Music and sound have an important role to play in discourse surrounding the global challenges of our time: the climate crisis, social and cultural justice, and geopolitical peace. Artistic methods for engaging with these topics have diversified over the past twenty years, with evolving artistic research practices significantly influencing design of interdisciplinary collaborations and the creative work that emerges from them.
It is commonly acknowledged that interdisciplinary approaches are urgently needed to effect meaningful societal shifts. Artistic research offers a plurality of tools and approaches to highlight the intangible, the emotional and the experiential, and to offer alternative pathways for engagement with global challenges.
This presentation centres on artistic research projects exploring music as an alternative means of climate communication, to bridge the gap between data, understanding, reflection, and action. Insights into artistic research processes centered on interdisciplinary transferability will be shared through a portfolio of collaborative works developed within The Sound Collectors Lab (Melbourne, Australia). Three interdisciplinary works that each reveal different stories of human impacts on bodies of water in this region will be presented: Dark Oceanography (2025), Preservation Reference Area (2024), and Alluvial Gold (2022). In each work, transferral of materials, narratives, and processes is embraced in different and plural ways, moving between art and science, human and more-than-human, the sonic and the visual, between knowing and feeling.
Louise Devenish
Monash University
Dr Louise Devenish is a percussionist whose creative practice blends performance, artistic research and creative collaboration with musicians, visual artists, designers, and scientists. Louise is director of artistic research project The Sound Collectors Lab at Monash University, which creates and presents new music through performances, recordings, talks and scholarly publications.