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Arts

Signal Extraction

Application summary

Signal Extraction is a sound art project situated within Sipoonkorpi National Park, aiming to elucidate the one-sided interspecies communication provoked by the widespread dissemination of sounds in our hyper-industrialized era. By utilizing trees as receptors to collect frequencies for subsequent manipulation, the project delves into the intricacies of arboreal communication networks, drawing inspiration from historical experiments such as General George Owen Squier's tree-based radio connections. While tree communication experienced a brief resurgence during the Vietnam War, its mainstream adoption became anachronistic with technological advancements. This initiative serves as a critique of extractivism, emphasizing the importance of listening to 'the other' in a world where non-human entities are often marginalized. Departing from animistic beliefs, the project examines the impact of human influence on the environment, particularly through the lens of noise pollution and its legal and environmental implications. As the Earth's soundscape undergoes perpetual transformation due to hyper-industrialization, understanding the complexities of our acoustic environment becomes paramount, especially in managing non-audible frequencies. Sipoonkorpi National Park, with its network of antennas, exemplifies the intricate relationship between urban and rural environments, reflecting on the tangible effects of human activity on various ecosystems.

Signal Extraction is a 20-minute audio piece composed from recordings made in Sipoonkorpi National Park and along its edges. Using a custom-built device that converts electromagnetic interference into sound, trees functioned as natural antennas, capturing “invisible” frequencies that were later manipulated and arranged.
The fieldwork extended beyond the park’s interior into surrounding areas—residential zones, highways, and industrial corridors—tracing the entangled flows of energy, sound, and information that disregard socially constructed boundaries. Walking over 200 kilometers and crossing these lines became a method of interrogating the idea of margins: what lies inside or outside a “protected” space, and how human infrastructures both define and confine. This approach also engaged with Finland’s jokamiehenoikeus (everyone’s right to access nature), exploring how this principle persists—or is challenged—within landscapes shaped by global extractivism and hyper-industrialization.
In an era where technology governs territory often without direct human presence, the project turns to the biological ambiguity of trees—organisms that, while lacking ears or nervous systems like animals, exhibit environmental sensitivity through structures such as plasmodesmata, allowing them to respond to stimuli, including sound vibrations.
This is not a scientific inquiry. Rather, it embraces subjectivity, embodied experience, and listening as a relational act, proposing alternative modes of perception. It confronts the acoustic consequences of modern life, where noise pollution becomes a subtle yet pervasive form of control and colonization. Even the most remote forests are saturated with anthropogenic pressures, shifting the world from an extensive to an intensive condition—no longer defined by distance, but by density.
https://cristiansubira.com/signal-extraction

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