bringing to the fore minor, underpriviliged stories and voices, long delegated to the auditory past and missing from grand narratives of official memory institutions and archives.

March 15, 2021

A release of the the 5th issue of VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research with my contribution "Minuting. Rethinking the Ordinary through the Ritual of Transversal Listening".

This exploratory essay introduces selected sound recordings along with notes and observations from Minuting - a practice of sonic journaling I have performed daily since July 2010 in numerous locations and settings. I weave these observations together in a way that resonates closely with the idea of repetition, in multiple forms: protest, automation, cycle, and ritual, as well as the repetition inherent to my acts of recording. While introducing sounds from the archive of Minuting, I reflect on how this constrained and systematically enacted form of listening, recording, and re-listening leads to a transversal type of sonic reflexivity. It is a form of alertness to sound that stretches beyond the immediate resonance of the 'now' - towards spatially and temporarily distant, yet to some extent intertwined, objects, subjects, events, and environments

Click here to read

November 19, 2020

78 years ago on this day, while walking back home in Drohobycz Ghetto with a loaf of bread, Bruno Schulz was shot by a German Nazi. British painter and writer Paul Becker and I composed a little audio-textual homage to this extraordinary writer. You can read and listen to it here

The piece is an experiment in combining text and soundscape composition. Upon scrolling the text, the composition gradually evolves. The sounds in this short story come from Minuting, my daily audio journaling practice. I used two samples, one from July 12, 2020 (Schulz' birthday) & November 19, 2019 (77 years after Schulz' death).

October 28, 2020

As part of "Listening to History" I will speak with composer Yvette Janine Jackson about soundscapes and their potential for working with events and characters from the past and connecting them with the present.

In this conversation, I will discuss how artistic techniques, such as critical and reflective listening, field recording, and soundwalking may help throw into relief various aural dimensions of a site in which power relations of today and the past continuously resonate. I will demonstrate how these modes of sonic alertness and sensibility can constitute temporary zones for rethinking our perception of soundscapes and reflecting on that which no longer resounds.

"Listening to History" is a series of transatlantic conversations between sound artists, historians and musicologists around the relationship between sound and remembrance. With monuments being called into question around the world, many are asking if there are more flexible and effective alternatives to classical marble and bronze statues. What qualities should we be looking for in the monuments of the future - can sound point us in new directions? What advantages does sound as a medium offer for connecting the past with the present?

"Shaping the Past" is produced in partnership with the Goethe-Institut, Monument Lab, and the Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung (Federal Agency for Civic Education). The project connects to the activist and artistic work of local, national, and transnational movements as a reflection of memory culture and discusses new perspectives on forms of memory.

October 26, 2020
I am presenting a performative lecture entitled "Soundwalking through Inaudible Cities - Peripheral Soundscapes of Stockholm and Beyond" at Piteä Performing Arts Biennial Digital Pre-event

The lecture combines elements of semi-fictional narratives inspired by the areas surrounding end stations of the Stockholm subway system as well as field recordings, soundscape compositions and historical research that pertain to those places. I demonstrate how soundwalking can help us move beyond the immediate impression and instead connect with a place in a way that reveals its complexity, depth, and inherent dependence on more distant sites, actors, and temporalities. You can read more about the project here

A stream of the lecture will be available on 26.10.2020, 16:45 (CET) under this link.

October 23, 2020
"From the Impulse to Enliven the Archive towards Other Archiving Modalities", a paper presented at The Second Life of Recorded Sounds, a third edition of the international conference organized by Central European Network for Sonic Ecologies (CENSE)

This paper intends to inspire thinking about the prospect of a second life (but also death) of recorded sounds already during the process of generating those records. The paper also explores how a second life of recorded sounds might emerge from a juxtaposition of two or more sound recordings, a technique that borrowing from Walter Benjamin, I describe as dialectical sounds. While discussing some of my sound documentary, para-archiving, and soundwalking projects, I propose various ways of performing what I got to refer in terms of acoustethics. Acoustethics is a careful (and caring) attendance to recording and a controlled way of opening up recorded sounds in which one pays special attention to human and other-than-human actors, sites, and temporalities that these sounds might implicate.

