Audio Lodge
Time Transposition 1010

1010 (art work commissioned for “Mapping Medievalism at the Canadian Frontier,” supported by the London Heritage Council and McIntosh Gallery, The University of Western Ontario)

A group of loudspeakers installed at the main entrance of University College at the University of Western Ontario transports visitors back in time sonically. Audio Lodge creates an approximation of what the southern Ontario landscape might have sounded like 1000 years ago. The sounds evoked range from giant old-growth trees rustling and creaking in the wind, flocks of birds (e.g., passenger pigeons), and armies of insects, to the snorts of the eastern elk (now extinct), howls of the currently endangered eastern Canadian wolf, and audio evidence of other species and inhabitants. The soundscape has been constructed through field recordings undertaken in the London region. Some of the recordings were made on site in the region’s largest and oldest stand of trees, while others were achieved through special effects and Foley artistry based on paleo-environmental research by the collective. A sonic nod to Alan Sonfist's physical Time Landscape (1965 NY, NY), Time Transposition 1010 is an instant trip to the past that builds on Audio Lodge's interest in sound and its potential to transform, inform, and re-present.

Audio Lodge is a Canadian sound art collective based in London, Ontario. It is dedicated to the aural exploration of cultural systems and their unexpected analogues in the environment. Comprised of multidisciplinary artists Kevin Curtis-Norcross, Troy David Ouellette, and Paul Walde, the collective was established as a platform for interdisciplinary research using sound as a point of departure. Audio cartography is a technique developed by the group for transposing music notation and other visual descriptions of sound into geographic mapping. Each artist brings to the fore concerns regarding environmental and social practice through the inherent hidden systems of the locations explored.

Topography, geology, and biology all feature in the work of Audio Lodge. Each artist has explored the central themes of the collective in his own way. Kevin Curtis-Norcross uses audio to examine the relationship between our environment and the systems of communication that are present in the natural world. Paul Walde’s sound work invites the audience to consider the evidence of non-human interaction with the environment by using the apparatus of culture to capture and display this information, while Troy David Ouellette’s audio work centers on consumption, waste, and systems of human interaction in various socio-political contexts.

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