Słuchanie świata. Słuchowisko o koegzystencji (2026)
sound composition, 28’20
A six-month artistic project in the field of sound art and new technologies, aimed at creating an experimental radio play devoted to biodiversity, environmental transformations, and the relationships between humans, nature, and technology.
The work takes the form of a narrative sound composition built from field recordings, AI-generated synthesized sounds, and a vocal layer — conceived as a speculative acoustic landscape in which living, non-living, and digital entities interpenetrate.
The project approaches listening as an artistic, ethical, and epistemic practice, proposing sound as a medium for fostering empathy, interspecies relations, and the imagination of future forms of coexistence with the planet.
English transcription from the essay inside the sound composition:
How often are you accompanied by a sense of uncanniness — triggered by the vastness of experiences that cannot be contained within human perception?
The touch of a wet pine trunk, coated for weeks of frost with a layer of petrified ice. Nine stones, accidentally arranging themselves into a geometrically flawed spiral. Oak roots breaking through the crust of the earth — their smoothed carvings perfectly fitted to a foot wandering along a worn path.
Transformations in a feedback loop take place in my body and in the bodies I encounter. I begin to sense the depth of time — its monstrous elasticity — inhabiting every interaction.
This depth does not reveal itself in monumental images, but in microscopic shifts: in the tension of skin exposed to the wind, in the minimal tremor of a leaf that only moments ago remained still. Time does not flow evenly — it thickens in depressions of terrain, accelerates across exposed spaces, loops back on itself where matter refuses to settle into clear resolution.
Standing by the water, I watch the wave withdraw and return, as if rehearsing an infinite variation of the same gesture. There is no beginning or end in its movement, only a pulsing — soft yet insistent. Each strike against the shore inscribes itself briefly in the sand, only to be erased by the next. Duration reveals itself as a series of corrections rather than a line.
Similarly, melting snow does not vanish abruptly. It breaks apart into droplets that fall with an almost inaudible sound. This delicate, ASMR-like rhythm of dripping creates an intimate space of listening in which transformation occurs without spectacle. Ice becomes water, seeps into the soil, alters its weight and scent. It is a process extended, patient, irreversible.
In such moments, I begin to understand that uncanniness does not arise from an excess of stimuli, but from their subtle accumulation. From the awareness that every touch, every sound, every movement forms part of a larger, multilayered choreography. My body does not stand outside it — it is one of its nodes, a point of intersection for forces that do not belong exclusively to me.
The depth of time I experience is neither distant past nor projection of the future. It is the tension of presence, the stretching of a moment to the limits of its endurance. Within this elasticity reside both growth and decay, both persistence and quiet disappearance. And perhaps it is precisely within this ambivalence — in the simultaneity of emergence and loss — that an experience is born which cannot be fully named, and yet persistently demands attention.
Contemporary environmental degradation, intertwined with the disintegration of social structures and the reduction of the world’s complexity to smoothed, codified data digestible by a digital behemoth, leads to the disappearance of ambiguous, strange, subjective encounters with reality.
Is the nightingale perched on one of the magically twisted branches shaped by meandering soil around the Błędów Desert truly the nightingale of this place and this time — with its unrepeatable melody immersed in the sonic matter of the desert forest? Or has it already become merely a nightingale-as-category, a unit within a data collection, an interchangeable event that, under sufficiently similar conditions, could occur anywhere?
When I listen to it, it seems solitary. It is accompanied only by the occasional crack of pine branches and the distant barking of a dog from a nearby village. No one answers its call. I imagine it was not always so — that it was once one of many voices within a multispecies polyphony of the night.
Now the acoustic space converges almost perfectly with the geophysical condition of the Błędów Desert.
I would like to notice everything. To understand the relations that govern the reality I love so deeply. I want to see all the hundreds of limbs of the beings I encounter along my path. I want to see where they are going.
Do you ever wonder whether there is something that connects us? Something that allows us to be together in this place and in this time? What made it so that it is precisely us, here, together?
I would like to see the interdependencies that support us in the paths we choose. Where are you going? May I walk with you? Can we walk together?
Perhaps it is precisely here — in the unsealing of categories, in the soaking-through of meanings, in the failure of definitions — that a kind of joy begins, one we rarely speak about. A joy not of possessing a name, but of losing it. Of the moment when a thing slips away from designation faster than we are able to pronounce it.
The nightingale cannot ultimately be grasped as a species, a record, a data point. A wave is neither repetition nor novelty. A swamp is neither land nor water. Melting snow is no longer ice, but has not yet fully become a river. Each of these phenomena endures in a state of transition — in an ontological uncertainty that does not demand resolution.
Queer joy emerges precisely here: in consenting to the fact that the world refuses to be unambiguous. In the pleasure that comes from the dissolution of stable forms, their soft passage into something else. In the recognition that the absence of a name is not an absence of meaning, but an excess of relations that language cannot keep up with.
The impossibility of naming is not a failure of knowledge. It is an invitation to remain in motion — to inhabit the fissure between “this” and “that,” between “is” and “becoming.” It is a space in which the subject does not have to be coherent, and things do not have to be sealed within their functions. One can be like a swamp: absorbing, transforming, changing without the need for final declaration. One can be like a wave: returning differently each time.
From this perspective, uncanniness ceases to be a fleeting moment of awe and becomes a practice. A training in indeterminacy. In tenderness toward what refuses stabilization. In the joy that the world — and we within it — remains a process rather than a definition.
Perhaps, then, it is not about naming things, but about allowing them to escape. Following their flight without the need to capture them. Accepting that meaning is not a point we arrive at, but a wave that lifts us for a moment — only to recede again, leaving us in a state of slight, generative disorientation.
The project was co-financed by the European Union’s NextGenerationEU fund under the National Recovery Plan.