world premiere

UNDER BOOM (2024) is a hallucinatory audiovisual experience shaped through a combination of human-shaped sonic ecologies and deep time. Framed as a listening station and a geological hotspot to imagine society’s shifting sonic world, the work takes the audience through an anthropogenic club experience with infrasound, an inaudible bandwidth of 0–20 Hz filled with shockwaves caused by human activities. These include mining blasts, burning space debris, air strikes, atomic bangs, sonic booms, seismic guns, and the calving of ice sheets. The work stems from the discovery of a listening island in the mid-Atlantic, which due to its geo-positioning and low noise ratio is hyper-sensitive to long-wave sounds. From this island, the sonic ruptures of the Earth’s ever-changing global acoustics can be heard. UNDER BOOM is captured using stroboscopic techniques, where anthropogenic beats orchestrate the presence of visuals. Infrasonic events become markers of visibility, entangling frequency with video frame-rates in an act to dissolve ocularcentrism. The frictions of vibrating matter, shaking sonics, and flickering images highlight the physical renderings of human sounds on the Earth. Linking the intimacy and intensity of techno club experiences with an embodiment of climate allows for alternative modes of listening and climatic imaginary experiences. What if the Earth was dancing faster and faster every year? 

Louis Braddock Clarke is an artist and researcher interpreting notions from domains of art, geography, physics, and philosophy. Listening and amplification as creative methods have become key approaches to their work relating to disrupted ecologies. Through fieldwork, filmmaking, sonic tuning, and amateur geology their projects seek to speculate on the future surfaces of the Earth. Braddock Clarke’s relationship with the geographical arts is embedded in their formative years in Cornwall, surrounded by radon moorlands, granite quoits, shifting isolines, pixies, tin mines, and trans-Atlantic cable systems. These entangled Earth energies have become paramount to their ongoing research methods relating to technologies and terrains.