Sound and Circumstance: Voicing the Winds

Abstract

Media art practices enable an intimate listening to and modeling of the sparring winds. We hear the wind’s voice with increasing stridency as cyclonic conditions intensify across Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa (the Southern Pacific Ocean). Sound-orientated media artworks attune and amplify our perceptions of these meteorological forces, and we focus on the winds as active exchangers with the unruly twenty-first-century weathers. We foreground two media artworks, Koea o Tāwhirimātea – Weather Choir, and our collaborative artwork, MĀKŪ, te hā o Haupapa: Moisture, the breath of Haupapa (2022–23), as generative catalysts for eco-social activism, drawing in ancient cosmologies of wind and weather. The artworks map the winds with Indigenous names and harmonic and aharmonic sounds to augment numerical datasets and images (culturally inscribed in the European tradition) and to negotiate local and global scales. Mātauranga Māori (Māori knowledge), which includes contemporary pūtaiao (Māori biophysical science), is found to resonate with and differ from non-Indigenous worldings from the environmental humanities and atmospheric science, drawing on the writing of Ngā Puhi author Reverend Māori Marsden (1924–1993) and Kāi Tahu orator Ron Bull (2023). The wind is positioned as a circumstantial mediator between bodies and technical and cultural instruments, with French philosopher Michel Serres (1930–2019), who positions human-meteorological encounters as thresholds of feeling or sensibility. Artworks situated as exchangers are argued to produce counter-mappings, creating circumstantial gatherings of the winds above glaciers or oceans, unsettling the primacy of human phenomenological experience. As art makers, we find that listening, slowing, and attuning to the winds enable a metabolization of ecological crisis spurring renewed efforts toward eco-social mediation.