It’s been a while since I last posted one of these installments to the blog. If you’ve been checking in here for the past year, you will have noticed that my activity here has been restricted to a handful of essays.
I had intended to keep these Communiques going too, since I feel like they fulfill something that posts to social media or my essays can’t facilitate – namely, a newsletter of sorts or missives with a bit of substance to them.
And that’s where I’d like to pick up from. On the personal and professional front, this year has been, well..something else. Whilst it’s been largely on the positive side of things, it’s been intensive and my health, wellbeing and establishing a semblance of balance has taken priority.
And sleep when I’ve been able to locate it.
As a consequence of this, creative endeavors largely took a back seat for the first half of the year. However, as I managed to find an equilibrium of sorts I spent a little more time in the studio, threw a microphone rig into the car and exhibited some new work.
Essays
Writing has been something of a constant over the past couple of years and it has been something I’ve wanted to put more energy into. As I mentioned from the outset, up to now these essays have been published here, but I’ve also set up a Substack called Joy In Ruination. Going forward all essays will end up here and will continue to touch on themes of acoustic ecology, listening, memory and the environment.
Fleurieu & Kangaroo Island Sound Map
The long-running project entered its twelfth year in 2023 and I spent a couple of months (on and off) attempting to pull together a new update for the site. Eventually it all came together in August – much to my relief.
The delay wasn’t due to lack of material or its inherent quality, rather as the sound map’s evolved over the years, so has the amount of work that goes into each update. It doesn’t matter how much I refine my process flowchart and spreadsheets to keep track of everything (listening, writing field notes, editing sound files, updating HTML, etc), attention to detail and quality control takes time.
I’m proud that this has become the guiding principle behind the project (and that I haven’t gone in the opposite direction), but I really should get around to properly learning how to use OSX’s Automator to speed a few things up.
Largely due to my Fleurieu ‘base camp’ being in Yankalilla since 2017, the bulk of site recording has occurred on the western side of the Fleurieu, with eastern locales (such as Victor Harbor, Port Elliot, Goolwa) being largely neglected. Thankfully, an exhibition opportunity brought me back to Victor Harbor for a much overdue visit.
Solastalgia and Two Sites
Way back in 2020 I had been invited to be part of group exhibition called Solastalgia with participating artists prompted to reflect on the recent Black Summer bushfires, the climate crisis, as well as underlying themes of loss, grief and return. The advent of the COVID-19 pandemic initially delayed and pushed the exhibition into 2021, then other disruptions pushed it out further. Eventually – and due largely to the tireless efforts of curator Jo Wilmot – the exhibition would go ahead in August 2023 at the Coral Street Art Space in Victor Harbor.
The work I developed is, on the one hand, one of the simplest works I’ve made, but is fairly ambitious in terms of its technical scope and implementation. Well, ambitious for me. Aside from being a sound artist for the best part of nearly two decades and being wedded to digital technology from the get-go, integrating autonomous circuits, microprocessors or small computers in work has never been my comfort zone. Whilst I could easily level the blame at a dodgy Arduino, too often I haven’t reached out for assistance from others or read documentation properly. Years or discouragement and avoidance ensued.
Thankfully there’s been a turnaround in my outlook since I started using a Raspberry Pi this year and successfully incorporated one into the work, Two Sites (2023.)
Consisting of a small wooden box with two buttons and three LEDs, the Raspberry Pi is housed inside and facilitates the playback of two field recordings made on Kangaroo Island in October 2019 and September 2020 respectively. Each of the recordings represent a soundscape prior to and following the 2019-2020 bush fires which burned a third of the island.
By pressing the button on the left side, the 2019 recording plays and the other button plays the 2020 recording. If a button is pressed whilst the other recording is still playing, there will be a crossfade between the recordings. The green and red LEDs indicate which recording has been selected, whilst the yellow LED represents a status that a button has been pressed. Below each of the buttons is a card detailing basic information about each of recordings and on the flip side is a QR code with a link to this accompanying essay.
It’s a very straightforward work and I did have some reservations about presenting it. Especially since I hadn’t exhibited a work in a gallery environment for some time. I admit that when the exhibition was given the go-ahead for this year, I imposed a certain degree of pressure on myself to do something big.
In the end though, I’m glad I went with a more restrained approach.
Big tech, small tech
I think there’s a perceived pressure on artists, especially those who utilise technology in their works, to strive towards greater sophistication and complexity as their practice develops. I think this is one of the trappings of a practice like sound art, since its realisation is typically reliant on technology, and an artist opting to present a ‘stripped back’ work using the basic framework of a given technology might be perceived – by themselves or an audience – as a bit of a cop out.
With regard to Two Sites, above all, my intention was to present a work with a means of facilitating a direct engagement with the listener, with the headphones being a clear prompt for listening. This is one of the reasons why I kept things as simple as possible and used a Raspberry Pi as a proxy for the functionality of an iPad or iTunes playback, albeit without being identified as such. The wooden box with its two buttons, LEDs and the enclosed Pi are the technological sum of their parts and represent the work in its entirety.
This in itself feels like a significant accomplishment, since previously the audio source and/or playback technology in my works has often been deliberately stored out of view. Here, the Pi is still enclosed out of sight, but is very much integrated into the work. The work may be simple in its presentation, but I feel it’s certainly sophisticated in its design.
The design of Two Sites also represents one of the first instances in my practice of a scalable work, where as I develop my knowledge of programming a Pi, I will build the confidence to create more sophisticated work. I’m very excited about the prospect of this.
Festival Of Nature
In the meantime, I’m equally excited to be re-exhibiting Two Sites again in October! This time around I’ll be installing the work at the Yankalilla Library as part of the Fleurieu Coast’s Festival of Nature from the 7th to 15th October.
The short turnaround has provided a bit of time to review the Python code, including a means of logging user interactions to a dataset and tidying up the internal components – including mounting the Pi to some LEGO bricks. If the latter feature sounds a little silly, from a practical standpoint it’s worked a treat!
Wrangling In The Antipodes
Lastly, on the programming front I’ve managed to produce a couple of new entries on my ‘data science meets acoustic ecology’ blog, Wrangling In The Antipodes. It may appeal to those of you with a preference for field observations, spectrograms, code extracts and nice looking scatterplots.
TRISTAN LOUTH-ROBINS 
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