Jacek Smolicki

PhD, Researcher at the BioMe Project at the Department of Informatics and Media. Committed to practice-based, artistic and design methods, Smolicki explores temporal, existential and technological dimensions of listening, recording and archiving practices in human and more-than-human realms. His work is manifested through soundwalks, soundscape compositions, diverse forms of writing, & a/v installations. His current research concerns human and other-than-human voices and technologies of capture.

Jacek Smolicki (born during martial law in Kraków) is a Stockholm-based cross-disciplinary artist, designer, researcher and educator. His work explores temporal, existential and technological dimensions of listening, recording and archiving practices in human and more-than-human realms.

Besides working with historical archives, media, and heritage, Smolicki develops other modes of sensing, recording, and mediating stories and signals from specific sites, scales, and temporalities. His work is manifested through soundwalks, soundscape compositions, diverse forms of writing, site-responsive performances, experimental para-archives, and audio-visual installations.

He has performed, published, and exhibited internationally (e.g. In-Sonora Madrid, Atlantic Center for the Arts, Moscow International Biennale for Young Art, AudioArt Kraków, Ars Electronica, Linz, and Historical Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Sarajevo). His broad scope of site-responsive artistic and research work includes projects concerned with the soundscapes of:

• Nordic Arctic Circle, (facilitated by Swedish Research Council, Polar Research Secretariat in Abisko, Kilpisjärvi Biological Station and Bioart Society in Helsinki),

• Canadian Pacific Coast, (facilitated by New Music Vancouver and Swedish Research Council),

• Walden Pond area, (facilitated by Harvard University, Walden Pond State Reservation and Swedish Research Council),

• Canaveral seashore, (facilitated by Canaveral National Seashore, US National Park Service and Atlantic Center for the Arts),

• World's tallest wooden radio mast in Gliwice, (facilitated by Silesian Metropolitan Network),

• The oldest American bells (in collaboration with Bell Ringers Guild and Old North Church in Boston),

• Three-Country Cairn, a border point of Sweden, Norway and Finland (facilitated by Bioart Society),

• Arnolds Arboretum at Harvard University, (facilitated by Arnolds Arboretum),

• UFO testimonies (facilitated by the Archives for the Unexplained in Nörrköping),

• Former Jewish Ghetto in Kraków, (facilitated by the Jewish Culture Festival and Katarzyna Zimmerer),

• Former sites of the Yugoslav Wars (in collaboration with Tim Shaw),

• Madrid's busking culture, (facilitated by In-Sonora Madrid 2013),

• Swiss soundmarks, (facilitated by ARC artistic residence and Sally de Kunst),

• Alfred Nobel's factory complex in Stockholm (as part of Walking Festival of Sound 2021),

• Historical artifacts from New York (in collaboration with Museum of Interesting Things in New York),

• Söderström, the shortest river in Sweden (facilitated by Riversssounds),

• And many other places.

In 2017 he completed his PhD in Media and Communications from the School of Arts and Communication at Malmö University where he was a member of Living Archives, a research project funded by the Swedish Research Council.

Between 2020-2023 Smolicki pursued an international postdoctoral research funded by the Swedish Research Council. Located at Linköping University in Sweden, Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, and Harvard, USA, his research explored the history and prospects of field recording and soundwalking practices from the perspective of arts, environmental humanities, and philosophy of technology. His edited book 'Soundwalking. Through Time, Space, and Technologies' was published by Routledge in 2023.

In 2022/2023 he was a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at Harvard.

He is currently a researcher at the Informatics and Media Hub for Digital Existence at Uppsala University and a member of BioMe, a research project that investigates ethical implications of AI technologies on everyday life realms. Smolicki explores sonic capture cultures and the impact of AI technologies on human and other-than-human voices.

He is a co-founder of Walking Festival of Sound, a transdisciplinary and nomadic event exploring the critical and reflective role of walking through and listening to our everyday surroundings.

Since 2008 Smolicki has been working on On-Going Project, a systematic experimentation with various recording techniques and technologies leading to a multifaceted para-archive of contemporary everyday life, culture, and environment. The On-Going Project includes Minuting, a record of public soundscapes performed daily ever since July 2010, for which he received the main prize at the Society for Artistic Research conference in 2022.

