The Story of Landscapes is Both Easy and Hard to Tell (2025)

The Story of Landscapes is Both Easy and Hard to Tell is part of the speculative artistic research endeavor Time out of Present – a research into the sounds and cycles of nature happening outside of the human immediate sensory resonance. It aims to make audible the manifold cycles and seasonal alterations in our surroundings through sonification of environmental data and passive acoustic monitoring. Long-term data series of different places are transformed into sound to explore landscape and build new relations to our environment and its inhabitants through sound.

Inside the ceramic sculpture is a microcontroller with several sensors that record environmental data: Temperature, humidity, concentration of volatile organic compounds such as CO₂, particulate matter in the air (PM2.5, PM10), etc. All conditions that affect humans and other animals, some of which we can more accurately sense than others. The Story of Landscapes is Both Easy and Hard to Tell makes the changes in these measurements audible. Changes that happen outside of the human time-frames, but that, through time-remapping and sonification can be made audible to us. The work thus aims to de-center the human perspective and tell the story of a landscape from the point of view of the landscape itself. The work challenges us to change our point of view to engage with our natural surroundings in a different and more emotionally relatable way.

This project is part of the Culture Trail Exhibition at Saari Residence and was supported by Kone Foundation.