AA Dubai - Climate Cartographies
May 2025 · Performance · Sound · Commission/Exhibition
Climate Cartographies: Glitch was an Architectural Association Visiting School at Alserkal Avenue in Dubai, about climate change and heritage and how you might represent them through sound. I attended as a participant and built this live A/V piece during the programme, then performed it at the closing showcase.
The programme, supported by the Alserkal Arts Foundation, took Wadi Madha as its departure point, a liminal border territory between Oman and the UAE. It treated the glitch, the error or disruption, as a way into a place rather than a failure of it. I worked from field recordings and terrain data gathered on site.
Process
The performance runs in TouchDesigner and Ableton. It moves through a set of transformations: a faked terrain heat-map spectrogram, noise from optical-flow tracking of monsoon wind, Madha field recordings granulated into droplet sounds, point-cloud disruption of terrain, glitched Google Maps narration, and a radio signal broken by interrupting the current on a copper wire. Each one is in the media below, linked to its moment in the recording.