I’m tuning in to waves of sounds and imagined narratives that mix, blend, and coalesce. When I turn away from my computer, the audio remains in the background, tied to a constant shifting stream of visuals and sounds. My attention keeps being redirected to this palimpsest—an immersive space containing multiple layers of experiences and memories with each moment unique to the individual listener. As I type, the delicate clicking of the keyboard transports me back to my bedroom, with the project We Are Here FM quietly humming in the background. What is it about sensory listening that is so important at this moment in time?
Image description: A laptop on a wooden table displays an indoor stone wall covered in ivy lit by purple and blue coloured lights. Sun comes in through a window to the right, lighting plants that sit on the sill.
Above: Betsey Biggs and August Black, We Are Here FM, Generative geo-tagged audiovisual internet transmission, 2021. Courtesy of the artists. https://wearehere.fm
Image description: A laptop on a wooden table displays a rocky shore. The ochre rocks fade into azure blue water. Land is visible in the distance, separating the water from the clear sky. Overlaid text reads: “Click to start audio. we are here fm is a project by artists Betsey Biggs and August Black. it explores our connections of place by using geo-tagged images and sounds and generative music to create ever-shifting imaginary situations. all listeners experience the same landscapes. we hope you will enjoy getting lost with us. fullscreen in landscape view with headphones recommended.”
An ongoing collaboration between Betsey Biggs and August Black, We Are Here FM (2021) is a web installation “carved out in electronic space”1 that combines images from Google Maps and sounds from freesounds.org. The components are generated by an algorithmic system transmitting a stream of visual and sonic elements through geo-tagging and multiple audio channels—as a real-time audiovisual broadcast—that one is invited to revisit again and again to witness the ethereal combinations. This project explores the symbiotic and transitory relationships found in digital repositories. The stochastic sounds have been geo-tagged within an 80-km radius of the Google images, making the geographical location a related factor, but not its temporality. This shift in time and space creates an “unreal, hyper-real, and uncanny effect”2 explains Biggs, providing a glimpse of a world that doesn’t truly exist yet appears and sounds intimately familiar to us.
A crucial element of this project is its ability to transmit an audio-visual landscape in real time. Users based anywhere in the world can experience this web transmission 24/7, synchronously encountering the vibrating, droning, and spatialized sounds. Every few days I’m compelled to return to the platform to observe the sonic landscape that changes every five minutes. We Are Here FM generates alternate, shifting realities, creating a reimagination of space and place, and a sensorial experience of the world—all while remaining perfectly still in front of the computer.
“There’s an elastic shape to the project, due to the fixed inputs, the algorithmic waves, and the various outputs that funnel out in various directions.”3
The artists behind the web platform—both faculty members at the University of Colorado Boulder—come from divergent media and technological backgrounds, which has allowed for a rich convergence of specializations in the making of this project. An artist and engineer, August Black is experienced in server and software back-end infrastructure and has a practice in live and radio transmission. Betsey Biggs, sound artist, writer, and composer, has experimented with various forms of media to sonically experience and augment the meaning of place. In part influenced by the Mexican-Canadian artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, their curiosity is defined by the shift from audience to users in participatory experiences of art. Their collaboration, which began in 2020 right at the start of the pandemic, investigates the possibilities of creating collective and communal networks conducive to live experimental broadcasts, transmissions, and choreographies
Drawing on familiar elements of soundwalking as a practice, We Are Here FM allows a user to feel guided through space, hand-held yet unaware of the next destination. This makes me wonder: Can sound guide or bring new awareness of space to a listener? How do we navigate familiar and unfamiliar terrain? What happens to an audio-walker in a shifting virtual environment?
Image description: A laptop on a wooden table displays a rocky shore. The ochre rocks fade into azure blue water. Land is visible in the distance, separating the water from the clear sky.
Image description: A laptop on a wooden table displays a street view photo from a dirt road. A large cement building and green fields are sunlit under a clear, blue sky.
Since the early twentieth century, artists have circled back to the notion of perceptual discovery to examine how societies and communities function in relation to their environment (e.g., Baudelaire, Benjamin, Debord, Long, and others). The practice of soundwalking, as a sensory exploration of location, reveals a fascinating cross-disciplinary interplay between practitioners and the environment. Sound, mapping, landscape, and spatial qualities act as cinematic cues, pulling a spectator into a liminal and imaginary space, one that Biggs relates to the concept of “physical cinema.”4 Audio, immersive, and site-specific pieces, such as Camille Turner’s Hush Harbour (2012) in Toronto and Janet Cardiff’s A Large Slow River (2000) in Oakville, experimentally incorporate these interconnected elements. As we listen attentively to our headphones—whether in-person, outside, or on the web—the sounds reverberate between various dimensions, and a creative, sensorial, and embodied engagement is created within the place and space we are in.
When asked about the future of We Are Here FM, Biggs and Black hope to increase the complexities and dynamism of the algorithmic and sonic elements by welcoming artists, coders, and developers to play with the input and outputs of the platform for a series of live performances. The artists are also thinking up ways of presenting it as a public installation, orchestrating live soundwalks, or exhibiting it in a 360/ VR output. We Are Here FM is a platform, a space, “a living sculpture”5 that can continually grow, expand, and amplify.
Image description: A laptop on a wooden table displays a street view photo. A paved road bends to the left toward a two-story house. To the right, people gather around a circular structure and benches on a walking path.
Image description: A laptop on a wooden table displays an image of a lookout onto evergreen trees and mountains. The ground nearest the viewer is covered in dry grass and beige rocks.
MELT: The Memory of Ice (2022) is another ongoing project by Biggs which pairs visual landscape with natural sounds.6 The artist has sonically captured the melting of ice and snow in Greenland using sound recording, photography, and cinematography to turn it into a modular audiovisual song cycle conveying the environmental variations brought on by climate change. “Now, more than ever, listening to and sounding with our planet matters,”7 writes Biggs.
Overlaid by a constant droning sound that fluctuates as one navigates hidden and liminal sites, We Are Here FM provides a break or an escape from current world news and its anxieties. While many of us are stuck at home, working or studying remotely, this web platform offers the—perhaps unfamiliar— experience of wandering aimlessly as a collective, listening to the surrounding noise and shifting consciousness of the world. With the continuing development of mobile mapping tools, global networks, machine learning technology, and immersive and spatial audio, it is conceivable that walking, soundscapes, and locative media practices will continue to flourish and generate as more alternative realities and cinematic environments are envisioned to better grasp the world we live in.
Cléo Sallis-Parchet is a graduate student in Cinema and Media Studies at York University. Her research explores the preservation of media, cinematic, and digital art forms by investigating dynamic approaches in archiving obsolete technologies, ephemeral art, and collective memories.
- In conversation with the Artists, February 8, 2022.
- In conversation with the Artists, 2022.
- In conversation with the Artists, 2022.
- Betsey Biggs, “Like It Was a Movie: Cinematic Listening as Public Art,” Princeton University, Centre for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies, Working Paper #36 (Fall 2008), 1-25, accessed January 2022.
- In conversation with the Artists, February 8, 2022.
- For more details: https://www.betseybiggs.org/project/melt-the-memoryof-ice-in-progressmusic-film-performance/.
- Betsey Biggs Studio, Facebook post, May 2, 2020.
This article is published in issue 39.1 of BlackFlash magazine. Get this issue
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