We will gather to listen and think with a live audio stream from a bark beetle-infested site in the Thuringian Forest. The forest stream was installed by Nele Moeller in the summer of 2023 to transmit the changing acoustic environment of the spruce monoculture, which is changing/disappearing as a result of the beetle infestation and clear-cutting.
What does it mean to listen over a distance?
What does it mean to listen with a place where one is not physically present?
What does it mean to listen with two places simultaneously?
The forest stream will run throughout the whole duration of the event, while a reading by Nele Moeller and a concert by Weston Olencki will interact with the live acoustics of the forest.
Bios:
Nele Möller is a Brussels-based artist working primarily in sound, performance and writing. Her research-based practice focuses on acoustic ecologies, environmental histories, and intersubjective relations with humans and more-than-humans. Currently, she is working towards a PhD in the Arts at KU Leuven/LUCA Brussels. Her research project, ‘The Forest Echoes Back’, oscillates around the disappearing spruce monoculture of the Thuringian Forest in Germany using field recording, live-audio-streaming, listening, and mimicry as the central methodologies.
Weston Olencki is an artist and musician from South Carolina, living now in Berlin. Their projects position musical instruments as sites of cultural inscription, working fluidly between experimental sound, traditional musics, and their various space/time(s). They are an active member of RAGE THORMBONES and APPARAT, and perform in many contexts on low brass instruments, winds, banjo, and electronics.
