Andreas Templin

anthropocene is just another word for nothing left to lose

The largest Atlantic hurricane recorded to date hit New York City in the morning hours of October 29th 2012. Hurricane Sandy was a storm-system with a diameter of 1800 km and took the lives of at least 233 people in eight countries. The assessed damage has been estimated to roughly $68 billion. The hurricane sparked a widespread political debate in the US regarding climate change and the hurricane’s relation to global warming.
The audio-footage for this sound art-work was captured from the hd-cameras’s microphones mounted on top of the Statue of Liberty and recorded in three parts starting 12.42 pm and ended at 17.54 pm on October 29th, 2012. It has since then been completed into the soundart-work “anthropocene is just another word for nothing left to lose”.

The sheer brutality of the storm’s impact creates strong overmodulations and distortions and pushes the microphones to its technical limits. The incomparability of this sound (incomparable in the sense of being the largest storm system recorded in meteorological history) is in my opinion directly interlinked with the technical limits of our civilization in general. It displays certain powerlessness counteracting the current visions of technological omnipotence dominating the early Anthropocene.