Deep Ocean Listening is an aquatic audio art collective stewarded by acoustic oceanographer David Barclay and sound artist Lindsay Dawn Dobbin. A confluence of ocean sounds and creative ways of listening, we engage in transdisciplinary dialogue, relational practice, submergent knowledges and water-based sound art in order to cultivate living connections to our acoustic commons: the ocean.
We begin with a radio broadcast of sounds from the deepest part of the world’s oceans—the so-called “Challenger Deep” in the Mariana Trench, located in the Indigenous Territory of the Chamorros.
The recording, documented by the Deep Acoustic Lander, depicts a twelve hour journey through layers of the Pacific to the silted bottom, where the lander sits, listening—before ascending back to the surface.
Witnesses will have the opportunity to respond to the oceanic depths of their listening through an online, participatory event, How deep into unknowing can we go to listen?, one moon cycle following the broadcast.
Deep Acoustic Lander
Radio Broadcast
How deep into unknowing can we go to listen? Workshop
October 14/15, 2023
New Moon
6 p.m. to 6 a.m. ADT
(sunset to sunrise)
WORKSHOP FULL:
November 29, 2023
Waning Gibbous Moon
2 to 4 p.m. AST
(mid-day)
Take part in an online workshop, facilitated by Lindsay Dawn Dobbin and hosted by OCEAN/UNI, where you will have an opportunity to engage in a collaborative listening and sharing process in response to deep ocean sounds.
About the Deep Acoustic Lander
The Deep Acoustic Lander is an autonomous underwater explorer designed to sink to the bottom of the deepest point on the earth's oceans while making high-fidelity sound recordings. The vehicle, built in oceanographer David Barclay’s Noise Lab, is centred around a single glass sphere that is able to withstand static pressure at nearly 11 km of depth while measuring the smallest fluctuations that compose the underwater soundscape.
About How deep into unknowing can we go to listen?
Facilitated by sound artist Lindsay Dawn Dobbin, this online workshop is an opportunity to respond to oceanic depths through collaborative storytelling and listening as ceremony. Participants will submerge into the depths of their listening, and be guided in an experience of collective memory—responding to the indescribable yet intimately heard qualities of the deep sea. Asking, How deep into unknowing can we go to listen? we encounter an invitation to be together, over distance, as we widen the acoustic lens and deepen kinship with the ocean.
David Barclay is an associate professor in the Department of Oceanography at Dalhousie University, where his research asks what can be learned by just listening to the ocean. He was awarded the Medwin Prize by the Acoustical Society of America, the A.B. Wood Medal by the Institute of Acoustics, and is an associate editor for the Journal of the Acoustical Society - Express Letters, and the IEEE Journal of Oceanic Engineering.
noise.phys.ocean.dal.ca
Lindsay Dawn Dobbin is a Kanien'kehá:ka - Acadian - Irish water protector, musician, artist and storyteller who gratefully lives, listens and creates in Wabanaki Territory. Dobbin's relational and place-responsive practice is a living process that follows curiosity rather than form with the intent of understanding and kinship—the way of water. Their transdisciplinary work in sound art, percussion, performance, sculpture, pedagogy and writing places wonder, listening, collaboration, play and improvisation at the centre of creativity. Through exploring the connection between the environment and the body and engaging in a sensorial intimacy with land and waters, their practice aims to bring attention to the world as witness, teacher and collaborator in learning—making visible and audible our interdependence with the larger web of living beings and systems in which human life is embedded.
lindsaydobbin.com
Deep Ocean Listening wouldn’t be possible without the support of:
Photos: David Barclay, Lindsay Miller, Rena Thomas / Web and graphics: Lindsay Dawn Dobbin / Logo: Lindsay Dawn Dobbin, Paul Hammond, David Barclay