> Turbine; infrasound
> Bird and flying insects; ultrasound


> 1980: After oil money
> 1987: A straight border (reclamation)
> 1988: Unemployment, divorce, and suicide
> 1996: Down the drain
> 2011: Finally bright?
> 2018: Into the (re)wild


> Body as an active instrument
> First-person listening
> A field listening diary






Written by Minji Kim
Situated listening modes in an ecological place; Sihwa 
Opening the Essay

On the afternoon of July 1st, the bus bound for Sihwa was bustling with passengers, from students to elders. The air in the bus was filled with the smell of dead fish (like any other fishing village), mingling with the bus's sway and the heat inside, making me feel queasy. As the bus approached the bridge, the driver switched on the microphone and announced:

"The bus will be accelerating on the bridge. Please hold onto the handrails and refrain from moving."

The bus picked up speed as it gained the bridge. Spanning a total length of 2.76 km, this bridge① serves both as a roadway and a sluice gate for the artificial lake of Sihwa②which has been erected at the bay between Siheung and Hwaseong. I glanced out the window. The grey sky of recent rain, and fog. Arrayed in a line, transmission towers blinked rhythmically in the mist. On the bus, I felt like I was floating in mid-air; like a scene from a sci-fi film. As the bus passed the middle of the bridge, the open sea on the right and the inland sea on the left presented a contrast. Cranes from distant ports moved slowly on the former. Smoke drifted into the sky from nearby factories③, as it does in all industrial areas. The inland sea on the opposite side were exposed tidal flats, across which birds with long, pointed bills foraged in the carved-out creeks. Beneath the bridge's midpoint, a sluice gate④ sent artificial tides into the inland sea. The ecosystem of the artificial lake of Sihwa has been adapted to the rhythm of these tides generated by the sluice gate. Inside the bus, my nausea dissolved into Sihwa's clear divide between inside and outside, past and future, artificial and ecological.

In July 2023, I conducted field research at Sihwa on the west coast of Korea, residing there for a month in collaboration with a multidisciplinary collective⑤ consisting of a landscape architect, a curator, a visual artist, a marine ecologist, and a maritime humanities researcher. Sihwa has been mitigating pollution caused by anti-ecological reclamation projects, diluting it through artificial currents to improve water quality and the surrounding marine ecology. This field research aimed to archive meaningful acoustic communication between maritime infrastructure and surrounding ecology within this re-wilding process.

This essay contained, in particular, a series of reflections on the listening modes encountered in the ecological field research. Important questions were addressed: How does one come to understand the entanglements of Sihwa through listening, and what listening modes can convey to listeners the contextual web surrounding Sihwa? I am trying to provide context in order to prime the listener to my blend of stories in the ecological place before I press record on my recorder. The reason for this attempt is that I believe meaningful acoustic communication can be realised through acknowledging the complexity of situated listening modes and with specific sonic knowledge.

The situated listening modes I conceived in the field research and what I describe in this essay are categorised to correlate with my three chapters. The first chapter, “Listening with Technologies; What we cannot Hear”, describes examples of infrasound waves radiated by the machines that constitute Sihwa's re-engineering in relation to the hearing of fish and, furthermore, examines Sihwa's crowded flying non-human ultrasonic sound communication. This is a conceptual framework of listening that perceives, through technology, the non-human-oriented inaccessible layers of sound that construct ecological places.  

The second chapter, “Geo-political Stories of the Place”, includes the tale of Sihwa’s 30-year reclamation in a geopolitical context, which is revealed through pluralistic collaboration by listening to unwoven stories and unheard voices. These expose the human roots of construction in the place and attune the ears to non-human perspectives of pollution.  

The third chapter, “Embodied Listening while Counting my Listening Body”, emphasizes the listener's embodiment and subjectivity in the field to avoid vesting the authority of the voice of an ecological place. Memories, emotions, and the listener's culture/knowledge system are counted and revealed in field listening, and a self-reflective orientation is added to the listening mode.


①    Sihwa Lake Tidal Power Station aerial view (Ansan:  Arne Müseler, April 9, 2020), CC BY-SA 3.0.


②   Satellite photo of Sihwa Lake (Ansan: Seok-jae Kwon(KORDI), February 29, 2008), Permission to use photo from Korea Institute of Ocean Science and Technology



③   Smoke drifted into the sky from nearby factories in industrial areas (Ansan: Minji Kim, July, 2023), Author's collection



④    Sihwa Lake Tidal Power Plant Power Plant Exterior (Ansan: Jin-soon Park(KIOST), July 1, 2013), Permission to use photo from Korea Institute of Ocean Science and Technology



⑤   Getbollab, https://getbollab.org/