Sonic Cartographies

Sonic Cartographies is a sound-based intervention investigating how contemporary technologies collect, measure, and extract information from both the physical environment and the human body. By translating environmental and plant data into sound, the project examines the relationships between data, memory, and place. It asks what is lost, transformed, or made possible when our lived experience becomes information.

This inquiry feels especially urgent within the context of Black histories and futures as ongoing environmental and economic inequities continue to disproportionately affect Black communities. From plantation economies to contemporary systems of surveillance, algorithmic governance, and AI-driven data extraction, Black labor, cultural production, and the landscapes we inhabit have long been sites of commodification and resource extraction.

Through sound composition, live performance, and participatory listening sessions, the project proposes an alternative relationship to data. Rooted in cultural preservation, collective storytelling, and remembrance rather than responsive extraction, Sonic Cartographies engages data as a medium for witnessing and memory, exploring how Black embodied knowledge and cultural practices might resist reduction into quantifiable data points while remaining central to conversations about technology, ecology, and our collective future.