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.
NTRO Output Category
- Original Creative Work : Visual artwork
Place
Beijing, ChinaVenue
SAM Sound Art MuseumNTRO Publisher
Sound Art MuseumMedium
10 bullhorn loudspeakers, amplifiers, digital audio players, timerResearch 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.Size or Duration of Work
Dimensions variable
