Listening Session: TRANSMIT, volume II

Event

Launch of TRANSMIT II

Spruce Speaks Before It Breaks - A work by Nele Möller

This audio essay tunes into the environmental, historical and ideological echoes of the Thuringian Forest in the East of Germany. It listens with trees and bark beetles, with foresters and culture women, with myths and ideologies.

The Thuringian Forest is an ancient grown forest, estimated to be 10.000 years old. In the last two centuries of heightened industrialisation, much of the ancient forest has been replanted with a monoculture of fast-growing trees. This monoculture forest has struggled to adapt to hotter and dryer climatic conditions, with the weakened trees being devastated by an outbreak of bark beetles (Ips typographus). To prevent the spread of the bark beetle, the forest management answers with extensive clear-cuts to remove the supposedly 'infected' trees.

Research project featured in Volume II

Spruce Speaks Before It Breaks is part of the PhD research project The Forest Echoes Back — Receiving and Transmitting Forest Conversations Through an Ecology of Listening by Nele Möller. The research project tunes into the reverberative effects of these ongoing processes of change. Practices of critical listening, field recording, environmental live audio streaming and mimesis are developed as methods of interaction with various forest actors that include human hunters and foresters, bark beetles, ancient and monoculture trees, birds, buck and fungi. With a focus on the sonic, the works that will emerge from these interactions are audio essays, long-durational listening sessions, written explorations and performances.

TRANSMIT Platform

TRANSMIT is a platform for creative audio works that disclose investigations, collaborations and methodologies of artistic research. Comprising experimental narrative works in the form of radio essays, sonic stories or audio dispatches, each work is created by a LUCA researcher in collaboration with radio makers, sound artists and writers. The series exemplifies artistic research as a distinct mode of knowledge production and one capable of engaging audiences beyond art and research domains.

Programme

14:30 - 16:00 Listening session: Spruce Speaks Before It Breaks

16:00 - 17:30 Open discussion with the participants on radio works as a form of artistic research dissemination. What are the processes involved in creating, listening to and transmitting audio essays and how do we work and guide through them?

Date: June 9, 14:30 - 17:30
Location: CINEMATEK, Baron Horta 9, 1000 Brussels
Free and open to all, but registration is required due to limited seating.

Credits