One of the most elusive aspects of recorded media is the issue of presence, not only that of the performer, but also of place. How can the essence of a given geographical location be captured and communicated? Onye Ahanotu’s Urban Forest Bathing series approaches the challenge of transporting the listener by providing a sonic environment steeped in the ambience of the location of its making. Ahanotu’s work begins as field recordings and photographs gathered in the meeting places between human-made infrastructure and the non-human natural environment in his current residence of Oakland, California. On a recent Saturday afternoon, I made an appointment and met the artist at Oakstop Galleries in downtown Oakland to experience Urban Forest Bath: Oakland Acoustic Park, a socially distanced immersion into his visual and sonic worlds. An exhibition of photographs, video and sound sculptures, Oakland Acoustic Park establishes an integrative fluidity, dissolving the four walls of the gallery into its broader environmental context and directing the listener/viewer’s attention to the ways that these things are already always connected. A cassette and Bandcamp release on the Oakland based FREAKS label makes these connections distributable in time and space.

Emily Pothast: How do you see location functioning in this work?

Onye Ahanotu: Much of my work in the past few years focuses on capturing and exploring the notion of an essence of place. In my recently completed Urban Portrait project I seek out the overlap of key architectural, geometric and material perspectives of a city that differentiate it from others. What tells the contextual story of a place?

In Urban Forest Bathing, I seek to explore and present an alternative perspective of the city; looking at the interface of the built and spontaneous worlds. In a time and place where construction is redefining the city, it is important to look at how we can think about intentionally and elegantly designing with nature, particularly in a location where access and mobility issues exist. The field recordings, and images, seek to amplify the persistence and sometimes overlooked aspects of the city around us.

Many of your photographs capture instances of the organic world popping up through man-made infrastructure, and it sounds like you are doing something similar in terms of field recordings and processing. Will you explain how the sound is being digitally altered in these tracks?

I spent some time considering how I could record to give a binaural-like experience – this helped influence my hardware set-up. The digital processing of these tracks is done in two parts, the first is noise reduction to reduce the man-made sounds and artefacts of recording, the second is feeding the processed clips into a generative algorithm to compose the final soundscape.

In the headphones, I hear water moving across rocks and the voices of birds calling out to one another. Meanwhile, the outside environment in the ‘real’ world feels inhospitable because of smoke from nearby forest fires. What’s the relationship between the recorded world and the ‘real’ world, for you?

The recorded world, in either my photography or field recordings, is a slice of the real world as selectively explored by me. Yes, there are fires and smoke-filled air that feels inhospitable, but for the birds chirping, the city is also a hostile externality. Our limited perspectives, say in wavelength or scale, restrict us from experiencing a more complete picture of reality. In these recordings, I try to leverage this by capturing details of a mostly under-noticed reality, to actively pose the question of if the recorded or live realities are equally real to our subconscious.

Urban Forest Bath: Oakland Acoustic Park was one of the first art experiences I’ve had in a gallery in months. How has the pandemic impacted how you think about the difference between public and private art experiences?

Before the pandemic, we had so many semi-private spaces that we would occupy extending outside of our residence. These spaces felt safe and OK to occupy, but now our private spaces have contracted. With people having different levels of comfort both private and public experiences should be considered. There are more ways than ever for galleries to explore new approaches allowing for private and public interactions with concepts, content and each other. For some who are just passing by, the porous boundary allows engagement with the projected videos and ability to stream the audio. For others who wish to reserve a listening session, a much deeper immersion and engagement is possible.

You’re also a scientist and a winemaker. What are the parallels between making music and working in those capacities?

My background as a scientist makes me prone to researching and learning about adjacent topics and allowing that to inform my approach. Particularly, I’m trained as a material scientist which is a perspective that I bring to both winemaking and my art. In materials science, we can seek to explore specific properties through the structure and production processes. I am curious about dissecting things down to understanding the critical variables. In sound, the subconscious influence it has on us is an interesting medium to explore. I have in interest in drawing viewers or listeners deeper into my work, one approach that I use to do this is composition. To build these sound sculptures I started by trying to understand psychoacoustics, to build an intuitive foundation before starting to record.

By creating work that aims to draw listeners deeper, it seems to me that you are actively cultivating more subtle forms of attention. Do you see a relationship between modulating attention and learning (or unlearning) ways of relating to the world around us?

As a trans-disciplinarian, much of my work is about seeing differently, thinking differently, and in this case, hearing differently (or at least more intentionally). New perspectives can sometimes allow us to find new value or connection. I see the simple act of intentional listening, as something that can broaden the experience of our surroundings. The birds tweeting back and forth were always there, but we just don’t listen for those details. What else are we missing?

For more about Urban Forest Bathing, visit Onye Ahanotu's website.