Selection of publications and other outputs

Peer reviewed original articles

Smolicki, J. 2023 You Never Soundwalk Alone. Transversal and Transformative Potentials of Soundwalking, in Acoustic Ecology Review , V.1 N.1: Proceedings of the 'Listening Pasts, Listening Futures' 2023 World Forum for Acoustic Ecology Conference in New Smyrna
Beach,

Emphasizing its transversal and transformative nature, the article reveals how soundwalking, despite its immediate and situated characteristics, spans broader temporalities, agencies, and locations, leaving lasting impacts on perception and unveiling one's positionality within the environment, shedding light on privileges and responsibilities.

Smolicki, J. 2023 Archaeology of Radiant Mediations. The Case of Gliwice Radio Tower' in Resonance: The Journal of Sound and Culture , V.4, I.1, Unive rsity of California Press

This essay is an exploration of cultural, environmental, material and political testimonies of the Gleiwitz (today Gliwice) radio tower constructed in the 1930s in the close vicinity to the border between Germany and Poland. The project is an instance of what I came to describe as an expanded archaeology of mediations.

Smolicki, J. 2022 'Acoustethics . Careful Approaches to Recorded Sound s and Their Second Life in Sensitive Recordings , S. Wieczorek, R.Tańczuk [eds.], Prace Kulturoznawcze, Wrocław Universi t y Press, Wroclaw

This article attempts to rethink some problematic ways and motivations for engaging in (field) recording and working with recorded sounds. I ask what ethical challe nges emerge against the prospect of second and multiple other lives and d eaths that the resulting material might form in the future.

Smolicki, J. 2022. 'Arboreal Sonorities ', in A Row of Trees , Journal of Sonic Arts Research
Unit, Oxford Brookes, Vol 1, Issue 1

I propose this essay as conceptual hearing aids for a better attunement with arboreal sonorities . This term should not be read literally as pointing towards acoustic qualities that trees and forests generate throughout their lifespan. At least, it i s not to be reduced to that aspect only. The acoustic life of trees is n ot limited to producing sounds. It also includes their ability to communicate and listen. To vibrate and respond to vibrations.

Smolicki, J., Shaw, T. 2022. Thinking Eye, Wandering Ear, JoLA, Journal of Landscape Architecture, issue 40 (1 2022)

This article is a result from a soundwalking experiment exploring instances of the simultaneity and hybridity as inherent aspects to any space. The piece gathers reflections from soundwalks per formed at the same time in two remote places while connected via network technologies.

Smolicki, J. 2021. Intertidal Room A S oundwalk through T imescapes of Vancouver's Coastline, in BC Studies, The British Columbian Quarterly, No. 210, Summer 2021

Intertidal Room is a soundwalk composition developed for Vancouver coastline near Stanley Park, unceded
territory of Coast Salish peoples. This soundwalk intends to provide a temporary room for increased temporary room for increased aural attention to the ways people have been cultiaural attention to the ways people have been cultivating but also affecting and disrupting imperceptible layers of these complex environments.lex environments.

Smolicki, J., Campo, C. 2021. Soundscapes as Archives. Traces and Absences of the Aural Past in Vancouver, in Sound of Science, Seismograf Peer, a peer--reviewed platform for contemporary music and sound art, https://seismoghttps://seismograf.org/node/19500raf.org/node/19500

Focusing on British Columbia's colonial history and its expression in everyday sounds, this paper attempts to rethink some of the assumptions that have underlain the field of acoustic ecology and soundscape studies as conceptualized and practiced by the World Soundscape Project.

Smolicki, J. 2021. ‘Minuting. Rethinking the Ordinary Through the Ritual of Transversal Listening.’VIS -Nordic Journal for Artistic Research, Issue 5, https://www.en.visjournal.nu/minuting-rethinking-the-ordinary-through-the-ritual-of-transversal-listening/

This exploratory essay introduces selected sound recordings along with notes and observations from Minuting–a practice of sonic journaling I have performed daily since July 2010 in numerous locations and settings. I weave these observations in relation to the idea of repetition, in multiple forms: protest, automation, cycle, and ritual.

