INTRODUCTION

“Soundings” is the scientific term for measuring sea depth with sonar. In bathymetric mapping, multibeam sonar sends fan-shaped acoustic pulses through water and converts returning echoes into seafloor maps. A multibeam sonar has the capacity to emit a series of over four hundred sound beams, or dots, per second through the water and, by stepping forward, create a visual image of the seabed by assembling each dot into a line, and the lines into a detailed landscape. A sounding is however never only a number—it is an event shaped by water conditions, calibration, software processing, instrument limits and political intentions, before it becomes data, then a map, then a scientific statement.

Soundings is an ongoing artistic research work developed as a synthesis between artistic research, software programming, and marine geoscience. Created within Sonic Visions of the Arctic (postdoctoral project funded by the Swedish Research Council), it proposes a methodological shift: from sonification and visualization as neutral representations to a critical, situated practice that makes gaps, artifacts, and uncertainty perceptible as embodied knowledge.

The project takes the shape of different forms and formats, and has been presented as screenings, publiced articles as well as manifested as an installation in the white cube gallery in the Norrland Opera, north of Sweden. In this case the installation explored  bathymetric data from the Ryder expedition in the summer of 2019, a scientific expedition to the Ryder Glacier in northern Greenland, one of the most inaccessible areas of the world. The expedition was carried out with the Swedish icebreaker Oden and the purpose was, among other things, to investigate whether the shape of the seabed affects the melting of Greenland’s glaciers, which is of great global importance as the glaciers are among the largest on earth and are central to the change in global sea level.

Soundings recreated the several-week-long route in northern Greenland exactly as the icebreaker Oden moved and collected data. The work consists of different parts which relate in different ways to the expedition’s journey and its collected data. It focuses on two different approaches to the raw scientific data that underpins the scientific study and analysis of the seabed: the relationship between raw data and scientific statement.

One part of the work shows the processed scientific map image of the Arctic seabed at Ryder Glacier provided by the scientists. Also visible here is a yellow emerging line showing the research vessel Oden’s route over time, moment by moment becoming its own abstract landscape.

Synchronized with the map image and its route, a projection appears at the far end of the exhibition space, along with a layer of sound coming from different speakers in the room. In the work, five points or lines from the four hundred points of the multibeam sonar have been isolated and can be seen and heard in the work. These are based on the raw data that forms the basis of the scientific map, but are reproduced here with all the technological “inaccuracies” that the scientists in the visualization have removed. Sudden silences and hiccups reveal stretches of the journey and the collecting of data where, for various reasons, the technologies have failed to measure. 

In this way, the exhibition juxtaposes the scientific map with the obscure conditions of the technologies, side by side, and turns it into a sensory, visible and audible experience.

Soundings was presented in its first public iteration in October 2023. The work should, however, be understood as part of an ongoing artistic research process that continues to evolve in response to new expeditions, datasets, and analytical shifts. During 2024–2025, the work has been further developed through the analysis of new bathymetric material from research voyages to the Victoria Fjord area, leading to both technical and conceptual changes in the work.