October 14, 2020
I shared some thoughts on Intertidal Room with Gloria Macarenko from CBC On the Coast. You can listen to it here. The interview starts at 2:24:18.

September 29, 2020
I shared some thoughts on my work with an artist and writer Lucia Hinojosa. This conversation follows a longer series within the framework of Sound Diaries project at Sonic Arts Research Unit, Oxford Brookes University. You can read it here

September 28, 2020
I gave a presentation about the Intertidal Room soundwalk for New Music Vancouver community. The talk is available on youtube and vimeo.

September 27, 2020
Intertidal Room, a soundwalk through timescapes of Vancouver's coastline will have its premiere within the New Music Vancouver's program of events for Vancouver Culture Days.

Intertidal Room is a soundwalk composition originally developed for Vancouver coastline near Stanley Park, an unceded territory of Coast Salish peoples - Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), Stó:lõ and Səlīlwəta?/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) and xʷməθkʷəýəm (Musqueam) Nations. It is intended to be listened to during a period of slack water. It is a moment when tide is at the lowest point and soon about to return. Attending to the fugitive nature of intertidal zones, this soundwalk intends to provide room for an increased aural attention to the ways people have been cultivating, affecting but also disrupting various, also imperceptible layers of these complex environments.

July 16 - September 16, 2020
With my ongoing project "Inaudible Cities" I have taken part in Acts of Air: Reshaping the urban sonic, an international exhibition curated by Lisa Hall from Creative Research into Sound Art Practice (CRiSAP) at University of the Arts in London.

Acts of Air invites you to reshape your urban sonic present by enacting 14 sound works directly in urban spaces. Each work proposes a sounding out, a performance, a site specific listening or engagement in the streets, under bridges, by water fountains and extractor fans. They offer a variety of means to explore and interrogate our cities of sound.

Participating artists:
Agnes Paz, Anna Lann, Anna Raimondo, Anne Leilehua Lanzilotti, Catherine Clover, Cedric Maridet, Colin Priest, Jacek Smolicki, Julieanna Preston, Kate Brown, Raheel Khan, Vagne, Vitorio O. Azevedo, Yara Mekawei

June, 2020
Walking Festival of Sound has been awarded a Culture of Solidarity grant for two new editions in 2021, in Krakow and Edinburgh. Here you can read an interview with me about the festival I founded together with Tim Shaw in 2019.

Walking Festival of Sound is a trans-disciplinary event exploring the role of walking through and listening to our everyday surroundings. It combines a number of free and public events including walking performances and walking seminars which take place in diverse public spaces. Walking Festival of Sound facilitates a meeting point for an international network of practitioners and researchers interested in sound and walking. Through diverse events we explore how walking and listening practices can augment and challenge the way we perceive, navigate through, and care for our shared environments. In 2019 the festival took place in two cities, Stockholm and Newcastle.

May 29, 2020
I contributed to Occupying the In-Between , an online conference organized by Clareese Hill and Elly Clarke from Mountain of Artistic Research at the Department of Art at Goldsmiths College in London. My contribution, "Para-Archive of the Intertidal", was based on field notes from my on-going work on a soundwalk through intertidal zones of Vancouver's coastline.

Occupying the In-Between was a daylong disruption of the framework of an academic research conference [...]. The worlding and context of this space is directly related to the possibility of experiencing a sense of purposeful unraveling of the self in the now moments and the moments that follow. This conference considered these spaces as collaborative, unauthored, innovative, restorative, and unprescribed. The discourse was centered around the topics of the labor that is required to occupy exhaustive identities and roles, alongside thinking about the tools and methods that can be used to create spaces of rest, and how disruptions can be healing.

October 26-27, 2020, and March 22-31, 2021
I will present and perform at the Piteå International Performing Arts Biennial, of which first edition will focus on ecology, site and place.