Smolicki, J. 2019. 'Eyes that Listen, Ears that See. The Para-Archive of Quivering Stillness', in Soundsites. Experiments in Sound and Place,Ch.Eppley and Å.Stjerna, [Eds.], PAD, Public Art Dialogue journal, Abingdon: Taylor &Francis

Material remnants and traces are what dramatic events, such as military conflicts, tend to leave behind at the sites of their occurrence. They constitute fragmented entry points to imagine and connect with the past. While their visual impact, even if fragmented, remains to some degree active over time, their soundscapes dissipate. How would we approach these sites if, instead of disappearing instantly, these past soundscapes persisted over time? What if, fragmented and partly decomposed, the sonic ruins of these past events leaked continuously through the gaps and cavities of their physical counterparts?

Peer-reviewed books and book chapters

Smolicki, J. (ed.). 2023 Soundwalking. ThroughTime, Space, and Technologies. Routledge, Abingdon, UK

Given the growing significance of listening and soundwalking across many fields and debates, this book intends to provide an insight into the evolution of the practice in question and, more importantly, offer a chart of its current state. The volumecomprisestexts fromdiverse authors, art practitioners, and cultural producers from various fields who deploy soundwalking as a central method in their work.

Smolicki, J. 2023‘Composing, Recomposing and Decomposing with Soundscapes’ in J.Smolicki [ed.] ThroughTime, Space, and Technologies, Routledge, Abingdon, UK

Lagerkvist A., Smolicki J., Tudor M. 2023. 'Sonorous Surfaces, Biased Backends: Existential Stakes ofGendered AI –the Case of the Voice',in L. Parks, J. Velkova, and S. de Ridder [Eds.], Media Backends: Infrastructure, Algorithms, and the Politics of Knowing, University of Illinois Press

This joint article explores what happens when the voice –the centre of our agential, political and existential selves, becomes entangled with technological assemblages of power, techno-utopianism, and patriarchal values. It takes as its main analytical lense the existential media perspective.

Smolicki. J. 2022 'Inaudible Cities', in E. Biserna [ed.],Walking, Listening, Sound-making,Umland Editions, Q-O2, Brussels

In Inaudible Cities, I explore the suburbs of Stockholm, where I live, to create a series of short stories describing diverse facets of city life from the perspective of what we have conveniently accepted to call “urban peripheries”. Through a series of soundwalking excursions to those peripheries, I ask what stories about the city can be revealed if the focus on the “sonic infra-ordinary”replaces our addiction to the“extra-ordinary.”

Smolicki, J.2018. You Press the Button, We Do the Rest. Personal Archiving in Capture Culture, in Towards a Philosophy of Digital Media, A. Romele, E. Terrone [Eds.], Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan

This chapter problematizes contemporary personal archiving practices in relation to Bernard Stiegler’s concepts of mnemotechniques and mnemotechnologies. The transition from one to the other is a mutation from low-tech manual techniques of handling one’s memory to large-scale, automated mnemonic industries which, while providing immediate solutions for capturing and organizing the flows of memories, simultaneously benefit from them economically.

Creative media and artistic outputs

Smolicki, J. 2023. Wish We Weren’t Here

A sound installation concerned with noise pollution as a phenomenon that permeates multiple scales and temporalities. The piece includes a four-channel soundscape composition and a series of sonic postcards.

Smolicki, J. 2023. The Fells. A Soundwalk through Timescapes of Kilpisjärvi Area

A soundwalk composition commissioned by BioArt Societyin Helsinki.The piecestemmedfrom my research residency and soundscape study conducted within thevicinity of theKilpisjärvi Biological Station in the Finnish Arctic Circle in August 2023.

Smolicki, J. 2023.One Step at a Deep Time

A soundwalk composition developed for Canaveral National Seashore focusing on its past, present and future soundscapes. It draws on field recordings and interviews captured during my artistic research stay at the park as an art resident at Soundscape Field Station in early 2023.

