sounds

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.