This Land is Not Mine | Album performance @ dotolim, Seoul

Image: Florian Voggeneder / Ars Electronica Festival 2022

19th May 2023
8pm
dotolim, Mapo-gu, Seoul

Tickets and more information

Kat will perform her album This Land is Not Mine as part of the dotolim concert series.

dotolim is a longstanding experimental music venue and recording studio run by Jin Sangtae, which hosts performances and concerts with people with different perspectives in various fields, as well as film screenings and exhibitions.

The “This Land is Not Mine” LP combines 7 songs by musician and sound artist Kat Austen. Austenmelds acoustic and electronica with field recordings, in this homage to a landscape ravaged by open cast mining: Lusatia, at the German-Polish border. Realised over the course of 2 years, This Land is Not Mine is a modern-day protest album, telling the stories of villages lost to the past, rivers that harbour secrets and communities that rebuild in the wake of mine closures. 

Austen’s musical roots hail back to classical piano, metal and folk. Since 2018, Austen has been releasing music that mixes field recordings and ambient electronic sounds with traditional instruments to create a unique and evocative sonic tapestry. 

Some field recordings for the album were gathered through a crowdsourcing platform Lausitzklang that explores the sounds of Lusatia.

Book published: Co-designing Infrastructures

“Co-designing Infrastructures: Community collaboration for liveable cities” by Sarah Bell, Charlotte Johnson, Kat Austen, Gemma Moore, and Tse-Hui Teh

ISBN: 9781800082229

Publication: April 27, 2023

Series: Engaging Communities in City-making

Published by Open Access by UCL Press

DOWNLOAD From the UCL Press site

Co-designing Infrastructures tells the story of a research programme designed to bring the power of engineering and technology into the hands of grassroots community groups, to create bottom-up solutions to global crises. Four projects in London are described in detail, exemplifying community collaboration with engineers, designers and scientists to enact urban change. The projects co-designed solutions to air pollution, housing, the water-energy-food nexus, and water management. Rich case-study accounts are underpinned by theories of participation, environmental politics and socio-technical systems. The projects at the heart of the book are grounded in specific settings facing challenges familiar to urban communities throughout the world. This place-based approach to infrastructure is of international relevance as a foundation for urban resilience and sustainability. The authors document the tools used to deliver this work, providing guidance for others who are working to deliver local technical solutions to complex social and environmental problems around the world.This is a book for engineers, designers, community organisers and researchers. Co-authored by researchers, it includes voices of community collaborators, their experiences, frustrations and aspirations. It explores useful theories about infrastructure, engineering and resilience from international academic research, and situates them in community-based co-design experience, to explain why bottom-up approaches are needed and how they might succeed.

Livestream for Reveil 10 on Dawn Chorus Day

REVEIL 24+1 HOUR BROADCAST 2023

5AM London time (UTC+1) on Saturday 6 MAY to 6AM on Sunday 7 MAY 2023

soundtent.org/reveil

I’m delighted to be hosting a stream from Seoul, South Korea, for Reveil 2023.

Reveil travels West on live audio feeds from streamers around the world at daybreak, making a loop over one earth day.

Reveil (2014—) is a collective production by streamers at listening points around the earth. Starting on the morning of Saturday 6 May in South London near the Greenwich Meridian, the broadcast will pick up feeds one by one, tracking the sunrise west from microphone to microphone, following the wave of intensified sound that loops the earth every 24 hours at first light.

Streams come from a variety of locations, at a time of day when human sounds are relatively low, even in dense urban areas. This tends to open the sound field to a more diverse ecology than usual. The Reveil broadcast makes room by largely avoiding speech and music, gravitating to places where human and non human communities meet and soundworlds overlap.

Each stream brings something different to the loop.

REVEIL 10 goes back to its starting point, giving attention to live sounds of places as first light reaches them.

Yongsan-gu Crow’s Nest Stream page