Meditating on our environment at ‘The River’

The latest in the Natural History Museum’s free contemporary art programme, The River – composed by acclaimed Norwegian sound artist Jana Winderen in collaboration with spatial audio expert Tony Myatt – explores the world below the surface of the Thames using underwater recordings, highlighting the importance of sound in this habitat and the impact that human activity is having on it.

Lying on a beanbag at Jana Winderen’s The River, you forget you’re in the Natural History Museum, in the heart of a bustling city where noise is as commonplace as black cabs and double decker buses.

The latest in the museum’s free contemporary art programme invites people to sit in a single, dimly lit gallery, with nothing to do but listen.

‘From the ambient crackling of gas bubbles at the source by Kemble, the hectic industry of Central London and the sprawling estuary into the North Sea, listeners will experience a huge range of sounds created and heard by aquatic species,’ reads the official press release.

‘Jana’s work highlights sounds often inaudible to the human ear and present in inaudible environments.’

 

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Composed by Winderen – an acclaimed Norwegian sound artist – in collaboration with Tony Myatt, the immersive 360-degree audio instillation takes you to the all-encompassing depths of the Thames, where very few have explored – even less so with their ears.

Using specialist hydrophones, Winderen captures the cacophony of life in this habitat, a chorus of water boatmen and backswimmers interrupted frequently by the rumbles of human activity.

It makes you think. In offering a rare escape from the overstimulation of London, a moment of peace amid the chaos, but one that’s contaminated by the reminder of our impact on the natural world, you’re made to understand how polluting our presence on Earth really is.

This is the message that Winderen is seeking to convey: that not only are we surrounded by more life than we’re able to comprehend, but that we’re destroying it in ways we aren’t even conscious of.