After 2 wonderful weeks in Korea to develop and facilitate first iterations of the workshop, Sounds from Earth is coming to Amsterdam! We will give a 2-day version of our workshop Sounds from Earth, an international collaboration between Hackers & Designers, Diana Band, and Heeju Lim with the students of the Design Department of Sandberg Insituut.

Only Sandberg Design department students are able to join the workshop

A shorter workshop open to all, and an evening of sound exploration at occii will take place the following week on December 7.

Sounds from Earth is a series of workshops about world-building, live-action role-play, and working with simple electronics. We invite participants to co-create a fictional narrative while building a network of small electronic objects that facilitate (re)connection to and communication with our surroundings. The sounding network explores communication beyond the use of words, allowing to approach “nature” not as something to dominate and extract from but as something we are part of and live with and we need to relearn to attune to.

Context

Sounds from Earth is a collaborative artistic exploration between the Netherlands and South-Korea, Hackers & Designers, dianaband and Hee-ju, that aims to create a space to critically and imaginatively address the ecological impact of user technologies: from the construction of large-scale data centers that damage or even erase local habitats, to the fiber optic cables that impact the marine environment through heat, turbidity (during cable burial), risk of fatal entanglement of sea life and the introduction of artificial substrates into the ecosystem. Interventions into the deep-sea environment as well as terrestrial mining used to source materials such as lithium or cobalt for chips and other components inside our communication devices and network infrastructures are exhausting the earth and are the cause of geopolitical tensions and asymmetrical distribution of wealth and power.

The workshop is developed over different iterations, during which participants join in co-creating new collective imaginaries and narratives around alternative, regenerative formats and devices for networked communication and eco-conscious interfacing with our environments. The workshops are open to participants with different technological abilities and of various ages, from teenagers to elders and everything in between.

In this workshops we will bring tools, skills, and pedagogies together to explore our relation to the environment through non-verbal communication with other-than-human entities. Inspired by natural networks of communication such as mycelium, we ask ourselves how we can enter into meaningful, reciprocal dialogue with the world around us and achieve a deeper sense of interconnectedness.

What information do we collect around us, what is legible, and what do we understand, interpret, and project meaning onto? What is lost in translation? Can we get comfortable with the miscommunications and the unknown?

Lore

Together we are a forest!

it doesn't matter what shape we have in this forest or what sounds we make, we are all interconnected into a chaotic polyphony. We each have our own personality but make sense as a whole. The wind is a vital force in our ecosystem and accompanies us through our cycles. Its unpredictable nature maintains our community, it's bringing us the energy we need in mysterious ways.

An echo in the wind brought us a rumor: the wind could become still, which would threaten our unique ecosystem's equilibrium... and sooner than we can imagine... we know that, because we attune to the wind and to each other in our own unique way . We do so with the help of symbiotic companions that help us channeling messages of the wind and carry our worries and hopes for the wind to consider.

The wind doesn't understand words, only maybe intentions through sounds, vibrations and blows, that is how we send and interpret messages.

Our companions are made of extracted minerals and oils transformed into components that we found discarded from others in our ecosystem...

When the wind blows with a certain strength and in a certain direction, we come together to send our wishes to the wind.....

Workshop Details

In this workshop we will work with ESP32 modules, motors, pure data and our imagination :)

Sounds from Earth is supported by The Cultural Participation Fund.

The Cultural Participation Fund aims to encourage and increase participation in the arts and culture.