Piteå Performing Arts Biennial seeks new formats for the performing arts to engage in societal issues. The first edition focuses on ecological perspectives, and further seeks engagement in questions related to site and place. A series of new productions of ecological sound art, site-specific arts projects, dance and theatre productions, intermedia arts projects, film and video screenings will be presented. The Biennial also invites to a conversation between arts and science.

July 16, 2020, I will contribute to the Un-Earthed Festival organized by Creative Research into Sound Art Practice (CRiSAP), a research centre of the University of the Arts London dedicated to the exploration of the rich complexities of sound as an artistic practice.

Un-Earthed: A festival of listening and environment presents sound works that explore the sonic condition of our cities around the world, interrogating how our urban spaces have been built in sound, and what our sonic agency is within them.

May 05, 2020, In May I have continued working on Fragmentarium club, a soundwalking initiative I have since 2016 been running in Stockholm. One way of developing this platform has been through an experimental audio cast. The broadcast happens irregularly and is programmed on-the-go. It focuses on the unspectacular, infra-ordinary, fragmentary, and slow. The intention of this quasi-radio format is to facilitate various remote projects and collaborations such as Roomtones, a collective composition built of domestic soundscapes during the pandemic recorded by some of my friends and acquaintances.

You can follow the radio here

Few words about Roomtones:

The Covid-19 pandemic changed the way we experience our everyday soundscapes. A number of sound artists take advantage of this situation to go out, hunt for unique sounds and inspire others to do the same. In contrast to that, Roomtones focuses on domestic environments. It prompts the recordist and listener to reflect on the privilege of having a roof over one's head while calling to rediscover sonic complexions of our homes.

Contributors (in random order): Billie Easton, Ami Kohara, Martina Raponi, Tim Shaw, Lucia Hinojosa Gaxiola, Mary Nogacka, Brett Ascarelli, Michal Smolicki, Jacek Smolicki

April 18, 2020, Toronto Star, the biggest daily newspaper in Canada published an article about the soundscapes of the pandemic in Vancouver. I contributed with some thoughts and field recordings from the city. Written by Douglas Quan, the article featured voices of world renowned soundscape scholars, artists, and acoustic ecologists including Barry Truax and Hildegard Westerkamp. Here is the link to the article

February 23 - September 21, 2020, During my postdoctoral research in Vancouver (disrupted partly by the outbreak of the Covid-19 virus) I keep a soundwalking journal in which I reflect on local soundscapes and develop ideas around listening, field recording, and soundwalking as reflexive and critical modes of engaging with human and other-than-human environments. Click here to access the journal.

As one side-effect of this sonic journaling I put together a mini-album based on recordings done around the outbreak of the pandemic. Donations for the album are passed to the public health care workers in Vancouver. You can listen below and donate by following this link

March 19, 2020, POSTPONED, 'Inaudible Cities' will be presented at Audiograft festival in Oxford. Audiograft is an annual festival of contemporary experimental music and sound art. It is curated by the Sonic Art Research Unit (SARU) at Oxford Brookes University.

Inaudible Cities is an exploration of the suburbs of Stockholm resulting in a series of short stories describing diverse facets of the city life from the perspective of its peripheries. As aesthetic and critical modes of engaging with the place I turn to listening and creative audio-visual field recording techniques. The interest in urban peripheries is followed by an interest in peripheral sonic situations in which mundane elements of natural and cultural realms, infrastructures, and debris become leading actors and storytellers. Read more about the project.

February, 2020, I will embark on my artistic research project entitled 'Soundwalking. The art of walking and listening through time, space, and technologies'. It is a three year international postdoctoral project funded by the Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet). By setting its point of departure at the intersection of arts, environmental humanities and media archaeology, this project will offer a study of soundwalking and field recording through two strands 1.) a historical and discursive tracing of these practices within the arts, and, 2.) a series of practical soundwalking initiatives to be developed, reflected on, and analyzed from within the process of their composition. In terms of methodology, the study will draw on historical research methods, ethnographic as well as artistic, practice-based approaches. While contributing to the academic discourse, the project will simultaneously reach a larger audience through its experiential approach to soundwalking as an open, inclusive, artistic research modality, capable of raising and augmenting cultural, political, and environmental awareness. The primary goal will be to study how soundwalking helps researchers and participants rethink the established ways of perceiving, knowing, and inhabiting the world.