Smolicki, J.2023.Discord, MA

Amulti-channel soundscape composition exploring past and present soundscapes of Walden Pond, popularized in the 19th century by the Transcendentalist writer Henry David Thoreau. Premiered at Holden Chapel, Harvard University, April 2023

Smolicki, J. 2023.Unsound Peregrinations

A concert at the Sound Lab of Sonic Arts Research Center, Queen’s University in Belfast. The concert featured four multichannel soundscape compositions developed throughout my artistic postdoc research (Intertidal Room, 2020, Lake that Glimmers like Fire, 2021, Dead Horse Bay, 2023, Discord MA, 2023)

Smolicki, J.,Shon. S,Magnanensi, G., McDermid, H., Shaw, T.2022. Walking Festival of Sound 2022

Co-curating another edition of the festival founded together with Tim Shaw in 2019.This transdisciplinary event explores critical and reflective roles of walking through and listening to our everyday surroundings. In 2022 it took place in Seoul and Vancouver, featuring local artists whose work draws on soundwalking techniques.

Smolicki, J. 2022.Slip of the Machinic Tongue

A performance based on a creative essay written for a book 'The Computer as Seen at the End of the Human Age', edited by Olle Essvik. A dialog between several repurposed 'smart' speakers is accompanied by a spontaneously evolving soundscape generated by those devices' electromagnetic fields and micro-currents that make them operational.Premiered at Digital Existence III conference, Sigtuna Foundation, May-June 2022

Smolicki, J. 2021. The Lake that Glimmers like Fire

A hybrid soundwalk through soundscapes of Trekanten and Rissajaure, one of the most and least polluted lakes in Sweden. The premiere of this practice-based component of my postdoctoral research took place as part of Open Studio program organized by Flat Octopus collective at Färgfabriken, Stockholm, September 2021

Smolicki, J. 2021.Söderström

A multichannel soundscape composition and soundwalk developed for Riversssounds, an online residency and a platform for virtual sonic experiences inviting to navigate the rivers of Europe via the microphones of sound artists.

Smolicki, J. 2021. Intertidal Room

A six-channel sound installation / soundscape composition (45min) presented in ‘Sound Park’ during Ars Electronica, Linz, and ‘Unheard Landscapes: listening | resonating | inhabiting’, the 10th International Symposium on Soundscape, Blois, France

Smolicki, J., Shaw, T. 2021. Walking Festival of Sound 2021

Curating another edition of the festival founded together with Tim Shaw in 2019. This transdisciplinary event explores critical and reflective roles of walking through and listening to our everyday surroundings and it 2021 took place in Edinburgh and Kraków

Smolicki, J. 2020. Intertidal Room

A soundwalk composition developed for Vancouver's coastline. Practice-based com-ponent of my postdoctoral research presented within New Music Vancouver September Pro-gram, Vancouver, BC, Canada.

Smolicki, J. 2020. Inaudible Cities #2,

A score for a self-guided soundwalk within Acts of Air: Reshaping the urban sonic, an international group exhibition at Creative Research into Sound Art Practice (CRiSAP), Lon-don University of Arts, London, UK

Other publications including popular science books/presentations

Smolicki, J. 2023. ‘A Walk in the Forest. Ecotonal Listening and Sonic Deterring Techniques in Human and Other-than-Human Realms.’

A keynote presentation at the Central European Network for Sonic Ecologies sympo-sium in Budapest, 21-25 November 2023. The talk concentrated on past and present sound-scapes of an ancient forest of Bialowieza at the border of Poland and Belarus, a site of a re-cent humanitarian and migration crisis.

Smolicki, J. 2022.‘From Soundmarks to Soundscars (and Back): Socio-environmental Imaginations in Soundwalking and Field Recording Practices.’

A talk for ‘Soundscape of Social Justice symposium organized by the Departments of Music at Harvard and Oxford University. In this talk, I discuss the potential of soundwalking and field recording practices to rearticulate preconceptions about soundscapes characterizing some of the sites where I have conducted my postdoc research, inlcluding Vancouver shoreline and Swedish Arctic Circle.

Smolicki, J. 2021.Pejzaż Dźwiękowy jako Granica. O Akustycznych Barierach, Teatrze dla Zwierząt i Simonie Kossak (Soundscape as a Border. On Acoustic Barriers, Theatre for Animals, and Simona Kossak). Glissando Audio Papers, http://audiopapers.glissando.pl/pejzaz-dzwiekowy-jako-granica/

This audio essay focuses on the impact of railway infrastructure on more-than-human realms, historically and presently. More specifically, the piece critically inspects a device known as UOZ 1 or Animal Protection Device. It is a set of loudspeakers designed to create a sonic boundary along the railway as to keep forest animals from crossing the tracks.

www.smolicki.com