Coming back to research after five blessed months of maternity leave, I had the chance to dig out of the drawer one of my first projects in sonification - from a sound art angle - back in 2017 when I was invited to the art residency of the Liminaria project, in the stunning and wild Fortore beneventano, in the Southern region of Campania, Italy. During one full time week I struggled to source original data from the territory - when almost no institution or individual has yet “dataified” that remote area of the country - while recording micro-sounds from the surroundings: wind through the leaves, insects in their nests, distant voices.
The project focused around the problem of uncontrolled, autonomous reforestation in vast areas of Central and Southern Italy. We decided to sonify the “forest that will be”, if humans keep abandoning those areas to move towards more ubranized centers, leaving century old agricultural practices behind.
I wrote a text for the occasion which I completely forgot about, wondering around data ontologies, epistemologies, ideologies, phenomenologies, and where does the title come from, which I think is worth sharing. A video of the Liminaria performance can be found here.
The ontological data - digitalising the world
I reached Airpaise with a cognitivist preconception. In a series of scrapped notes over the previous weeks, I had investigated a number of different concepts that I wanted to explore once there. Sketched the profile of people I meant to collaborate with. Made hypothesis on ways to present the artistic result of the residency to the wider public.
I work with data, and sound, in a field called “data sonification”, often described as the usage of - typically non speech - sound to represent large sets of numerical data (Alberto De Campo, 2006). When starting a new project, I look for a question to answer to. I investigate the message I want to make public with the answers I might find; the context where the public will receive the message and how I’d like them to engage with it; the sonic material I want use and how to get it; last but not least, the time I have to complete the project, the budget I can invest.
But never I had questioned before, the main assumption of working with data. I.e. the mere fact that, in our current technological and political landscape, data exist, and are everywhere for us to use them as we want, or we can. Or even, but it’s a longer discussion, for us to be used by data.
Data are today of ontological nature. Mainly digital, they became independent entities that form an everlasting trace of ourselves, running in parallel with our real lives. We produce data everywhere we go, with every action we perform, online and offline. Not only us humans but animals, everyday objects, distant galaxies, natural phenomena, and viruses, produce data that are collected, stored, sold and bought, and sometimes explored to be made sense of. In 2017, data became a buzz word, too. Big data. Open data. Data journalism. Data - driven innovation.
Still, I arrived in Arpaise in September 2017 and there was no data waiting for me to be harvested. No matter how hard I searched, that corner of land and its living and non-living inhabitants refused to comply with the ontological grid, and I had to start from scratch.
The epistemological data - investigating reality as you meet it
If data are a means of describing reality and investigate it to generate new knowledge, a first step in collecting them would be to look around from exactly where you are and ask yourself a question that can be answered through pieces of quantifiable information.
So, immersed in the nature around TANA - Terranova Arte Natura on the third day of the residence, we started counting the trees (the main or at least by far the most noble, protagonists of the place) one by one, to create a bottom up data set. In this particular area of Italy, more than in any other forests are growing out of control. Taking advantage of depopulation forests are taking over a big portion of what used to be an organised space with houses, crops, roads, and cattle. 2015 (the year of the last forests census) has been the most forested year of the past one thousand. Forests grow, in Italy, at the pace of 0.6% yearly. Due to the loss of population of many mountainous areas of Central and Southern Italy, since 1971 forests have taken over more than 3,5 hectares of country. One third of the country is covered with spontaneous woods. In many areas, such as the Fortore, these forests are impenetrable, so much so that there are no official data on their status. Simply because nobody can get in to collect them.
No matter how many trees, and leaves, we tried to count that day, an impenetrable forest therefore lied in front of us. I had my theme to work on, now I needed the data.
The phenomenological data - mapping the territory bottom up
I set up to learn all I could about the forest of Arpaise: from taking pictures of the trees density and counting them by hand per square meters, to consulting historical tables on the annual growth rate of oak woods, via measuring the leaves mass by means of height and width of the trunks, step by step we mapped the wilderness around TANA as it is now.
A work carried out walking up and down the land until the forest allowed me to go and talking to the people who on a daily basis live it, and know it by heart, and with it co-exists. On our explorations we stopped at the border of this impenetrable forest, found the dried course of an empty stream, and recorded the great silence to be used as material for the data sonification.
The ideological data - an empty stream, a great silence, an impenetrable forestAnd therefore, it happened that the idyllic slopes of Southern Italy countryside in the sweetness of a mild Autumn became my Heart of Darkness. Once obtained a table of data able to depict, numerically, the current situation of the forest in terms of number of trees, annual wood production, annual leaves production, I applied the growth ratio to algorithmically project the uncontrolled growth of the forest in a context of absence of human interference. The numerical data were sonified associating to each number a fragment of the forest’s micro soundscape: ants in their nest, wind in the leaves, some distant voices from the nearest village. The result is a still work-in-progress software-generated sonic portrait of the wood as it will be in the years to come, developed in collaboration with Giosuè Grassia and Stefano Silvestri from the Conservatorio di Benevento.
Coesistenze - Coexisting
I heard once the architect Rem Koolhas saying that it was the cities, with their anonymity and “beyond human" scale, what gave men and women of the XX century their freedom. Freedom from the paternalistic, conservative society of the agricultural countryside, of the village where everybody knows everything about you. Is the advocacy of a return to nature a sign of the failure of those ideals of liberty and freedom from control, freedom to choose the life you want to live? Or is it there where the lack of digital entities allows us to build our own vision of the world around us, that the resistance will take place?
Acknowledgements
The final work presented at Liminaria and the path that led to it, would not have been possible without the help of Tiziana De Tora and Marco Papa, whom I deeply thank for the warm welcome at TANA, the dedicated time, the wonderful cuisine, the chat and drinking till late, and the love for what they do. All my gratitude to my colleagues Giosuè Grassia and Stefano Silvestri from the Conservatorio di Benevento for having developed the conceptual idea in something viable, interesting, and at all possible (thank you Giosuè for having started counting the leaves!). And a deep thank to the woodman and forests expert Antonio Pernici who advised and followed me in building the data base. He was definitely the right man at the right time.”