About

How does an environment sound that is ecologically sustainable and socially integrative, fair, and peaceful? Who has the right to decide about the production, organization, and distribution of sound? This project aims at expanding and enhancing sonic awareness as a basis for empowering sonic citizens to be able to respond these questions. We all are producing sound, communicating through sound, and surrounded by sound. This project intends to define our sonic environments as sonic commons. Sonic commons are outlined here as networks and agencies for sound perception, generation, and dissemination in which we all—humans and non- humans—should be able to live together in self-determined and sustainable ways. To achieve these goals, this project pursues a bottom-up and participatory form of art-based research. Stakeholders from the civil society will collaborate with the project team to become co-researchers. Their work will be complemented by guest researchers from different disciplines in the social sciences, arts and humanities. This new model of integrative arts-based research will re-evaluate the boundaries within academia and between academia and the civil society. This intertwinement of art, research, and societal stakeholders aims at transforming the object of research (our co-existence in sound) and the participant researchers (the sonic citizens) towards the realization of a sonic democracy.

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Project Team: Trajectories, Approaches to this Project and Online Portfolios

The project team is constituted by four artist researchers: Alex Arteaga, Jaana Erkkilä-Hill, Petri Kuljuntausta, and Jan Schacher (project leader). As exposed below, each artist research contributes to this project with different approaches, resources, skills, and professional trajectories. This diversity is the basis for the artists researcher to conceive and realize this project in a multidimensional interaction. The team is constituted regarding the skills and professional backgrounds that are necessary to achieve the ambitious goals and the impacts that this project pursues.

Two concentric circles of researchers will complement the activities of the project team. Firstly, different, and very diverse groups of citizens will actively participate in the planned artistic and research activities in a status of co-researchers. It is fundamental for this project that citizens are not only understood as the receivers of the experiences and findings enabled by the artistic and researcher activities – they will become sonic citizens – but also and most fundamentally as co-thinkers and active investigators of their own sonic environments as sonic commons and of ways to conceive and implement a sonic local democracies. Secondly, a network of national and international guest researchers from social anthropology, ethnography, social geography, sociology, political and economic sciences, philosophy, sound studies and sonic culture will complement and extend the artistic and research work of the core team.

 

The following are short descriptions of each team member’s trajectory, and her/his approach in this project.

Alex Arteaga is an artist researcher who combines and hybridizes aesthetic, phenomenological and enactivist research practices through an inquiry into embodiments, environments and aesthetic sense-making. He studied music and architecture in Barcelona and Berlin and received a PhD in philosophy at the Humboldt University Berlin. He is visiting researchers at the University of the Arts Helsinki, lectures in different universities and develops long-term artistic research projects such as Contingent Agencies, or Architecture of Embodiment.

architecture-embodiment.org/  contingentagencies.net/

With his sub-project The Sense of Common Self Alex Arteaga enquires into the concept and the experience of "togetherness". Drawing on phenomenological and enactivist approaches, he aims at developing the concepts of "common self" and "the sense of common self", and specific practices endowed with the agency of inducing and reflecting (on) the emergence of common selves and the sense they might enact. He denominate this practices generically: "aesthetic practices of reflective co-involvement". This fundamental research will provide a solid ground for addressing collectively a research hypothesis: "sonic commons" and a "sonic democracy" can only be addressed from a common perspective.

Jaana Erkkilä-Hill is a visual artist and artist-researcher. Her research interests include themes of silence, artistic thinking, dialogue between human and non-human worlds. Her previous research project Travelling Laboratories for Slow Thinking focused on experiences of nature and silence as resources for holistic wellbeing. Her ongoing artistic project Ask the Animals tackles the issue of ethics in animal welfare when it comes to human controlled environments where other than humans have very little to say about conditions they live in, whether in nature or within built environments.

Erkkilä-Hill’s approach in this project is to study perception of sounds through creative writing as research and finding ways how to visualize sounds in art installations. She also collects experiences from wider public about how to live together with the sound environment created by non-human animals. Erkkilä-Hill will contribute to exhibitions, public events, collaborative writing workshops with the team; publications, in residencies.

Petri Kuljuntausta is a composer, improviser, musician, and sonic artist. He has performed music for an underwater audience, improvised with birds, and made music from whale calls and the sounds of the northern lights. In addition to using environmental sounds and live electronics in his work, he creates sound installations for galleries, museums, public spaces, nature environments and culture centres (eg. permanent installation Tempus in Musiikkitalo, commissioned by State Art Deposit Collection).

In his artistic research, Kuljuntausta focuses on developing methods by which the artist's sound performance becomes an equal part of the sound processes of the environment. The latest research data on the sound behavior of species provides a framework for the project, and the analysis of the site's sounds accurately unravels its sound processes, such as the structures, frequency bands and cycles of the sound signals of birds and other animals. This information provides the basis on which the research builds completely new sound performance strategies for the use of artists, aiming for sound democracy with the living organisms of the environment.
kuljuntausta.com

Jan Schacher’s artistic work in music and sound-based installation work has led him to carry out practices and research; his main research interests are about perception of sound in arts-environments and the method development in arts-based research.

In this project, Schacher carries out both artistic work in the creation and performance of sound work and develop and carry out research work in the reflective and socially engaged research section, including in publication and research exchange organization. As the project lead, he will govern the project management and the organization of activities.
jasch.ch

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Jari Rinne was part of the project from May 2023 to September 2024.

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