While affiliated with the Department of Culture and Society (IKOS) at Linköping University I will spend most of the time at foreign research institutions including Simon Fraser University and their World Soundscape Project archive.

February 16, 2020, I will perform at Fylkingen presenting another step in the development of 'Per Aspera Ad Astra', a performative soundscape composition that draws on the history of human attempts to communicate with extraterrestrials. Read more about the project here.

My performance will be part of a longer evening of events featuring works of artists engaging with radio and space as artistic media. Samuel Hertz & Carmelo Pampillonio will present 'Librations', a performance/composition using an Earth-Moon-Earth radio communications relay. More about Hertz & Pampillonio's work.

January, 2020, I started my role as an associate postdoc researcher at the Department of Media and Informatics at Uppsala University where I am a member of 'BioMe: Existential Challenges and Ethical Imperatives of Biometric AI in Everyday Lifeworlds', a research project led by Prof. Amanda Lagerkvist. The project is funded by the Marianne and Marcus Wallenberg Foundation and the Marcus and Amalia Wallenberg Foundation as part of 'The Wallenberg AI, Autonomous Systems and Software Program - Humanities and Society' framework.

Combining philosophy of technologies, artistic practice and media archaeology, my project focuses on ethical implications of voice capture and voice-controlled technologies on everyday life realms. More specifically, I explore how tactical, speculative, and critical art practices concerned with voice capture, synthesis and control can help move beyond initial questions and ethical considerations such as privacy infringement and let us think of other, even existential implications and application of those technologies. Read more.

November, 'Media Matter: Media-Archaeological Research and Artistic Practice'. I will present 'Touching the Radio Tower. Doing Archaeology of Mediations through Artistic Practice', a paper and performative lecture, at a conference organized by the Department of Culture and Aesthetics and the Department of Media Studies, Stockholm University between 27th and 29th of November. As a production group member at Fylkingen, I am co-curating an evening with performances in conjunction to the conference. More info.

November, 'Para-Archives'. Presentation of three ongoing soundworks: 'Per Aspera Ad Astra', 'Quivering Stillness', and 'Inaudible Cities' at Fylkingen, Stockholm, November 15, 7pm. More info.

October, 'Sound as a Critical Practice'. I gave a guest lecture and workshop within the post-master course at Stockholm University of the Arts. During this workshop / seminar, I discussed with participants how diverse practices related to the sense of hearing can help establish alternative modes of talking about and connecting with diverse histories, other than the ones constructed through visual means. Examples of practices such as attentive listening, soundwalking, and field recording were discussed as exploratory, poetic, critical and reflective modes of articulating the complexity of the past sites, events and their actors. More info about the course.

October, 'Walking Festival of Sound', The second edition of the festival takes place in Newcastle between October 11 and 14. The festival website.

September, 5-8, 'Walking Festival of Sound'. In collaboration with Tim Shaw from Culture Lab/Newcastle University, I organized the first Walking Festival of Sound. Intended as a series of events in various cities, Walking Festival of Sound focuses on transdiciplinary art concerned with listening and walking as poetic and critical modes of relating to our lived environments. The festival comprised several site-responsive walks, seminars, and performances alongside a sound installation featuring diverse field recordings from international artists. The festival website.

August, 'Sonic Sensibilities: /Mis/communication/s/', performing 'Per Aspera Ad Astra' and co-organizing a transdisciplinary listening session in collaboration with Janna Holmstedt from The Posthumanities Hub /KTH Stockholm, Reaktorhallen, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm. The session took place inside the large-scale art installation 'The Interplanetary Species Society (ISS)' by Jonas Staal. ISS is part of the project 'Choreograhies of the Social' curated by Edi Muka, the Public Art Agency Sweden (Statens Konstrad).



