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, 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, 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, Toronto Star, the biggest daily newspaper in Canada published an article about the soundscapes of the pandemic in Vancouver. I was happy to contribute 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, 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, 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, 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, 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, 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.

December, 'BioMe: Existential Challenges and Ethical Imperatives of Biometric AI in Everyday Lifeworlds' was presented among other 15 projects during an international workshop organized by 'The Wallenberg AI, Autonomous Systems and Software Program - Humanities and Society' in Stockholm. From January 2020, I will be part of this project hosted at the Department of Media and Informatics at Uppsala University in Sweden. Funded by Marianne and Marcus Wallenberg Foundation and the Marcus and Amalia Wallenberg Foundation and led by Prof. Amanda Lagerkvist, BioMe will explore ethical and existential challenges posed by AI technologies in everyday realms. My study will concern history and the present condition of voice capturing technologies as well as inventive, activist, artistic and critical practices of counter-acting what I call the panacoustic condition. 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, '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. Stockholm, 5-8 September 2019. 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,

2018

November, 'Returning the Ear', art residency with Tim Shaw at Inter Arts Center (IAC) and mini-tour in Copenhagen, Denmark (Illutron), Malmö (IAC), Stockholm (Fylkingen), Sweden

October/November, 'Footbook for Soundwalking', (forthcoming 2019), a custom-made art/research residency at Arc Artist Residency, Romainmôtier, Switzerland

July, 'Listening Back, Listening Ahead', soundscape/soundwalk composition in conjunction with the International World Listening Day, broadcast on Resonance FM, and Resonance Extra, London, UK,

July, 'Gagnef Soundscapes', sound performance at Gagnef Festival 2018, Gagnef, Sweden

July, 'Assembling the World', design and premiere of a publication co-edited with Malin Pettersson Öberg in conjunction to the exhibition Unfold a Place, at the Ottilia Adelborg Museum in Gagnef, Sweden

June, 'The Spring Thing', coorganizing and participating in a forum on artistic research at Arc Residency in Jura Mountains, Romainmôtier-Envy, Switzerland

May, Guest lecturing and leading a workshop on mapping and documenting historical and present power relations in public space in Krakow/Poland, within the course "Design and Power" offered by Linnaeus University, Växjö, Sweden

April, 'Cache 22: on Lures and Traps of Digital Memory', talk at the closing event of Living Archives research project at Malmö Museum, Malmö, Sweden

April, 'Quivering Stillness', sound performance at the closing event of Living Archives research project at Malmö Museum, Malmö, Sweden

April, 'Disrupted Witnessing', w/Tim Shaw presented within Testimony - Politics or Truth at Historical Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Sarajevo

March, 'Disrupted Witnessing', w/Tim Shaw presented within Testimony - Politics or Truth, curated by Noa Treister at Volkskundemuseum (Folklore museum), Vienna, Austria

February, 'Alienating and Affirmative Power of Contemporary Mnemotechnologies', talk at Documedial Revolution seminar, Collè ge d'études mondiales de la FMSH, Paris, France

January, Thematic residency on artistic research at Arc Residency in Jura Mountains, Romainmôtier, Switzerland

2017

December, 'Para-Archives:Rethinking Personal Archiving Practices in the Times of Capture Culture', PhD defense at School of Arts and Communication, Malmö University, Sweden.

November, 'Post-Digital Archives', talk and inaguration of Para-Archives, a post-digital publication series at Thinking Through the Digital in Literature, international conference in Linköping, Sweden.

September, '[Post]-[Digital]-[Archives]', exhibition and soundwalk at Inter Arts Center (IAC) in Malmö, Sweden (curating and participating). Invited artists and practitioners: Olle Essvik, Tim Shaw, Malin Pettersson Öberg, Ronda Bautista, Jenny Soep, Nikita Mazurov, Lucy N. Read more

September, 'Soundwalking as Para-archiving', talk at Det Trä dje Öret, (The Third Ear), Lund University, (IAC), Malmö, Sweden

July, 'Stockholm Soundwalk', multi-modal soundwalk in conjunction with the World Listening Day, Stockholm, Sweden

May, 'Fragmentarium - on Post Digital Archives', talk and exhibition at GeoMedia conference in Karlstad, Sweden

April, 'Fragmentality-Palma', residency, workshop, soundwalk and exhibition in collaboration with Ronda Bautista, Cac Ses Voltes, Palma de Mallorca, Spain

March, Talk with Maria Renée Morales Lam at IASPIS open house, Stockholm,

February, 'Returning the Ear', collaborative sound-walk and performance with Tim Shaw, Northern Charter, Newcastle, UK

2016

September, 'Amble', collaborative residency, sound-walk performance w/Tim Shaw, Les Weekends du ROY Festival, Arc Residency in Jura Mountains, Romainmôtier-Envy, Switzerland

August, 'Returning the Ear', collaborative sound-walk with Tim Shaw, Science and Technology by Other Means 4S/EASST conference in Barcelona, Spain

June, 'Sonic Flaneurie' workshop, presentation and soundwalk, Flaneur Festival, Oslo, Norway

June, 'On Lifelogging and Quantified Self', interview for Medea Vox/Malmö University, Sweden

April, 'Fragmentarium', talk at a symposium on artists' books 'After the book' at the City Library in Linköping, Sweden

March, 'Minuting' online residency at InSonora festival of sound and interactive arts, Madrid, Spain

2015

November, 'Reality Backup', solo exhibition at Gallery Detroit/Stockholm

October, '24 Hour Reenactments', durational performance together with the Living Archives research group, AHA festival of Art and Science at Chalmers University Göteborg, Sweden

September, 'The Only Thing We Have to Fear is...' presentation at the symposium on Media Archaeology Lab and Artistic Practices, Data Museet, Linköping, Sweden

June, 'The Art of Self-Tracking', curatorial co-direction with Alberto Frigo and participation in a group show at Mason Fort back to back with Quantified Self conference in San Francisco, USA

2014

March, 'Street-sampling Madrid', installation, performance and workshop at In-Sonora, VIII Festival of Sound and Intermedia Arts, Madrid, Spain

2013


November, 'On the Art and Act of Archiving in the Digital Age', conducting a workshop on Augmented Reality at Moholy Nagy Institute of Art and Design, Budapest, Hungary

November, Performing within Tarek Atoui's project 'Metastable Cut' at 'The Art of Memory' Exhibition at Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm, Sweden

October, 'Slussen Project', sound installation at Medborgarplatsen Library, Stockholm, Sweden

October, 'AffeXity', installation and performance co-developed with Living Archives research group members (Susan Kozel, Jeannette Ginslov, Camilla Ryd and Daniel Spikol) within the ReNew performance art festival in Copenhagen, Denmark

September, 'Hökarängen Project', sound installation and performance at the group exhibition 'Aural Spatiality', Stockholm, Sweden

July, 'Open hAir', sound installation and performance in collaboration with Azusa Itagaki, Norbergfestival, Norberg, Sweden

June, 'Slussen Project: Archiving the Ephemeral' sound installation at Musik Museet, Stockholm, Sweden

March, 'District 1941-1943', artistic direction and production of a commemorative soundwalk for the Jewish Culture Festival, Krakow, Poland