Jacek Smolicki

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Sweden (residence), Poland, Sweden (citizenship) °1982
research interests: field recording, soundwalking, para-archiving, soundscape, mapping, experimental cartography, personal archiving, acoustic ecology, psychogeography
affiliation: Linköping University
en

Jacek Smolicki (b.1982, Kraków) is a Stockholm-based interdisciplinary artist, designer, researcher, and soundwalker interested in attending to (as in paying attention) and recording (as in calling to mind and heart) the diversity of human and other-than-human realms and existences.

In his design and art practice, besides working with existing documents, archives and heritage, Smolicki develops new modes of sensing, field-recording, para-archiving, and mediating stories and signals from various sites, scales, and temporalities. His work is manifested through soundscape compositions, soundwalks, site-responsive performances, experimental para-archives, audio-visual installations, and diverse forms of writing.

He has exhibited, presented his works, performed, soundwalked, and gave workshops internationally (e.g. Kraków, Madrid, Moscow, Helsinki, Stockholm, San Francisco, Budapest, Vienna, Sarajevo, Oxford). In 2017 he completed his PhD from the School of Arts and Communication at Malmö University where he was a member of the Living Archives, a research project funded by the Swedish Research Council.

Between 2020-2023 Smolicki pursues an international postdoc funded by the Swedish Research Council. His research explores the history and prospects of field recording and soundwalking practices from the perspective of arts, environmental humanities, and media archaeology. He is also an associate scholar at the Uppsala Informatics and Media Hub for Digital Existence at Uppsala University. From January 2020 he is a member of BioMe, a research project that investigates ethical implications of AI technologies on everyday life realms. Smolicki explores sonic capture cultures and the impact of AI technologies on human voice.


research

research expositions

  • Minuting. Rethinking the Ordinary Through the Ritual of Transversal Listening (2021) author(s): Jacek Smolicki published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
    This exploratory essay introduces selected sound recordings along with notes and observations from Minuting – a practice of sonic journaling I have performed daily since July 2010 in numerous locations and settings. I weave these observations together in a way that resonates closely with the idea of repetition, in multiple forms: protest, automation, cycle, and ritual, as well as the repetition inherent to my acts of recording. While introducing sounds from the archive of Minuting, I reflect on how this constrained and systematically enacted form of listening, recording, and re-listening leads to a transversal type of sonic reflexivity. It is a form of alertness to sound that stretches beyond the immediate resonance of the 'now' – towards spatially and temporarily distant, yet to some extent intertwined, objects, subjects, events, and environments. The text evolves across three interrelated layers: annotated recordings from the project's archive, a set of thoughts and associations triggered by re-listening to the material, and a discursive analysis that opens up the project to a dialogue with other thematically resonant debates and practices. Drawing on perspectives from media studies, the philosophy of technology, sound studies and durational art, I discuss Minuting as an art work, a creative constraint and a transversal listening practice. Lastly, I propose it as an existential media technique for composing critical and reflective positions towards one's surrounding space, experience of time, and use of sound technologies.
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