Notes on Fieldwork for Future Ecologies

Created: Mon Aug 11 2025 20:00:00 GMT-0400 (Eastern Daylight Time)

Open Fields: Fieldwork as a Creative Process

Talks about two sound artists, Éric La Casa and Doug Quinn and their process of recording and re-presenting the recordings.

Paris Quotidien by La Casa are recordings from his apartment to showcase a different soundscape of Paris, one that is more personal and a way for the artist to self-discover and make meaning of his place (literally his apartment, but his place in Paris and his place as an artist). As part of his process, he would compose where he also recorded. This would allow him to make adjustments in real time by reacting and feeling what's actually happening in his apartment.

There's a running theme, which is obvious considering the title of the book, that being in the field allows for an embodied experience that informs the output.

"Quin talks of listening with ears but recording with the whole body" (Sharp 64). So good. With Environmental Aesthetics some argue to fully appreciate nature you need to be immersed with it. So, not only do we see, or in this case, hear sounds in nature, we can also feel it with our body and have it stay with us beyond just as a sonic experience.

Learning from Ice: Notes from the Field by Susan Schuppli

Field notes of Schuppli's process of learning everything she can about ice cores and the people behind them. Often times when we see projects, we only see the end results so it's great to read about the people she contacted around the world to conduct her research and the challenges of doing art-based research in the scientific community.

What I learned though is that glaciers are considered a mineral and rock and that ice cores, like rocks, can give us insights into Earth's past. Canada's ice core programs is a joke and I'm embarssed this is my home country. When doing fieldwork with communities, make sure you respect them and report back your findings and your work in a meaningful way and also in the language(s) that they understand.

Scientists encourage those who work in lab examining and studying ice cores to make it to the field so they can understand the context. Even though one admits that it's not necessary, it's so they can have the whole picture. Perhaps by going to the field, scientists can truly appreciate the object in front of them. They can get a sense of the environment that formed the ice core, the people, including communities that guard and take care of the land.

Wandering in Someone Else's Garden by Philip Samartzis

An essay on Samartzis project about the Boleskine House and its surrounding area in Loch Ness, Scotland. Didn't know anything about Boleskine but it was the property of occulist Aleister Crowley and Led Zepplin's guitarist and producer Jimmy Page. Sound recordings showcase the diverse soundscape of the land from natural to human-made sounds while giving a sense of more-than-human.

Term 'psychoacoustic' is new to me. It means our perception to sounds but like psychogeography on how an environment or place can affect our behaviour and mood, sounds can do the same. In this project, I think Samartzis is trying to capture the mysterious, eerie lore of the place.

Scuba Driving Praxis by Melody Jue

New term I learned 'terrestial bias'. How we behave in water can reveal our biases of living on land and the effects of gravity on us. For example, wanting to stand up in water when feeling discomfort or in danger. The other example Jue provides is our naming of underwater creatures like sea cucumber or clownfish.

Two books that I would like to checkout after reading this chapter are:

And this paper:

Bibliography

CRONE, Bridget, NIGHTINGALE, Sam and STANTON, Polly (eds.), 2024. Fieldwork for future ecologies: radical practice for art and art-based research. Second edition. Eindhoven : Onomatopee. Onomatopee, 225. ISBN 978-94-93148-91-8.

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