Soundcamp cooperative: Building Field Transmitters -Workshop
Friday 24 November
10:00-13:00
A hands-on workshop, building field transmitters, which can later be placed by participants in the surrounding city and perhaps beyond, bringing high quality live feeds into the space from surrounding environments. These could be the basis for listening sessions and contact with those outside the conference via an online site with player and chat: ) Listening Room. This could be a way to open thinking / conversations about local / regional soundworlds and develop collective responses and planning.
We would also be happy to contribute a presentation about our experiences with ecological radio and our reflections on acoustic commoning. We welcome suggestions about how these initial proposals might be adapted to the programme at it takes shape.
BACKGROUND: We have already collaborated with the CENSE network in the frame of the annual Soundcamp events, and the long-form radio work: Reveil since 2014, a collective audit of sounds of the earth at first light. These were recurring activities in Acoustic Commons (2020–22), a collaboration for Creative Europe with other art/science organisations in Europe and Japan. Our recent work with radio has explored the ways ecologies of subjects, institutions and environments converge in places and in between them. We ran As if radio.. (AIR) over 2 weeks during COP26 Glasgow, which we described as an experiment in ecological activist radio. For the Sonic Acts Inner Ear(th) program we did l a g – working in a post-military/industrial space at het Hem outside Zaandam, where sounds of bats, water, weather, encountered the works of other artists and each other in surprising ways through a series of workshops and listening sessions.
We are currently working on Spree~Channelsea Radio Group bringing together rivers and their people between London and Berlin, and Trans[m]it, which aims to develop cultural connections and spaces with diaspora groups between UK/Poland and Poland/Ukraine. This follows Land to Return, Land to Care a remote collaboration with artists around Ukraine, using streamboxes to be in contact through soundworlds altered by invasion.
Bio
Soundcamp CIC is an artist cooperative with directors / members: Christine Bramwell, Mort Drew, Dawn Scarfe, Grant Smith (self-noise.net), Hannah Kemp-Welch, Kirsty Collander Brown, Maria Papadomanolaki (voice sound text), Max Baraitser Smith (Code), Sam Baraitser Smith (Design), Sasha Baraitser Smith. SC are an arts cooperative based at Stave Hill Ecological Park in Rotherhithe. We work on transmission ecologies from DIY broadcasting devices to public sound and radio projects. As part of the Acoustic Commons network, we coordinate the long-form radio broadcast Reveil (2014—), and a series of sound and ecology events (soundcamps) on Dawn Chorus day each year.
Hannah Kemp-Welch is a sound artist with a social practice. She is a member of feminist radio art group Shortwave Collective and arts cooperative Soundcamp, and is currently engaged in PhD research with Creative Research into Sound Arts Practice (CRiSAP), University of the Arts London. She produces audio installations and radio broadcasts with community groups, using voices, field recordings and found sounds. She also delivers workshops, makes zines and builds basic radios, aiming to open out sonic practices and technologies for all. Hannah is a member of feminist radio art group Shortwave Collective and the arts cooperative Soundcamp. Hannah has exhibited at Art Gene, Furtherfield, John Hansard Gallery, Kettle's Yard, Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, Nottingham Contemporary, Tate Britain and Tate Modern. She has also shown work internationally at Chinretsukan Gallery Tokyo, FILE festival Brazil, and TENT Rotterdam Hannah is currently working on a transmission arts project funded through the Developing Your Creative Practice grant, Arts Council England and was on residencies at MoKS (Estonia), Full of Noises (UK) and Buinho Creative Hub (Portugal) in 2021.
Grant Smith is a British artist and writer working on sound, transmission, text, domestic and social projects in Loughborough Junction, South London. Smith co-founded the Soundcamp cooperative with Kirsty Collander-Brown and Maria Papadomanolaki in 2013 soundtent.org. Soundcamp’s Reveil (2014-2022), a 24 hour broadcast of the sounds of daybreak on International Dawn Chorus Day each year presented in partnership with Wave Farm and broadcast on WGXC 90.7-FM.
(Photo by Daisuké Shimotoku, Fuji Iyashinomori, June 2016)
