SPARC Symposium Talks and Installation

This event is part of the 2025 SPARC Symposium (4-8 June 2025). To see the full programme of symposium events, please visit the overview page.

The symposium talks are free to attend, but space is limited. Please register in advance using the button above.

This year’s key note will be given by Marine Biologist Dr Sophie Nedelec. She is a Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Fellow, at the University of Exeter working on particle acceleration passive acoustic monitoring for mapping coral reefs. She is interested in underwater sound, sensory ecology, human impacts on the environment and sustainability.

Other speakers include sound art curator Solen Fluzin, sound artist Matilde Meireles, composer Ville Aslak Raasakka, sound artist David Monacchi and composer Erik Nyström.

Talk Abstracts

Sophie Nedelec: Underwater acoustic animals

Many underwater animals use sounds to find out what is happening and where things are. By understanding how underwater animals make and receive sounds, we can gain new understanding of their watery worlds and our roles as caretakers.

Sophie Nedelec is a Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Fellow working on particle acceleration passive acoustic monitoring for mapping coral reefs. Broadly, she is interested in underwater sound, sensory ecology, human impacts on the environment and sustainability. Much of her work has focused on the impacts of anthropogenic noise on the reproduction and survival of fish. Her current work is also focussing on engaging with policy-makers and translating research into behavioural change.

Erik Nyström: Systemic agency and uncontrol

Synthesised sounds, especially those created with ‘non-standard’ models which are not linked to acoustic concepts, can have a tendency to engender a wide and arbitrary range of ecological stimuli which suggest different types of sound sources. This multifarious behavior appears especially true when sounds are animated within a system of non-predicted forces. To what extent can such ambivalent sounds have identity, given how they may be perceived very differently by different listeners? Are sounds in these scenarios best understood as effects of causes or do they have their own agency? This talk presents ‘systemic agency’ as a concept indicating causality in mutual influence among processes in a system. This opens a query about the potential values of undermining human instincts of control, through speculative scenarios of ‘uncontrol.

Ville Aslak Raasakka: The Baltic Sea and its Ecologies as a Compositional Environment

In this presentation I will discuss two compositions involving collaboration with biologists researching the Baltic Sea. ’Waves don’t wash on dormant waters’ focuses on marine microplastic, contaminants and bacterial growth on the plastics. ’Ballast’ focuses on the Baltic Sea situation from both an ecological and a geopolitical perspective, dealing with cargo ships disrupting marine life communication and cargo ship incidents involving data cables being cut between Baltic Sea states.

Further abstracts to be announced shortly.

5pm Installation

Solen Fluzin: Windswept Whispers

Windswept Whispers is a spatial sound art and visual performance that immerses the listener in the elemental entanglement of human presence and nature's forces on Scotland’s Shetland Islands. The sonic journey begins within the belly of a ferryboat approaching the island of Yell, where virtual portals bring to life windswept landscapes and the ruins of stone buildings and vernacular architecture. As virtual visitors move through these spaces, their presence is felt and triggers sounds – whistling winds, purring gusts, and the whispers of non-human life seeping through the cracks of decaying stone. Field recordings of boats and the land itself weave with electronics to sense the pulse of the islands' natural and constructed worlds, where everything, human and non-human, resonates with the shifting weather. This is the first time Windswept Whispers is presented to live audiences.

Windswept Whispers was developed as part of AuralPluralities Windworks field trip, at the invitation of Ayşe Köklü and Helen Frosi, and as part of BOM (Birmingham Open Media)'s Immersive Arts programme.

About Solen Fluzin

Solen Fluzin is an artist, curator, and the co-founder of Anam Cara, a collaborative studio forging radical kinships between architecture, sound, analogue media, and digital systems. Rooted in the Celtic concept of the anam cara – a friend who walks beside, listens, and holds – Solen’s practice is both poetic and political, acting as a memory-keeper and sonic insurgent across physical terrains and virtual realms. Her work cultivates deep, often experimental engagements with spatial sound, places, digital echoes and collective futures.

Recent works include Windswept Whispers, a spatial sound art composition featuring responsive virtual landscapes from the Shetland Islands, and Paradise Yard, an ongoing project and DIY act of preservation holding space for IKLECTIK’s erased sonic sanctuary at Old Paradise Yard, Waterloo – presented as a CRT monitor installation for MANIFEST:IO London.

Anam Cara was artist in residence at Sono Electro festival 2024 and has exhibited at MANIFEST:IO symposium for new media and electronic art, and Piksel Bergen festival for electronic art and technological freedom.