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Installations

Ice Voices
By Joan Sullivan and Robin Servant
September 26, 2025 to January 5, 2026. Open 10 am to 4 pm Thursday to Monday
NAISA North Media Arts Centre, 313 Highway 124, South River, Ontario.
Admission by Donation

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.
Borderline (Almaguin Highlands): Collective counter mapping through sonic geographies
By Jessica Thompson
Open 10 am to 4 pm Thursday to Monday.
NAISA North Media Arts Centre, 313 Highway 124, South River, Ontario
Pay by Donation

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
By Mitchell Akiyama and Brady Peters
Open 24/7 year round.
NAISA North Media Arts Centre, 313 Highway 124, South River, Ontario

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 by Eric Powell
Interactive Installation
By Eric Powell
Permanent Installation open Thursday to Monday, 10 am to 4 pm
NAISA North Media Arts Centre, 313 Highway 124, South River, Ontario.
Admission by Donation

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.