A hallucinatory cinema experience driven by shockwaves caused by human activities. Flickering images orchestrated by infrasonic beats highlight humanity’s impact on Earth. “Under Boom” is a hallucinatory audiovisual experience shaped through a combination of human-shaped sonic ecologies and deep time. Framed as a listening station and a geological hotspot to imagine society’s shifting sonic world, the work takes the audience through an anthropogenic experience with infrasound, an inaudible bandwidth of 0–20 Hz filled with shockwaves. These include mining blasts, burning space debris, air strikes, atomic bangs, sonic booms, seismic guns, and the calving of ice sheets.
The work stems from the discovery of a listening island in the mid-Atlantic, which due to its geo-positioning and low noise ratio is hyper-sensitive to long-wave sounds. From this island, the sonic ruptures of the Earth’s ever-changing global acoustics can be heard. “Under Boom” is captured using stroboscopic techniques, where anthropogenic beats orchestrate the presence of visuals. Infrasonic events become markers of visibility, entangling frequency with video frame-rates in an act to dissolve ocularcentrism. The frictions of vibrating matter, shaking sonics, and flickering images highlight the physical renderings of human sounds on the Earth. Linking the intimacy and intensity of rhythmic experiences with an embodiment of climate allows for alternative modes of listening and climatic imaginary experiences.
What if the Earth was dancing faster and faster every year?
Biography
Louis Braddock Clarke is an artist and researcher interpreting notions from domains of art, geography, physics, and esoteric philosophy. Listening and amplification as methods have become key approaches to his work relating to disrupted ecologies. Through field work, film-making, sonic tuning, and amateur geology his projects seek to speculate on the future surfaces of the Earth. Braddock Clarke’s relationship with the Geographical Arts is embedded in his formative years in Cornwall, where he was surrounded by radon moorlands, granite quoits, piskies, shifting isolines, tin mines, and trans-Atlantic cable systems. These entangled Earth energies have become paramount to his ongoing research methods relating to technologies and terrains.
Louis has been a lecturer at the Royal Academy of Art since 2019, he is also an ongoing and active research fellow at the lectorate Design and the Deep Future. His projects are award-winning, receiving the Waag Technology Award 2019, Dutch Talent Award in 2020, Landscape Research Award 2021, and the Gouden Kalf (Dutch Oscar) in 2022. His artworks and installations have been shown internationally at major galleries, biennales and festivals including: Venice Biennale, NTMoFA, Sonic Acts, Re-Wire, Sounds of Silence, Centre Wallonie-Bruxelles, Netherlands Film Festival, FILE Brazil, Digital Arts Taipei, Macau Design Museum, MU Hybrid Art House, W139, OT301, Quartair, Stroom, Museum of Mines and Metal Brazil, WEST Museum, Noorderlicht, Het Hem, and reviewed by magazines such as the WIRE, DAMN, CLOT, AQNB.