As part of Rewire’s context programme 2023, Instrumental Ecologies will focus on the ways in which musicians and sound artists find ways of listening with the environment, while critically assessing the environmental impact of the technologies they use, and how they are entangled with natural ecologies. In this assembly, artist and researcher Mark Peter Wright, sound artist and musician Liew Niyomkarn, researcher and editor Carla Maier, and audiovisual artists Matthew Biederman and Pierce Warnecke will enter into a conversation on their work, the politics of field recording, and modes of environmental listening. Wright will open the assembly with an introduction, following his essay Micologies, highlighting hidden interactions between humans, non-humans, and sound technologies. 

Mark Peter Wright is an artist and researcher working at the intersection of sound arts, experimental pedagogy, and critical theory. His practice blends the field and lab, site and gallery; amplifying forms of power and poetics within the creative use of sound and documentary media. He is a member of CRiSAP, UAL, and the author of Listening After Nature: Field Recording, Ecology, Critical Practice (Bloomsbury, 2022).

Liew Niyomkarn is a sound artist and musician. Coming from experimental sound practice and performance, her work focuses on listening practices and conveying memories through sound and text. She uses field recordings to detect time, (non)-human voices, everyday routines, and engage in sounds of wilderness, archival sounds, and ambient music culture. She combines them with a sonic palette and the properties of sound itself, such as sounds of spaces, playing with long decays and harmonics. She often presents her work through live performances and sound installations. 

Carla J. Maier is a sound studies and postcolonial studies scholar and editor of Norient Books. She has published on electronic popular and club music, postcolonial and transcultural aspects of music production and sound art, everyday urban sound practices and sonic ecologies, as well as decolonial approaches in listening practice and research. Her recent work deals with the entangled multi-sensorial, (anti-)colonial, and multi-species dimensions of contemporary environmental issues. She is the author of Transcultural Sound Practices: British Asian Dance Music as Cultural Transformation (2020) and «On Rhythming: A Manifesto» (with Melissa Van Drie, 2022).

Audiovisual artists Matthew Biederman and Pierce Warnecke will present their work Spillover at Rewire on Sunday April 9.