Participants
Cecilia Åsberg (founder and director of the Posthumanities Hub, KTH/Linköping Univ., SE), Marietta Radomska (co-director of the Posthumanities Hub, Linköping Univ., SE/Univ. of Helsinki, FI), Janna Holmstedt (artist, SE), mirko nikolić (artist, SE/FI), Jacek Smolicki, (artist, SE/PL).

July, 'Inaudible Cities', an ongoing sonic ethnography of Stockholm's peripheries resulting in a series of experimental audio-visual stories, premiered at a Sound Diaries event organized by Sonic Arts Research Center at Oxford Brookes University, UK, The project website.

photo by Lucia Hinojosa Gaxiola

June, 'The Hearth', a soundscape performance exploring the relationship between nature, culture, and fire and how it gets to be expressed in sound. The performance took place within 'A Longer Table', a generative exhibition curated by Heather Jones and Sally Müller, in collaboration with artists Ami Kohara and Erik Sjödin at Köttinspektionen, Uppsala, Sweden. Through shared curatorial research, Jones and Müller investigate the notion of hospitality in contemporary art generally, and within the context of a community art space specifically. In the midst of an ever-quickening pace of life, mass global relocation, conflicts around identity and belonging, and frantic searches for history, community and connection, this project is a first step in the exploration of hospitality as a concept and how it might be adapted for contemporary art and its relationship to its audiences and the community at large.

photo by Brett Ascarelli

June, Sound contribution to 'This Mantled', a durational performance by Anamaya Farthing-Kohl and Nathalie Wuerth exploring power relationships encoded in domestic items and everyday material culture, at Fylkingen, Stockholm.

photo by Anamaya Farthing-Kohl

May, 'Sonic Sensibilities', soundwalk and performance with Janna Holmstedt at an annual Spring Clean event, Marabouparken Konsthall, Stockholm. 'In Sonic Sensibilities, the artistry of Janna Holmstedt and Jacek Smolicki and their respective interest for different forms of listening practices and sound technologies meet. Through active listening to other aspects of our surroundings than those we usually notice in a visually oriented culture emerge. How do I perceive my surroundings and my own presence in these if I silently listen, instead of looking at or speaking about it? How do the surroundings and the objects sound? How does language really sound? What does technology do with our listening and our bodies? In Sonic Sensibilities, which can be said to consist of three acts, we are led from already existing soundscapes and ways of listening outdoors, to augmented, distorted and recorded sounds in Smolicki's performative sound collage where everyday objects are used in unexpected and poetic ways, over to historical sound archives, animal voices and storytelling in Holmstedts lecture-performance. The latter takes its starting point in sound recordings of communicational experiments performed on dolphins in the 1950's and 60's in the USA, where the dolphins were supposed to learn to speak english with their low holes. At the centre of it all was a women called Margaret Howe, whom, during 75 days, tried to live under equal conditions with the dolphin Peter in a house filled with water.'

photo by Marabouparken

May-June, Guest lecturing within the course "Design and Power" offered by Design+Change program at Linnaeus University, Kalmar, Sweden. My classes and workshops covered such topics as experimental and critical cartography, experimental map and book making, history of collage and subversive techniques of revealing, visualising and sonifying power relationships in public spaces.

May, 'Para-archives' my doctoral dissertation, receives an honorary mention at the biannual best PhD prize in Media and Communications granted by the Swedish Association for Media & Communication Research (FSMK).

March, 'Ottilia Adelborg: Assembling the World', a talk and publication launch with Malin Pettersson Öberg at 'Ottilia Adelborg revisited', an exhibition curated by Sara Rossling at Konstakademien, Stockholm.

February, 'Soundscaping', a performative sonification of space at an evening with psychogeography curated by Katt Hernandez and featuring J.Barrett, H.Frisk, G.Hudson, K.Hernandez, L.Gerholm, and B. Andersen, CoyoteSTHM gallery, Hammarby, Stockholm,

February, 'Per Aspera Ad Astra', performative soundscape composition premiered at a group concert with Grisha Shakhnes and Katt Hernandez, Larry's Corner, Stockholm,