Jacek Smolicki

Reading:

Hildegard Westerkamp’s writings on soundwalking and listening

Alejandro Frid – Changing Tides: An Ecologist’s Journey to Make Peace with the Anthropocene

Listening to:

Honestly, I have not been watching much recently besides watching after my one year old daughter ;) My evenings are occupied with catching up with reading and writing. But seriously, I have much reduced watching and listening to mediated, external stuff for the benefit of watching and listening to the immediate surrounding. (Nevertheless, as part of my research includes the Archives of the World Soundscape Project, I have occasionally been listening to some of their work). But primarily I spend long hours on watching and listening to the Vancouver coastline and especially tidal zones which is subject to my current soundscape/soundwalk project. I have been watching changes of the water level and how tidal pools are being constantly formed and dissolved. I have been listening to limpets, barnacles, grass shrimp, harbour seals, blue herons, western gulls, wood ducks among others. I recommend barnacles and herons, especially the piece by the latter in which they clap their beaks.


So in few words:
Vancouver tidal zones (feat. the aforementioned species) and Vancouver harbour (feat. bulk carriers, oil tankers, breakbulk carriers and container ships)

Watching:

Starling nesting in a wooden head of an eagle that crowns one of the totem poles at Stanley Park in Vancouver.

Ravens crushing mussels and clams against the surface of a sidewalk at the Sunset Beach in Vancouver.

Working on:

I’ve been keeping up my sonic journal while soundwalking in and around Vancouver.

Following the imposed trend of going online, I have also continued working on Fragmentarium club, a little soundwalking initiative I have been running in Stockholm. One way of elaborating on this rather elusive platform is through an audio cast  which is dedicated to the unspectacular, infra-ordinary, fragmentary, and slow. The broadcast happens irregularly and is programmed on-the-go. We just launched a little soundscape composition focused on domestic soundscapes during the pandemic.


Jacek Smolicki is an interdisciplinary artist, designer, researcher, and soundwalker interested in attending to (as in paying attention) and recording (as in calling to mind and heart) the diversity of human and other-than-human realms and existences. In his design and art practice, besides working with existing documents, archives and heritage, Smolicki develops new modes of sensing, field-recording, para-archiving, and mediating stories and signals from various sites, scales, and temporalities. His work is manifested through soundscape compositions, soundwalks, site-responsive performances, experimental para-archives, audio-visual installations, and diverse forms of writing.

Jacek Smolicki

Bandcamp: Roomtones / Distances