SOUNDplay Series

Ice Voices is an interactive sound-photo installation by Joan Sullivan and Robin Servant that invites visitors to listen to what the disappearing ice is trying to tell us and to use their sense of touch and vision to explore further. Underwater recordings of ice “voices” play in the artwork which can be both fascinating and destabilizing. They pull listeners into their evocative vortex, coaxing them to listen more intently to the non-human world.

Join the artists for the opening launch on September 26 at 7 pm where they will be giving the talk Probing the Sounds of Climate Change.

NAISA Artistic Director Darren Copeland interviews artists Joan Sullivan and Robin Servant from Rimouski, Québec about their interactive installation Ice Voices. The conversation will explore how this tactile and sonic artwork de-centers the human by giving voice to the non-human, an invitation to "see" the disappearing ice on the Saint Lawrence River differently: with our bodies and not just our eyes.

Advance Registration Required

This weekend intensive invites artists to create a sound art miniature in a 48-hour period on the theme "There is Art in Our Nature."

Fall is undeniably a remarkable time for the changes in the tree canopy. However, there are also many changes and movements in the soundscape worth considering, as both people and animals prepare for the arrival of winter.

The 48-hour Sound Art Challenge will take place at Warbler’s Roost, a 14-acre rural, forested and lake-side property in the Almaguin Highlands. NAISA will provide assistance with access to its supply of equipment. Participating artists should bring their own portable recording devices and computers and other tools necessary for their creation.

Peer learning and sharing will be encouraged throughout the process and NAISA Artistic Director Darren Copeland will facilitate and assist participants.

The schedule of the weekend is open-ended in order to accommodate individual work and learning needs. There will be three group meetings beginning with an Orientation and SOUNDwalk from 5:30 to 7:00 pm on Friday October 17, a Check-In and Sound Sharing from 4 to 6 pm on Saturday October 18, and the weekend will conclude with a Listening and Feedback session from 2 to 4 pm on Sunday October 19. The remainder of the time is for individual work and for arranging any one-on-one instruction and consultation.

Results of the 48-hour Sound Art Challenge will be aired on NAISA Radio and NAISA’s social media channels after completion.

Photo by Anton Pickard

"EARTH (Okâwîmâw Askiy - ᐅᑳᐧᒫᐊᐧᐢᑭᕀ)” is a 12-hour event that follows on the heels of 2020’s You, 2021’s And, 2022’s I, 2023’s Are and 2024’s Water. It is the sixth in a series of twelve annual events taking place on December 12 from 12 noon to 12 midnight. NAISA Radio will be broadcasting the audio livestream from the USask Galleries in Saskatoon.

Each year the event moves through each word of the 12-word phrase, You And I Are Water Earth Fire Air Of Life And Death, to activate the word of the year in myriad ways.

This year's edition is curated by jake moore and Christof Migone. Featured artists include Christina Battle, Joshua Bonnetta, Tanya Doody, Michaela Grill / Karl Lemieux, Jessica Karuhanga, Masha Kouznetsova, Cassie Packham, Danielle Petti, Laura St Pierre, Aurora Wolfe, Worried Earth, and many more.

The word ‘earth’ when preceded by a direct article becomes planetary, the Earth. This proximity shifts our understanding of ‘the substance of the land surface; soil’ into ‘the world’. It moves from ground under your feet and soil you can hold in your hand, to expanse you walk on and territory you live within. This perceptual transformation makes clear the potency of spatial relationality in language and worldmaking and opens the parallel in this year’s title and prompt, Earth (Okâwîmâw Askiy - ᐅᑳᐧᒫᐊᐧᐢᑭᕀ).

The planet Earth is the only one in this solar system whose English name is not taken from Greek or Roman mythology. The word Earth comes from Old English and simply means ground. Ground-, grounded, defined as the solid surface of the earth, a limited or defined extent of the earth's surface; land, land of a specified kind, an area of knowledge or subject of discussion or thought, factors forming a basis for action or the justification for a belief, a prepared surface, solid particles that form a residue; sediment. While the planets that exist light years away are assigned narratives already in existence, it is Earth’s spatial and relational proximity to us, that invites beings to story it directly with experiences born of connections between living and place. Humans continue to re-story the world as Earth’s topography informs us while we simultaneously inform, deform and re-form.

