Composing with Soundscapes

Sound-walking through Time, Space, and Technologies

During this talk, Dr. Smolicki will guide the audience through several of their 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. They will 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.

This talk will simultaneously be an invitation to a following series of workshops for those interested in critically rethinking soundscapes and sound-marks of the Boston area.

Jacek Smolicki is an interdisciplinary artist, designer, researcher and educator. His work brings temporal, existential and critical dimensions to listening, recording and archiving practices and technologies in diverse contexts. Besides working with historical archives and documents, Smolicki develops other modes of sensing, recording, and mediating stories and signals from specific sites, scales, and temporalities. His work is manifested through sound-walks, soundscape compositions, diverse forms of writing, site-responsive performances, experimental para-archives, and audio-visual installations.

He has performed, published, and exhibited internationally (e.g.,In-Sonora Madrid, Moscow International Biennale for Young Art, AudioArt Kraków, Ars Electronica, Linz, and Historical Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Sarajevo). His broad scope of site-responsive works includes projects concerned with the soundscapes of the Swedish Arctic Circle, the Canadian Pacific Coast, the world’s tallest wooden radio mast in Gliwice, the UFO testimonies from the Archive for the Unexplained in Sweden, the Jewish Ghetto in Kraków, the former sites of the Yugoslav Wars among many other places.

He holds PhD from the School of Arts and Communication at Malmö, and between 2020-2023 pursues an international postdoc within artistic research funded by the Swedish Research Council. Located at Linköping University in Sweden, Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, and Harvard, USA, his research explores the history and prospects of field recording and sound-walking practices from the perspective of arts, environmental humanities, and philosophy of technology. In 2022/2023 he is a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at Harvard. He is also an associate scholar at the Informatics and Media Hub for Digital Existence at Uppsala University where he explores sonic capture cultures and the impact of AI technologies on human and other-than-human voices. He is a co-founder of Walking Festival of Sound, a trans-disciplinary and nomadic event exploring the critical and reflective role of walking through and listening to our everyday surroundings. Every day since July 2010, Smolicki has been making a one-minute recording of a public soundscape.

More on www.smolicki.com