Iceland Land is a conceptual soundscape that challenges the ultra-aestheticization of Iceland occurring on Instagram, through a sonic ethnography of Iceland’s data and energy infrastructures. Popular images of Iceland produced by influencers, professional photographers and tourists, and disseminated on Instagram via hashtags such as #icelandicnature, #icelandscape, and #icelandtravel, construct an image of Iceland as a pristine, pure and untouched wonderland—or “Iceland Land”—waiting to be repeatedly (re)discovered by the quintessential Insta-tourist. Iceland Land complicates this socio-digital construct by amplifying the reality of Iceland’s natural landscape, which is one always entangled with people and technology. By eschewing the persistently aestheticized visual representations of Iceland, Iceland Land forces the listener’s attention onto the “dirty” sounds of tourists’ chatter, structure and facility maintenance, the mechanical roaring of Iceland’s energy industry, and the constant hum of the island nation’s data infrastructure. These sounds accompany ambient nature sounds—ocean waves, rushing river water, steam vents, and boiling mud bubbling up from deep in the earth—at times becoming indistinguishable. Steam or machinery? Geothermal activity or the roaring of a data center? “Natural” or “unnatural?”All of the sounds in Iceland Land were recorded in Iceland, the majority at the very sites that the typical traveler presents on platforms like Instagram as whimsically pristine and conspicuously silent. Iceland Land eschews the silencing frame of visual representation, making space for Iceland’s voices—natural and unnatural, human and machine—to speak for themselves, calling out the reality of the country’s complex relationship between its human inhabitants, technology, and nature.
Kyle Cassidy - Eyelanda
I feel my job in a collaboration like this is most often to take abstract ideas and represent them in a visually compelling way that will capture people’s attention in a short amount of time and then direct it at a particular area of research, sort of like ringing a bell and then pointing.
In this case — how do you tell the story of infrastructure, and energy, and a magic, invisible kind of computer money? The way that naturally evolves for me is through people. I can’t really show you the story of an excited electron, traveling from the Earth’s core through wires and homes and technology, but I can introduce you to people whom it’s influenced along the way and hopefully create compelling portraits of them.
I was lucky enough to be able to study under Mary Ellen Mark (B.F.A. ’62, M.A.C. ’64) when she taught here. She saw everything through people and she made friends everywhere she went and that helped her tell stories. I try and do the same thing. I think she would have approved of my photos here, though she definitely would have said I should have shot them on film and probably with a view camera. I used a Panasonic Lumix GX7 because I could fit it in my pocket.
