It's February 21st, two days into Minji Kim's residency at Mediamatic. She is currently conducting field research at our Oosterdok location for the Aquatic Soundscapes project. We sat down in the warm and sunny restaurant of Mediamatic, right next to her research set-up, and talked about her inspiration for this project, what makes this place a unique site, and wishes for the outcome of the exhibition.
Finding inspiration
The idea for the Aquatic Soundscapes project is derived from Minji's research last year, where she was developing a listening methodology for the ecological landscape. During this search, a realization flooded in; within her works she, as the sound artist and field recordist, is the bridge between the audience and the environment. At the same time, she is just a subjective listener, with a subjective ear. This made her curious to dive deeper: "How can I listen without any appropriation as a human being or as a god view listener? I want to avoid that position. So I researched the situated listening mode", Minji explains.
Here the main question was: "How can we listen with our bodies, without any appropriation, while we listen to the voice of non human speakers?"
The situated listening mode
In order to explore how we can avoid listening without appropriation as human beings, Minji Kim developed a situated listening mode consisting out of three methodologies. First, listening beyond our hearing frequency. Second, listening with geopolitical context. Third, revealing our own subjective ears.
Based on the situated listening mode, she tries to research infrasound - which belongs to the first methodology - as it's beyond the hearable frequency of human beings. Infrasonic frequencies are below the hearing frequency of humans, however most industrial motors emit these frequencies, Minji points out. Many non-human species use the infrasonic frequencies for their survival, for navigating their surroundings. Minji continues: "This made me wonder, how can I hear, or how can I get closer to feeling the infrasound?"
Spectogram of recorded sound waves - Result of Minji Kim's research at the Oosterdok in Amsterdam
Recorded sounds also carry unheard stories, which may be revealed when taking into consideration the geopolitical history of the site. Minji can best explain this by using an example from a previous field research of hers in Sihwa, South Korea. She wanted to listen to the sound of an artificial lake, in particular how non-human human life might experience a human made environment. But in this time she found out that this lake holds a significant geopolitical context. The creation of Sihwa and its artificial lakes are funded by oil money from the Gulf area. They were constructed with poor consideration for the environment, leading to severe pollution.
Minji realised that the sound she is listening to is strongly related to the contextual history of the area, and revealed this story to her.
The third methodology calls for the subjectivity of the listener to be taken into account. When listening, the knowledge background and cultural experience of the listener are always present. It's impossible to talk about listening without the subjective experience, the cultural context. Minji explains that sound is plural, and when you listen to something it can't just be labeled as one thing. She illustrates this by explaining that when listening to wind we might label it as only the sound of wind. But, there are layers. It could be the sound of a shaking tree, or some friction from a window and air movement, or something else. "Sound is really plural, so it's always different depending on the point of view, right? So, I believe when I talk about what I hear, I should first explain myself and look into it with plural context"
Mediamatic as field research site
Before Minji was researching the situated listening mode, she was studying the concept of sound 'in between'. She is particularly interested in studying the sound at coastal lines, due to sea level rises. This makes them very fragile spaces, grey areas. They belong to water, but also to land. Mediamatic is a very relevant place to study the concept of sound in between, because indeed its location belongs to the water but also to the land. There are many wind turbines, large ships, boats, trains and bridges in the region of Amsterdam and around Mediamatic, making it an interesting place to study infrasound as part of Minji's research.
Image of Lenny and Eve at Aquatic Soundscapes - 
Experiencing Aquatic Soundscapes
This exhibition is particularly exciting for Minji, because she will be exhibiting the rotary speaker that she built. It's a speaker which, simply said, amplifies infrasonic frequencies. This is her way of revealing the recorded infrasound, where audiences could possibly feel the infrasound. As said before, the infrasound is below the hearing frequency for humans, so this speaker will amplify the low frequency vibrations as much as possible. The rotary speaker hopefully creates an experience of 'feeling the sound' with our bodies. Furthermore, Minji is interested and enthusiastic about finding out the kind of stories to be revealed through the frequencies encountered here at Oosterdok.
She's only been here for two days, she goes on: "It's much busier than my expectations, I can't even imagine what's in there."
I got a chance to listen to some of the recorded sounds in real time, and was shocked myself at the amount of underwater activity. Personally, I had been associating the waterfront of Mediamatic with a kind of serenity. The reality has shown something different, exposing my unknowingness to worlds I'm not attuned to.
The experiences Minji hopes to create looks similar to what I described for myself. She wants the audience to feel and to sense. For their imagination to be activated, "sound is something invisible, it's not really there, but it's also a physical phenomenon. It's very vague and abstract, right?" She would like for the audience to imagine what is underwater, maybe question for themselves how the underwater business is. Daily life underwater is not really something that can be translated into language, but maybe feeling it can make a tiny shift the perception of daily life. That would be really nice, she says.
For those of us that hear, are we listening? When we are listening, do we question? If you are questioning, what did you learn?
