Samuel Thulin OBORO@Avatar: Sounding Desert Utopias
Samuel Thulin, Sounding Desert Utopias, capture d’écran tirée de Google Maps
Conference-performance at Avatar on Thursday May 29, 2025, at 5 pm
Following last spring's Avatar@OBORO project with Amélie Laurence Fortin and the Repères listening station, OBORO travels to Avatar with artist Samuel Thulin.
Sounding Desert Utopias is an octophonic composition about desert exploration made up of 128 audio files that were unintentionally geotagged in the middle of the Libyan desert on the sound-sharing platform Freesound.org. The original files range from seaside recordings to voice recordings, drum samples, music fragments and more. Through his correspondence with the people responsible for the uploads, Thulin was able to discover that the sounds in fact came from all over the world: Thunder Bay, Ciudad del Este, Pretoria, New York, Zagreb, and so on.
In his work, the artist employs multiple approaches to working with sound. Among other things, he draws on extracts from the travel accounts of early 20th-century desert explorers, highlighting the disorientation, sandstorms and shifting dunes encountered in the search for oases. In his process, sounds are transformed and distorted by granular synthesis and by his own custom-designed sampling instruments with SuperCollider. The work addresses the multiple and conflicting tensions that are generated by the idea of utopia.
The artist acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts.
Samuel Thulin, Sounding Desert Utopias, capture d’écran tirée de Google Maps
Samuel Thulin is an artist and researcher interested in the specificities of spaces and places, and in the movements and resonances of bodies, data, and sounds. Through his artworks and publications, he has explored: locative media and contested senses of place; confluences of cartography and auditory culture; self-tracking, chronic illness, and datafication; and creative and emergent research methodologies. His solo and collaborative projects include multichannel sound installations, compositions made from data sonification, interactive geolocated soundscapes and narratives for mobile apps, music made from found-sounds and field-recordings, live audio performances, place-based soundtracks for public transit and kinesthetic and vibrational multisensory installations. Based in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal, Thulin holds a PhD in Communication Studies from Concordia University.