The Spliced City

In early June 2024, Daniel Rothman, Andrea Heilrath, and I exhibited an interactive arts installation at the lovely “The Nature of Cities” Festival in Berlin. (I’ll write another blog post about this amazing event somewhere else. It was a fantastic week!)

The installation itself consisted of a simple stationary bicycle connected to a sound output. People could pedal to create power to activate the speakers which would then played selections of the continuous sound recordings Daniel has collected from the Ballona Freshwater Marsh over the past few years. The trick was that you would have to pedal at just the ‘correct’ speed to ‘accurately’ hear the sounds. Yet what does that mean – ‘correct’ sounds? How can a degraded wetland ‘speak’ to us across time and space? What gets translated, transported, transferred, transcribed? Which sounds were people able to hear? Human, animal, plant, air, atmosphere, soil? How did these sounds resonate in the exhibition space in Berlin?

This installation was first shown at the Berlin Akademie der Künste in Fall 2023. The video below shows the installation in its outdoor setting in the garden at the Akademie in 2023, with sound artist Daniel Rothman pedaling the bike pre-opening to demonstrate different pedaling speeds:

Installing the ‘Listening to Ballona’ Sound-Cycle in the Atelier Gardens in Berlin came with the added challenge of setting it up in a noisy indoor environment with lots of other exhibition stalls but we ended up with a good corner space a little bit away from the center of the action.

The slides below are based on the mini-posters we hung on the walls to introduce visitors to both the installation and the Ballona Wetlands. We intend to continue our collaboration and bring another Ballona Listening event to an audience closer to home in Southern California in early 2025.