Communicating Sustainability: The Role of (Sound) Art in Influencing Change Through Community
This essay should be read in conjunction with the sound and video artwork, ‘Figtree’, viewable at the link below. Headphones are recommended for the listening experience as the work utilizes spatial audio.
'Figtree'
Art and Culture as a tool in the global push towards environmental sustainability has a role not only in ensuring its own practices are sustainable, but also in communicating notions of sustainability to influence broader cultural change. This may be achieved through art works that tap into audience desires for community and knowledge. Starting at the local level, these art works can foster ecological citizenship through a shared sense of connection to environment. The sound art piece, ‘Figtree’, presented alongside this essay, attempts to put into practice this statement, by offering a perspective of a localised environment that builds learning and understanding towards broader care and respect for natural spaces.
Through creating community, art can educate and influence people towards sustainable ideas. Sustainability is viewed holistically, encompassing all of social, political, economic and cultural climate, as well as the environmental (De Beukelaer & Spence, 2019). ‘Figtree’ – named for the property on which it was initially recorded - chooses to focus on two of these pillars of sustainability: social and environmental. Through the view that creating community around connection to shared spaces will create sustainable thinking in both maintaining those localised communities, and also the spaces within which they are localised - in this case the regenerating bushland behind fire-affected Cobargo, NSW – the work can influence ideals of environmental sustainability in protecting and maintaining the ecology of the area.
The work operates in three stages towards this end. Firstly, the intention is that residents of the area from which the recording originates may connect with its subject matter (the local ecology) through its familiarity. It leverages Blesser & Salter’s (2007) notion of ‘soundmarks’, “which, by analogy, are here to be understood to equate to ‘landmarks’” and can provide “[a] sense of local cohesion” (Kouvaras, 2014) in the same way that community connection and pride around an iconic local building – such as a church – might. Thisconnection to ‘soundmarks’ and the broader subject matter of the work (the local ecology) opens viewers of the work to learning from how the work displays that familiar ecology (discussed more broadly later in this essay), and in turn influencing them to take more notice – and ultimately care – of that ecology post their experiencing of the work.
Through this method, the work - positioning itself as an arm of cultural policy more broadly - is used as a tool for fostering what Duxbury et al., in borrowing language from Stevenson (2003), describe as ‘ecological citizenship’. That is, a way of “creating imagined communities [to] tackle sustainability as a global issue.” (Duxbury, Kangas, & De Beukelaer, 2017). Art can create a sense of connection and responsibility to ecologies through a shared ‘citizenship’ in its dual role as both ‘Educator’ (teaching about sustainability) and ‘Promoter’ (encouraging actions of sustainability) through which it emphasises “way of life” changes to thinking and action (Duxbury, Kangas, & De Beukelaer, 2017). The creation of ‘Figtree’, in taking on these roles, is supported by research conducted by Curtis et al., who find “the role of the arts is often overlooked in extending scientific information and yet the role of the arts in communicating issues, influencing and educating people, and challenging dominant paradigms has a long tradition in the humanities” (Curtis, Reid, & Ballard, 2012).
In order to create community and influence notions of sustainability, and also be an effective work of art, ‘Figtree’ must effectively engage audiences through its content by leveraging desires for learning and emotional connection. In analysing what it is audiences desire when viewing or attending works of art, Simona Botti noted that “a number of studies have found that acquisition of knowledge is one of the primary reasons why people visit museums and galleries” (Botti, 2000). Additionally, in their survey of attendees to arts and cultural events, Radbourne et al. noted that “respondents cited the importance of information as part of the audience experience and its role in providing opportunities to lean” (Radbourne, Johanson, Glow, & White, 2009). ‘Figtree’ aims to teach about how the sounds within an environment interact with each other. By presenting an adapted spectrogram – a form of visualizing frequency information within a sound source – viewers of the work can identify sounds visually as they hear them, seeing lower frequencies at the bottom of the image and higher frequencies at the top. Viewers of the work can notice that different species of insects and animals are communicating at different frequencies so as to not overlap and interfere with each other, and that – significantly – towards the end of the work the introduction of a causes the cessation of a large portion of the communication occurring. Audience engagement here will be “a function of learning: the experience is significant if one can ‘expose’ oneself to its educative message and ‘take something away from it,’ something that develops one’s understanding of what is being listened to or watched” (Radbourne, Johanson, Glow, & White, 2009).
‘Figtree’ also aims to engage with audience emotions, in response to the suggestion that “when people become emotional, they tend to pay more attention to events and as a consequence commit the experience to long-term memory” (Curtis, Reid, & Ballard, 2012). To that end, the work introduces composition and manipulation of the soundscape ecology, through the dual framework of aesthetic & emotions on one hand, and learning from and reacting to the ways in which the ecology already operates on the other. That is, composition attempts to ‘stay out of the (sonic) way’ of existing natural sounds by specifically choosing frequency and temporal patterns that interact and respond to, rather than go over the top of, the communication occurring within the soundscape. The hope is that this will suggest a way in which human influence might interact cooperatively and harmoniously with natural ecosystems, rather than destructively. ‘Figtree’ therefore hopes to leverage “the emotions of fear, sadness, and anger” – but also beauty and admiration – “evoked by environmental degradation [to] encourage pro-environmental behaviors” (Curtis, Reid, & Ballard, 2012).
Ultimately, through engaging with audience emotional responses, and also their desire for learning, ‘Figtree’ aims to encourage a ‘hedonic response’, being “a combined response from the emotions, senses, imagination, and intellect” towards “arousing [audience] emotions, stimulating a physical reaction, soliciting their memories and fantasies, and triggering their cognitive development” (Santoro and Troilo, 2017, as cited in Radbourne, Johanson, Glow, & White, 2009), all towards fostering attitudes of sustainability.
‘Figtree’, as a work of art, specifically aims to create a shared sense of community by engaging audiences with their local environments and fostering notions and actions of sustainability amongst those communities. It does this by connecting audiences to the work through recognizable ‘soundmarks’ and engaging them by triggering a hedonic response that appeals to both their desire for knowledge and learning through art, and connection through emotional stimulation. The intention is that fostering these connections first to the work, and then through the work to local environment, will encourage actions and attitudes ofenvironmental sustainability and care for that and other environments, thereby demonstrating some of the impact the arts more broadly can have towards sustainable development.
References
Botti, S. (2000). What Role for Marketing in the Arts? An Analysis of Arts Consumption and Artistic Value. International Journal of Arts Management, 2(3), 14-27.
Curtis, D. J., Reid, N., & Ballard, G. (2012). Communicating Ecology Through Art: What Scientists Think. Ecology and Society, 17(2).
De Beukelaer, C., & Spence, K.-M. (2019). Sustainability. In Global Cultural Economy (pp. 157-179). Milton Park: routledge.
Duxbury, N., Kangas, A., & De Beukelaer, C. (2017). Cultural policies for sustainable development: four strategic paths. International Journal of Cultural Policy, 23(2), 214-230.
Kouvaras, L. (2014). Making 'Soundmarks': Places and ecologies in contemporary sound art. Communities, Places, Ecologies: Proceedings of the 2013 IASPM-ANZ Conference. (pp. 164-170). Brisbane: International Association for the Study of Popular Music.
Radbourne, J., Johanson, K., Glow, H., & White, T. (2009). The Audience Experience: Measuring Quality in the Performing Arts. International Journal of Arts Management, 11(3), 16-29.