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Nocturne: Sonic Migrations will be the 19th transmission by the Radio Amnion platform/sonic sculpture. Its programmes are broadcast over each full moon from the transmitter's position "far beyond human perception," located on a multi-faceted neutrino telescope more than 2kms deep in Cascadia Abyssal Plain, the most extensive deep-sea channel currently known of the Pacific Ocean.
Artist Jol Thoms, creator and curator of Radio Amnion, writes that the project "was designed to quietly relay spirited messages from artists and researchers directly to the Ocean itself—within the planet—considered as a sentient type of being, a living, knowledgeable creature. A type of reverse Golden Record of the voyager space craft, Radio Amnion seeks responsible communication with the more-than-non-human world."
This transmission will start at UTC 3:08 pm on the 8th of December, at the height of the fullness of the moon, and will continue until the 10th December. It will also be available for listeners online throughout the transmission, by visiting Radio Amnion's website here.
If you weren't in Hobart for the performance in February (or even if you were), please tune in!
Please see below for more about Nocturne: Sonic Migrations, and the conceptual and technical aspects of the Radio Amnion platform.
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NOCTURNE SONIC MIGRATIONS
Matt Warren
Sally Ann McIntyre
Dani Kirby
Curated by Eliza Burke
https://constanceari.org/nocturne-sonic-migrations
Nocturne: Sonic Migrations is a collaborative composition and live-performance sound and transmission artwork exploring relationships between whales and other marine species, humans and the marine environment. It is addressed to historic Southern right whale populations of the Derwent River in nipaluna/Hobart, lutruwita/Tasmania, that were hunted to near-extinction in the 19th century by British invaders. In settler-colonial accounts, these whales were once so numerous in the Derwent that their sound kept local residents awake at night. The work attempts to listen to these entangled more-than-human legacies through/against their contemporary ecological silencing, traces resonating through a contemporary restlessness about ecological disasters of human making, and centuries of unsettled sleep.
Warren, McIntyre and Kirby employ a range of mediums such as radio transmission, theremin, electronics and live vocal performance, to present a series of sonic ‘migrations’ across several datasets and sites. The composition invites listeners into a submerged, episodic, dreamlike soundscape that follows six stages of the human sleep cycle, blending bioacoustic data from the Australian Antarctic Division’s Southern Ocean voyages, recorded and live environmental sound, live electroacoustic elements, and recorded vocal interviews with nipaluna/Hobart residents. Throughout, the project's subtle shifts in mood and expression, which produce an abstract narrative, simultaneously familiar and alien, combine acknowledgement of violent pasts of resource extraction with contemporary and future imaginings of whales as kin. Moving beyond human-centred listening spaces Nocturne: Sonic Migrations re-imagines the local marine environment as both a regenerative and haunted space and a significant site for interspecies communications.
This collaboration with the Radio Amnion platform materially and conceptually extends Nocturne: Sonic Migrations in several fruitful directions. Firstly, moving the project from its initial site-specific presentation on the nipaluna/Hobart waterfront in February 2022 - where it was heard by a (predominantly) human audience at the approximate site of historic mass cetacean bio-extractive slaughter - to the further translation processes of underwater broadcast. Secondly, this re-transmission takes the original concept of a mourning and memorialisation ritual that acknowledges settler-colonial violence and complicity in the ecological silencing of whales and their entanglement with the economics of empire, and re-orients it toward a future that places the work among living cetaceans, the sounding of their complex social systems, and their wider ecologies. In this, we encounter the very real possibility that our work will be heard within a wider ecological circuit of oceanic sensory and communicative exchange; encountering and addressing not only individual creatures or species but, through entering into relation with their communicative networks and living relationships, a Pacific ocean itself "considered as a sentient type of being, a living, knowledgeable creature."
Acknowledgements
Nocturne: Sonic Migrations was performed on the nipaluna/Hobart waterfront, lutruwita/Tasmania, on February 18, 2022. It was assisted through Arts Tasmania with support from Constance ARI and The City of Hobart’s Creative Hobart. The artists gratefully acknowledge Dr Brian Miller and the Australian Antarctic Division for generously sharing their bio-acoustic data for this project. Thanks to Ivan Johnson for recording this event. Thanks also to Tricky Walsh, Mary Scott, Lucienne Rickard, David Patman, Annalise Rees and Rona Hollingsworth for sharing their thoughts and voices for this project.
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RADIO AMNION: SONIC TRANSMISSIONS OF CARE IN OCEANIC SPACE is a multi-year sound art project for the waters of Earth, commissioning and relaying new compositions by contemporary artists more than 2kms deep with/in the Pacific Ocean. During each full moon, far beyond human perception, the abyssal waters of Cascadia Basin resonate with the deep frequencies and voices of invited artists. All transmissions are relayed in the sea through a submerged neutrino telescope experiment’s calibration system and available here online only during the three days of each full moon. Register to be notified for our next transmissions.
The Radio Amnion project is possible due to a collaboration with the ‘P-ONE’ ‘neutrino telescope’ experiment of the SFB1258: Neutrino and Dark Matter Group at the Technical University of Munich. The ‘P-ONE’ telescope is partnered with Ocean Networks Canada: a vast underwater oceanographic observatory monitoring marine ecosystem function, deep-sea biodiversity, and multiple geological dynamics with their 840 km NEPTUNE Observatory in the Pacific north west.
Invocations, blessings & affirmations from Radio Amnion are first and foremost for and to the Ocean, streamed in those remote cyclic depths that irrigate our connected lives and worlds. Artist’s compositions enter and expand these new hybrid spaces where ecology and astronomy intersect, where deep sea and deep space convene, where scientific and cultural cosmologies develop new types of relationships.
SONIC PLATFORM
The bronze, glass, steel, rubber and electronics sound sculpture—the Radio Amnion Sonic Platform designed by artist Jol Thoms—is one of several hundred glass spheres that make up the aquatic P-ONE telescope. The other glass orbs house optical equipment designed to register and amplify the faster-than-light UV signals caused by rare neutrino particle intra-actions in the sea water. The Sonic Platform was designed to quietly relay spirited messages from artists and researchers directly to the Ocean itself—within the planet—considered as a sentient type of being, a living, knowledgeable creature. A type of reverse Golden Record of the voyager space craft, Radio Amnion seeks responsible communication with the more-than-non-human world.
Using the calibration system of the telescope, and through a process of ‘Fourier transforming’ artists compositions into frequency space, a complimentary selection of spheres also transmit rhythms of light deep into the abyssal body.
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