Twenty Springs: Listening to the Climate

The climate crisis remains for many an inaccessible, looming threat. In Twenty Springs, presented at Malmö Konsthall from 18–22 of October, the Sono-Choreographic Collective installs a sonic environment drawing on a detailed set of hourly environmental data points from the Arctic, the fastest-warming place on earth. Using custom software, instruments, storytelling strategies and participatory somatic practices, Twenty Springs relates long climatic changes to our sensory perception, making palpable the damaging effects to the earth’s atmo-, hydro-, cryo- and geospheres. A narrative audio-guide and interactive map help guide visitors through the sonic environment. The guide can be accessed through personal smartphones, or via devices available to borrow onsite.

Twenty Springs is part of Sono-Choreographic Collective’s Common Grounds project, initiated by Julia Boike, leader of permafrost research at the Alfred-Wegener-Institut Potsdam, and running from 2020 through 2025. It is a collaborative artistic-scientific exploration of strategies for sonifying and communicating environmental data. It asks how a long-term collaboration between the practices of climate science and sonic arts can be translated into public experiences, producing artistic outputs including a sound installation, concert-lecture, music record, video work, and an art-science publication.

Twenty Springs turns 20 years of environmental data recorded at a Svalbard permafrost measurement station into a 60-minute sound installation, translating the spatial and temporal scales of climatic change into a sound sculpture. The project explores how the fragile complexity of planetary systems can be sensed and embodied by transforming hourly atmospheric and subterranean measurements into a polyphonic drone.