From the classical period through the early modern, tales abounded of distant islands inhabited by demons, devils, evil spirits, and all manner of winged creatures. The Sirens lured sailors to shipwreck with singing voices. The sprite Ariel conjures up a storm. These are but some of the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of wind.

An Island of Sound is a new browser-based work by J. R. Carpenter exploring phantom islands as weather phenomenon through an assemblage of found images, algorithmically generated texts, live performance, and sound. Artistically, An Island of Sound contributes a feminist, polyvocal, and decolonial approach to thinking about the emergence and propagation of phantom islands in the colonial imaginary. This thinking is undertaken through and with the elemental media of wind. All of the images in the browser-based work come from the British Library’s Flickr Commons. These visual elements extend far beyond the bounds of the browser window. In order to navigate the work, the viewer must scroll vertically and horizontally, and zoom in and out. Even then, the viewing is only ever partial. The textual elements in the browser-based work incorporate references to islands from classical, colonial, and cartographic sources. These texts are variable; one line of text on the screen may be a long poem in a JavaScript array in the source code. Thus, machine time enters into this assemblage, interrupting the timescale of human reading with its own logic of random selection and interruption.

The sound-world created by Jules Rawlinson for the browser-based and live performance iterations of this work responds to, supports, and transforms J R Carpenter’s visual and textual imagery. Field recordings, wind synthesis, generative sample streams and data-driven sound processing are collaged and combined with spoken word to create ambiguous and shifting sonic narratives and spectral resonances.

The browser-based iteration of An Island of Sound was not funded or sponsored. The first live performance of An Island of Sound was commissioned by the Edinburgh Futures Institute. A link to a video of this performance has been provided below. An Island of Sound has since been performed at SpokenWeb Research Symposium on the theme of Reverb: Echo-Locations of Sound and Space” in Edmonton,Alberta, at Mix Conference at the British Library in London, ELO conference at Coimbra, Portugal, and at Wind as Model, Media, and Experience symposium at John Hansard Gallery, Southampton.