The University of Melbourne
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Lost Bandwidth

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posted on 2025-04-09, 05:27 authored by Dane MitchellDane Mitchell
Lost Bandwidth conjures the dead. Although we might experience the recordings as filling the museum garden with a distant dawn chorus performed by birds nesting in the treetops, these acoustic-ghosts are in fact signals from a lost past - reminding us that the present too is already history. Through speakers otherwise employed to attract birds for the purposes of hunting, Los Bandwidth broadcasts the songs of now extinct bird species in the canopy of the museum garden. These archival recordings, pulled from the vaults of time — the earliest recording of the Bachman’s Warbler was made in 1954 — reach our ears in the present as an elegiac reminder of what is now lost and gone.

History

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NTRO Output Type

  • Original Creative Work

NTRO Output Category

  • Original Creative Work : Visual artwork

Place

Beijing, China

Venue

SAM Sound Art Museum

NTRO Publisher

Sound Art Museum

Medium

10 bullhorn loudspeakers, amplifiers, digital audio players, timer

Research Statement

This work operates within sound art and archival art practices, while engaging with environmental history, extinction studies, and acoustic ecology. It also draws from the fields of museum practice, ornithology, and memorialisation. The work explores how we might experience and relate to lost species through their archived sounds. It investigates the gap between historical recordings and present absence, addressing our limited understanding of how to meaningfully connect with extinct species through their acoustic remains. The work's significance lies in its ability to make extinction tangible while suggesting future losses, creating a complex temporal experience. By transforming hunting technology into memorial technology, it creates a commentary on human responsibility for species loss while offering new ways to experience and remember what has been lost. The work makes significant impact by being permanently installed at a new museum in Beijing China.

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