Southern Soundscapes
The above recording is a composition using looped audio samples elements of an imaginary Antarctican soundscape: wind, ice, snow, some footsteps, some creatures, water, waves. It has been recorded to serve as an example of an Antarctican exhibition installation, where northern visitors can create their own immersive soundscape mixes using a MIDI keyboard. The function of this is to simultaneously bring Antarctica closer to the northern experience, without removing anything from the continent, or having to travel there.
The entire audio sample pack for this project can be downloaded here.
In 2020-21, I began collaborating with Thomas Barningham, who works at Halley IV station and sent him a field recorder and hydrophone to start capturing simple, abstract audio samples and photographic materials as the foundation of creating a new body of work.
On the subject of the Environmental Protocol, I also noted, which Thomas confirmed, that no one is permitted to remove anything from Antarctica. No plants, no rocks, no ice - nothing. Despite there being a high probability that Antarctica holds astonishing reserves of natural "resources", the extraction industries, who no doubt would love to exploit this (more or less) pristeen wilderness, have thus far been fended off.
Perhaps this is one of the aspects of what "peace" means in Antarctica, that we leave it alone? A question comes: do we go there at all? There are four groups of humans who regularly go to Antarctica (scientists, tourists, the military and fishers). Is their precence there benign? Can it be? Perhaps peace means we leave the whole thing alone in the true sense of the word? Really alone. No humans at all.
I, like most people, must admit, that I am surrounded by output from the extractive industries. Moreover, I constantly interact with it. While the photos and audio recordings I am hoping to receive from Antarctica are in themselves as intangible as phantoms, the physicality of these media is not the medium, but it's container and the tools associated with its capture. The camera, the microphone, all the associated wires, the computers, the screens, the hard drives, the vehicles used to get somewhere and the fuel they consume. This is all physical matter, utterly dependent on extraction.
I get to thinking about whether, even though I am not personally in Antarctica, can I still advocate for it? And can I do so whilst both leaving it in peace and removing nothing from it?
So while I wait for the recordings and photos to return to this more comfortable climate, I present here an experiment in what I call "advocating through imagination", which removes nothing from Antarctica whatsoever, and not a great deal from anywhere else, not even simulacra pressure waves or photons. In my opinion, imagination is owned by the imaginer. It is mine to share.
I do have a small clue of what Antarctica sounds like. Partly from nature documentaries, but also from a record "Antarctica - A Portrait In Wildlife And Nature Sound", but I haven't listened to it for a few years. Instead, I sat down and tried to imagine what Antarctica sounds like. Mostly wind, a bit of ice, some creatures. Mostly I used my own body, but there's some other recordings that I pulled out of the archive, completely unrelated to Antarctica, but seemed to work well in the mix. These samples are all 30 second loops, which I have set up to be triggered by my MIDI keyboard, the idea being that I can "play" the imaginary Antarctican soundscape live.
I wonder, is this a way that I can represent peace, or does it need the authenticity of "real" recordings? Listeners are welcome to use these recordings for whatever project they like, or create their own imagined Antarctican compositions.
Graeme Walker, Peaceful Order of Antarcticans, Spring 2021
