9th August 2024
(In)audible Presences is an ongoing, long-term exploration of the documentation practices associated with wildlife sound recording. Via an exhibited archive of typewritten A5 pages, the project challenges established approaches to sonic cataloguing, querying institutionally driven preferences for logical categorisation and notational accuracy. It calls for a creative renormalisation of how we document other species' sounds, encouraging experimental approaches to natural history archiving through the use of typewriter, paper and ink. By deliberately foregrounding inefficient/outdated methodologies for the description and transcription of wildlife sounds, (In)audible Presences seeks to destabilise the ‘digitised precision’ of current field-recording practice, drawing attention to the ambiguous, the incomplete, the unknown. And what better source materials for this process than the mysterious ultrasonic vocalisations of bats? Inherently inaudible to humans, propagating in darkness and lending themselves to myriad perceptual distortions, the rhythmically complex echolocations of British and Irish bat species (recorded using a handheld ultrasound detector) serve as a creative foundation for the archive, acting as aural scaffolds for textual rhythm and the articulation of field experience on paper. This is a free event.
