Tim Cowlishaw

Designer, Researcher, Technologist

Alluvial Sharawadji (2018)

With Jakub Fiala

A google streetview screenshot of the Ebro Delta, a rural marshland. From left to right across the horizon, the image starts to blur and undulate, taking the form of a soundwave.

Alluvial Sharawadji was a crowdsourced interactive artwork/workshop by myself and my friend and collaborator Jakub Fiala for Eufonic festival 2018, combining collaborative field recording with low-cost, ubiquitous web technologies to communicate the experience of a local sound environment to audiences who are distant in both time and space.

Drawing on Claude Shryer’s idea of ‘Sharawadji’ – the action of “tending an open ear in the hopes of experiencing the sublime beauty of a given sound in an unexpected context.” this work takes the alluvial action of the Ebre river’s flow (transporting material through time and space to create new deposits and forms) as a metaphor for the movement of participants through the festival soundscape, gathering and depositing elements of the sound-world for later experience by others.