In Winderen’s composition, the sounds of living creatures become a voice in the current political debate concerning the official location of the floe edge. This zone is increasingly contested as climate crisis affects its position and seasonal emergence, impacting Inuit hunting and fishing territories, wildlife migration patterns, and climate science. In Spring Bloom listeners hear the bloom of plankton, the shifting and crackling sea ice in the Barents Sea around Spitsbergen (towards the North Pole), and the underwater sounds made by bearded seals, migrating species such as humpbacks and orcas, crustaceans and spawning cod.

Winderen’s field recordings document wildlife activities that all depend on the annual spring bloom. On UTM campus, these sounds connect the vulnerable ecologies of the Barents Sea with the seasonal rhythms of local forest ecologies, and the distressed waterways of Lake Ontario and the Credit River.

Spring Bloom plays during daylight hours only. It is periodically shut off in response to seasonal ecological activity, determined in consultation with faculty in the Department of Biology. See the Blackwood website for current playback conditions.

This artwork was first presented offsite at Southdown Industrial Area, Mississauga, for the Blackwood’s 2018 program The Work of Wind: Air, Land, Sea. Southdown is a complex 1.5 sq. km area, bordered by Clarkson to the north and Lake Ontario to the south, featuring an oil and lubricants refinery, a carbon dioxide production facility, a nursery, heritage sites, brownfields, commercial transport hubs, a wastewater treatment plant, a cement plant, a gypsum pier, a rail line, a hazardous waste management facility, fields of phragmites, a fruit distribution centre, an abandoned paint and resin plant, a working hay farm, a radio transmission field, among others. Artworks were presented site-sensitively throughout the industrial area for the 10-day festival.