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Brown Bag Seminar with Jacek Smolicki

Soundwalking. Through Time, Space, and Technologies

Time: Thu 2025-02-13 12.00 - 13.00

Location: Kitchen, Teknikringen 74D

Language: English

Participating: Jacek Smolicki, Uppsala University

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Can soundwalking, a seemingly simple combination of walking and listening, be approached as a spatio-temporal condition for reconfiguring how we sense and act in the world today? Can attentive walking and listening converge into a technique for disrupting the familiar and engaging with the unknown, the strange, the uncanny, and even the inconvenient or monstrous?

In this presentation, I will discuss my hands-on (or ears-on, if you will) and theoretical engagement with this practice, pursued as an international postdoc between 2020 and 2023, and beyond, as an art and design practitioner. Together, we will (re)visit the soundscapes of several geographies I was privileged to collaborate with, including the Pacific Northwest, Walden Pond, Canaveral National Seashore, and Sápmi.

In addition to these experiences and the lessons learned from them, I will reflect on some of my other projects aimed at rethinking our relationship with surrounding environments through listening practices and technologies. These include the edited book Soundwalking (Routledge, 2023) and the Walking Festival of Sound, which I co-founded in 2019.

Please register for the seminar and a vegan sandwich here.

Jacek Smolicki  is an interdisciplinary artist, researcher, designer and educator. His work explores temporal, existential and technological dimensions of listening, recording and archiving practices in human and more-than-human realms. Manifested through soundwalks, soundscape compositions, a/v installations and diverse forms of writing, his work has been presented internationally (including InSonora, Madrid, Ars Electronica, Linz, Sonorities, Belfast, and Atlantic Center for the Arts, Florida). He holds a PhD in Media and Communications from Malmö University. Funded by the Swedish Research Council, between 2020-2023 he pursued international postdoc research at Linköping University and Simon Fraser University and in 2022-2023 was a Fulbright visiting scholar at Harvard. In 2019, he co-founded the Walking Festival of Sound . Currently, he is a researcher at the Hub for Digital Existence at Uppsala University. Jacek is a curator of "Relational Technologies, Technological Relations – An interdisciplinary assembly on existential challenges of AI and biometrics" , a collaboration between Uppsala Hub for Digital Existence  and Färgfabriken, opening the 7th of February.