Let’s (be) play(ed by) an ocean: Of situated actions within ecological sound art

This chapter investigates participatory sense-making within ecological sound art. The field links to “a broader set of cultural practices in which the imperial power of ‘the human’ over the rest of the world is shifting in favor of what we might call a more eco-systemic engagement” (Hogg, 2013). In summer 2018, the project sent poet Gunnar D. Hansson, composer Anders Hultqvist and ecological sound artists Halla Steinunn Stefánsdóttir and Stefan Östersjö on a search for the sounds of the book Tapeshavet (Hansson, 2017), through the artistic method of activation. This chapter analyses the processes of such participatory sense-making, which springs out of an ecological-enactive approach. Based on this the author puts forth and argues for the concept of multi-entity performance (Rawlings, personal communication, May, 2019; Stefánsdóttir, 2019a) as a technique as well as analytical and conceptual stance, thus showing through doing that the ecological-enactive approach has the power of “providing one with new tools and technology and new understandings of processes, in any musical environment and its collaborative creativity, where things happen in the connection” (Stefánsdóttir, 2019b).