Ongoing Sessions
April 1-June 30
9:00am-5:00pm |
Exhibition, Air America Though it is mostly invisible to us, we need air—please remember to breathe as you read this. Necessary to life, hard to grasp, air became a powerful metaphor and an actual source of power for life in the new world. Europeans used the wind to get to America, then worried that its air was bad for them (mal-aria). Indian, European, and African peoples of the Americas played and sang musical airs, even operatic arias. Colonists made money from tobacco smoke and from wind-powered sugar-mills. In America, squirrels flew and the Virgin (of Guadalupe) hovered in midair. Soaring eagles represented new American nations. And new world natural phenomena shaped new conceptions of climate that continue to inform debates about life on Earth today. |
John Carter Brown Library |
April 25-May 6
8:00am-5:00pm |
Sound Installation, Oscillator Pond: Analog Critters in a Digital Pool The critter sounds that populate Oscillator Pond were made on a rare and historic analog synthesizer - an Arp 2500 made in the 1970’s. Organic sounding rhythms and creature-like tones were generated on the the Arp and then captured digitally. The critter sounds are triggered with custom software using probability and random processes to create a surreal and unpredictable soundscape that changes through the day. Visitors can interrupt this “organic mode” to hear specific critter sounds and activate some special playback modes. |
IBES Greenhouse |
April 28-30
8:00am-7:00pm |
Sound Installations, Room Tones Sound installations works by students enrolled in Site & Sound. |
Granoff Center
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Sound Installation, Rainforest Listening Rainforest Listening is an augmented reality installation that layers rainforest soundscapes in urban environments to inspire ecological engagement. Listeners access the sounds via mobile devices and sculpt their own experience by triggering geolocated soundscapes as they walk through iconic locations across the world. |
Accessed via mobile devices |
April 29-30
8:00am-7:00pm |
Sound Installation, A Hundred Thousand A Hundred Thousand derives from a sound recording made in Botswana while on an expedition through 1,500 miles of the Okavango river system with a multinational team of scientists and members of the regional Ba'Yei community in support of conservation, scientific, and environmental justice initiatives. |
Granoff Center
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One-Day Sessions
Thursday, April 28
4:00pm | Event Registration |
IBES Main Foyer |
5:00pm | Keynote Lecture, Dr. Mwangi Githiru, Director of Biodiversity and Social Monitoring at Wildlife Works, Kenya Atmospheres: A story of space and connexion, thresholds and infinity, despair and promise, A story of life Chair: Jim Russell, IBES Fellow, Associate Professor of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences |
IBES 130 |
6:00pm | Poster Session |
IBES Main Foyer |
6:30pm | Reception Book Launch, Birders of Africa: History of a Network, by Nancy Jacobs, Associate Professor of History, Brown University |
IBES 101 |
8:15pm |
Magic Lantern Cinema presents “Visual Climates” With growing urgency, the world turns its attention to how environmental crises unfold from local to global scales. An enduring concern in addressing ecological problems centres on how the human being perceives the world with the limitations of senses that fail to capture the complex operations of our whole surroundings. This program presents a collection of visual experiments and documents that seek to explore the unknown, imperceptible, micro and macro worlds of our shared ecology. |
Cable Car Cinema
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Friday, April 29
6:00am |
Campus Birdwalk, led by Scott Turner, Director of Web Communications, Brown University Late April in Providence is usually when songbirds, from hummingbirds to warblers and vireos, begin to show up in both variety and numbers on their spring migration north, and post dawn is when most birds typically sing. We will head for the local birding “hotspot,” the trees and shrubs around Woods-Gerry House (RISD Admission Office) on Prospect Street to meet and greet both migrant and resident birds. |
Begins outside IBES
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10:00am | Welcome Address Neil Safier, Director of the John Carter Brown Library |
John Carter Brown Library |
10:15am | Panel 1: The Politics of Wind Chair: Leah VanWey, Interim Director of IBES, Associate Professor of Sociology Lawrence English, Relational Listening: The Politics of Perception Cymene Howe, Wind Species Bina Venkataraman, Windspeed: Bridging planetary and political time horizon |
John Carter Brown Library |
12:15pm |
Lunch and Poster Session The posters, paintings and videos, from undergraduate and graduate students across disciplines at Brown, include descriptions of scientific research, paintings, and other ways of engaging with questions of environment, climate, ecology and atmosphere. |
IBES Main Foyer |
1:00pm |
Ignite! Ignite! is a new innovation, in which faculty and graduate students will present work using PowerPoint in short format – with each presentation lasting around 6-8 minutes. This, like other events, is open to the public and is intended to inspire. |
IBES 130 |
2:30pm | Panel 2: Air and Illness Chair: Lenore Manderson, Conference Convenor, Visiting Professor of Environmental Studies Bernadette Ramirez, How Climate Change Shapes Health Risk Tongzhang Zeng, Air pollution & human health in China: Establishment of a nationwide monitoring networK |
John Carter Brown Library |
4:15pm | Break and Afternoon Tea |
John Carter Brown Library |
4:45pm |
Theatre Performance, Drift Drift is a work in progress, a performance free association monologue that travels through myriad images, associations and thoughts about atmospheres and the weather. It is written and performed by artist Wendy Woodson. |
John Carter Brown Library |
Saturday, April 30
9:00am-7:30pm | Sound Installations, Room Tones |
Granoff Center |
3:00pm | Panel 3: Conservation Concerns Chair: Nancy Jacobs, Associate Professor of History Michael J. Hathaway, Winds: A Way to Understand Globalization Differently Scott Turner, Writing for a Breath of Fresh Air Leah Barclay, Changing Soundscapes and the Biosphere |
Granoff Center
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4:45pm | Closing Remarks | |
5:00pm | Reception |
Granoff Center
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7:30pm |
Concert, Air Fields Pieces by three artists who work with soundscape and field recordings as a central part of their practice are presented in a multichannel listening environment. Leah Barclay’s Temporal Encounters (2016) explores a series of field recordings from UNESCO biosphere reserves across the world. Garth Paine’s Now (2016) is an exploration of a practice he calls “ecological listening.” Lawrence English’s Viento (2015) is built from recordings made during wind storms in Patagonia and Antarctica. |
Granoff Center
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