Institute for Climate Sound & Society

The Institute for Climate Sound & Society (ICSS) brings together sound-based practices entangled with the climate crisis, offering new ways to sonically gather, analyze and represent data to understand changing ecosystems and decenter humans in public culture. Merging the rapidly evolving landscape of sound recording technologies such as passive acoustic monitoring and AI with long-established audio recording methods, climate sound integrates work from scientists, technologists, artists, journalists, scholars, and policymakers across bioacoustics, soundscape ecology, atmospheric science, geology, STS, media theory, landscape architecture, biodiversity monitoring, music, and many other arenas. The Institute for Climate Sound & Society supports this growing community and is engaged in innovative research, publishing, and gatherings with the mission to advance new forms of knowledge and expand research impact.
Time
Location
Copenhagen, Denmark // Cambridge, USA // Berlin, Germany
Macrophones (2022–24) by Brian House (https://brianhouse.net)

The institute launched with a Radcliffe Exploratory Seminar on Thursday, February 29 - Friday, March 1, 2024.

Now, the Institute is focused upon research, experimental publishing, and community-building through exhibitions & events.

The Institute for Climate Sound & Society (ICSS) is being incubated at metaLAB (at) Harvard and the AIRLab at IT University of Copenhagen. Kara Oehler, a senior researcher at ITU, co-Founder of metaLAB (at) Harvard and long-time innovator in sound, technology, and storytelling is Executive Director. Jeffrey Schnapp, Faculty Director of metaLAB, and Brian House, Assistant Professor at Amherst College, are co-founders of the Institute. Jesse Shapins, co-founder of metaLAB and UnionDocs, is a senior advisor. The Institute is now seeking additional launch partners and collaborators on its first initiatives. To find out more, check back here or join our newsletter.