disperal

For their web residency project dispersal, sound producer and listener kirby will create »an algorithmic browser composition combining audio and creative code to listen with the presence of colonizing plants.« Soil Seed Bank sonically maps the lively activities performed by adventive plants in the inner West of Naarm, and therefore contemplates varieties and plants which were not originally local. They also address the fact that the foreign plants undergo a process of transformation when introduced into a new environment.

kirby/Local Time, Naarm, Wurundjeri Country, »Australia« — Juli 13, 2023

Soil Seed Bank by Local Time is an algorithmic browser composition combining audio and creative code to listen with the presence of colonizing plants in the artists’ local neighborhood (»Footscray« and the inner West of Naarm, Wurundjeri Country).

»This is a continuation of my ongoing experimental process of audio-recording seeds^[1] from introduced/adventive species such as long-headed poppies, honey locust, artichoke thistles and agapanthus. I plan to use the web residency period to programmatically compose these samples using ToneJS and the WebAudio API. Growth stages of each plant (dormancy, germination, growth, flowering, seed maturation, and dispersal) and climactic data (from JS libraries like SunCalc and APIs like Open Weather and iNaturalist) will be used as parameters to control when and how each species is audible, and their voice/s in the composition – building an imagined soundscape of local temporalities through the framework of a soil seed bank.«^[2]

The piece Soil Seed Bank will be constructed from audio files, and hand-coded HTML, CSS and JavaScript documents. Visual elements (e. g. videos, photos, or animated SVG accompaniments to the composition) will be developed during the residency period. Its form encourages repeated listenings over time, as the composition shifts with live climactic data.

This website you are about to access is an artistic work within the online program “Web Residencies by Akademie Schloss Solitude”. © 2023. Akademie Schloss Solitude – Stiftung des öffentlichen Rechts, Stuttgart and the artist(s).

The plant species listed in this proposal are either those that I have foraged and/or recorded already, and those that are likely to be found around Footscray during the residency period.
»Soil seed bank« is defined as the »natural storage of seeds in the leaf litter, on the soil surface, or in the soil of many ecosystems, which serves as a repository for the production of subsequent generations of plants to enable their survival«.