Geronimo Mercado

Inviting immersion in wilderness sound, the audience is encouraged to engage in exploration of wilderness that occurs upon active movement among and between sound circles in the installation space.

Hearing and exploring the sound circles with an awareness of recently experienced silence is a key element to this piece. Before entering the installation space, we must prepare by using earplugs, which prompt the recalibration of silence perception and awareness of sound. This simple act of wearing earplugs before entering the installation space heightens the contrast between wilderness sound circles. The initial silence period invites introspection. And sets the space to explore the minimal visual cues of sound spectrograms. In this instance, the audience is invited to further explore what is evoked by the sounds from the juxtaposition of layered sound circles in the installation soundscape. The installation provides an immersive surround experience where variations in distance, elevation and frequencies of sound are explored by moving about in the delimited spaces. Further, the shared listening experience offered by the museum space (in contrast to the contemporary side of the headphone-individual listening) evokes both shared and individual reflection and reaction. In the delineated sound circle space, the audience is invited to find themselves immersed in a wilderness conversation.

Sounds are an integral and essential part of understanding wilderness. The sounds were recorded via non-invasive, automated remote monitoring networks. Sounds present a more subtle and complex perspective of wilderness, a measure of acoustic biodiversity. Now the wilderness becomes not just the landscape and protected land, but also the sounds and particular daily and seasonal soundscapes in which one must be immersed in, and perhaps converse with, in order to have the full experience of the wild. 

Seeking broader ways to communicate the experience of sound immersion into wild landscapes, the artist collaborates with ARBIMON.  The Automated Remote Biodiversity Monitoring Network is a collaboration among ecologists, environmental scientists and computer scientists from the University of Puerto Rico-Rio Piedras.