One story goes that when Earth was a young planet, a large chunk of rock smashed into it, displacing a portion of Earth's interior. The resulting chunks clumped together and formed our Moon. Unlike other discrete moons in this solar system, Earth and Moon were once one. Moon is made of Earth, and Earth, like its human inhabitants, is mostly made up of water. These critical correspondences and seeming oppositions of liquids that produce the appearance of solids make clear the intra-relations at play, the co-constitutive nature of things, and how our wounded planet maintains balance through its spatial tether to its long-lost entrails.

Another story, not our own to tell, but its repetition here is required to indicate the inadequacy of univocality when coming to know a complexity. We have listened to this story many times, so we choose to retell it here as we have the one above, as listeners, as receivers, with unique positionalities to inform its reception. This story tells of how Ota Aski, as we know it now, comes into being. Sky Woman, who lived in solitude in the heavens, comes through a hole in the sky to rest on a gigantic turtle’s back. Earth at this time was an entirely watery surface. Sky Woman asked the beings living there; plants, two legged, four legged, winged ones, and swimming ones, to bring up some soil from below the waters. Only the small muskrat succeeds in her travel below the waters to deliver soil to the edge of the turtle’s shell. In doing so, muskrat is passes. Sky Woman surrounds the turtle’s shell with the soil to create a place for generation. She revives the tiny muskrat and asserts her role as a giver of life. Earth is our mother, Moon is our grandmother. Still of one another, entwined.

How do we definitively describe something still coming into being? How do we definitively describe something that is brought into being by multitudes, and regardless of consensus of origin, fully exists?

These co-constitutions, interreliance, and fluidity of meaning reflect how Earth is primarily made up of water—its seeming material opposite—and the ground itself is made up of a series of relations. Western science describes it as the only planet in this solar system to support life as ‘we’ know it (knowing Western understanding of life is limited). In this cosmology, Earth is an ocean planet reliant on its moon to keep it from wobbling uncontrollability. There is an intimacy implied and required in making our world a whole constructed of millions of parts, distributed and connected, reliant on their ongoing transmission and reception. Electronic communications require grounding to flow uninterrupted and make clear our species’ reliance on Earth to both imagine and articulate connections and the potential to be whole, if wounded, through them. Amplifying Earth as a series of relations becomes our grounding premise.

Samuel Beckett concludes one of his Fizzles with these words “ruinstrewn land, little panic steps.” As both unsettled settlers of Argentinian/Austrian and Scottish/Dutch heritage, the paths we take are teeming with these little panic steps, but they are steps nonetheless.

We are coming towards you from this ground here. Here, kisiskâciwan, the traditional territories of the Nehiyawak, Maškékowak, Nîhithaw, Lakota, Nakoda, Dakota, Saulteaux (Anihšināpē), Dene, and the ancestral lands of the Métis, specifically Treaty 6 on the Canadian Prairies.

Borderline is a critical mapmaking project that uses sound to illuminate social and economic differences in local geographies. Visitors to the NAISA North Media Arts Centre are invited to contribute to a large-scale soundmap of the Almaguin Highlands by borrowing a toolkit to map sounds in one of the villages of their choice, or by using the Borderline mobile app. The sounds collected are added to the map on an ongoing basis.

The Borderline iOS app enables users to automatically map sounds in their environment, put them in dialogue with other forms of data, and generate interactive soundscapes by playing sounds back into the environment. Click here to download

The Sensation of Distribution is a reprise of Mitchell Akiyama and Brady Peters’s 2019 work, The Distribution of Sensation, which they created while artists in residence at The Bentway, a large, urban public space situated under an elevated highway in downtown Toronto. The Distribution of Sensation was a sound sculpture composed of PVC pipes installed around The Bentway that invited visitors to listen through the natural resonance of the cylinders, creating a series of musical experiences across the site. Mimic the plumbing infrastructure of the site, the installation was meant to create aesthetic slippages that might potentially lead to confusion as to what exactly functioned or counted as art.

The re-installation of this work at NAISA blends the pipe sculptures into a more domestic vernacular. Mounted on NAISA’s exterior walls to impersonate furnace vents and erupting from the ground to suggest rogue plumbing gone awry, The Sensation of Distribution re-invites visitors to explore the unnoticed or imminent sonic and aesthetic potential of our built environment.

Voice of the Water is an interactive rotary telephone-based listening station. Using sounds collected from inside the lakes and rivers around South River, Voice of the Water encourages listeners to connect with the local waterways as they explore the boundaries and overlaps between planes of existence. The Artist's goal is to create a venue for contemplation, catharsis, and a deeper engagement with the surrounding environment.