Uncleaning the Archive, 2024
Soundscape and screen recording · 3 min 56 sec
UNCLEANING THE ARCHIVE
2023-2024
Sound, archive, ecology
Uncleaning the Archive investigates the threshold between ecological sound and military noise within the underwater landscapes of the ocean. During the development of military sonar, the collective snapping of shrimp colonies disrupted underwater communication, becoming an ecological presence to be identified, classified and removed from military recordings.
Working with archived sonar and snapping-shrimp recordings, the project reverses this process of sonic erasure. Military recordings are layered, distorted and deliberately ‘uncleaned’, returning more-than-human voices to an archive from which they had been suppressed. Through 'uncleaning' the archive, interference becomes a form of ecological resistance.
THE ECOLOGY OF INTERFERENCE
Colonies of snapping shrimp generate an intense underwater crackle through the rapid closure of their claws. During the development of military sonar, this collective chorus became a source of interference: obscuring signals and complicating the detection of submarines. What military systems classified as unwanted noise was, however, the sound of an already inhabited ecological territory.
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Synalpheus pinkfloydi, c. 2017
Photograph: Arthur Anker · CC BY 3.0
Listening to the Snapping Shrimp, 2024
Spectrogram study · Uncleaning the Archive
DEEP LISTENING METHODOLOGY
The project turns towards listening as a method of ecological attention. Drawing on Pauline Oliveros’ practice of deep listening, sound becomes a way to encounter environmental conditions that resist visual perception. Hydrophone recordings, military archives, repetition and slowed playback reveal the ocean not as silent territory, but as an already occupied sonic environment.
Uncleaning the Archive, 2024
Audiovisual installation
Media Studies end-of-year exhibition
Royal College of Art, London
The project is informed by Françoise d’Eaubonne’s ecofeminist critique of the shared structures through which environmental and social domination are produced. Rather than treating the ocean as an empty territory available for human control, Uncleaning the Archive considers military occupation of the underwater soundscape as part of a wider politics of extraction and ecological power. The snapping shrimp’s interference disrupts this authority, allowing more-than-human sound to emerge as a form of resistance.
Ecological Interference, 2024
Film still, Uncleaning the Archive
Uncleaning the Archive, 2024
Audiovisual installation
Media Studies end-of-year exhibition
Royal College of Art, London
UNCLEANING
Sound archives are shaped by acts of selection. This decides which signals are preserved, which are isolated and which are dismissed as noise. Uncleaning the Archive reverses this process, reopening military sonar recordings and returning the ecological sounds that had been excluded from them. The act of uncleaning remains visible through screen recording, exposing the archive as it is opened, isolated, layered and manipulated. Rather than concealing the editing process, the interface becomes part of the work, revealing the supposedly ‘clean’ recording as a product of exclusion and transforming removal into a continuous process of return.
EXHIBITION: RCA MEDIA STUDIES 2024
Uncleaning the Archive was selected for exhibition at the Media Studies end-of-year show at the Royal College of Art, where the work was presented as an audiovisual installation experienced individually through headphones. The project was subsequently used by the department as exemplar work for the following cohort.
RELATED WRITING
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Selected References
Allen, I. K. (2020). Thinking with a Feminist Political Ecology of Air-and-Breathing-Bodies. Sage Journals, 26(2).
Carson, R. (2020). Silent Spring. Penguin UK.
d’Eaubonne, F. (2022). Feminism or Death. Verso Books.
Federici, S. (2021). Caliban and the Witch. Penguin UK.
Nixon, R. (2011). Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Oliveros, P. (2022). Quantum Listening. Ignota.
Hyžný, M. et al. (2020). Pistol Shrimps: How to Recognise Them in the Fossil Record. Deposits Magazine.
Tsui, T. (2023). It’s Not Just You. Gallery UK.