project updates — News — Architectural Ecologies Lab

The ECOPOEISIS Project is pleased to launch How We Hear Now, a new collaborative, participatory artwork conceived and executed in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and its impacts on environmental perception.

How We Hear Now invites participants to engage in audible changes in their environments—to record and transmit how, as humans moved into isolation, nonhuman ecologies have grown noticeably more audible during the COVID–19 pandemic’s shelter-in-place orders. Each participant constructed a sound recording of their environment on April 22, 2020, the fiftieth anniversary Earth Day, and provided a description of ecological or cultural factors. The audio recordings and environmental descriptions are compiled into a layered stream of sound and text, a visual and aural landscape of ecological observations collected during this unique time. The individual contributions meld together with a visualization of seismic data collected on April 22, representing the concurrent geological sound occurring at a planetary scale.

To learn more about How We Hear Now and see excerpts of the artwork, see this link.

AEL directors Evan Jones and Margaret Ikeda have been working for the past year with the Presidio Trust and the National Park Service on innovative ecological substrates for native oyster habitat restoration at the newly expanded wetlands at Quartermaster Reach / Crissy Marsh. The team includes research fellow and CCA M.Arch alum Sean Cunningham, the Benthic Lab at Moss Landing Marine Laboratories, Kreysler & Associates, and support from Autodesk’s Technology Center, San Francisco.

This past year, the team has deployed a series of floating substrate prototypes to test ways to recruit Olympia oyster larvae and encourage their growth in the marsh. This work has informed the design of larger scale, custom-contoured composite panels, which will be installed later this summer as a permanent liners for new culverts that run beneath Mason Street.

For more information on the project, see this news post from the Presidio’s blog.