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Author: Maees Hadi
Title: The Sound of The Border
Site: Sabah Al-Ahmad Nature Reserve
Coordinates: 29°41'54.8"N 47°45'42.1"E, 29°36'10.0"N 47°46'04.4"E, 29°35'21.2"N 47°44'30.5"E
This project examines the border condition between the Sabah Al-Ahmad Nature Reserve and a military base on-site. It uses data mining as the primary methodology for investigation. The generated medium derives from sources of information and sound data of birds that inhabit and migrate through these spaces.
Sound is a vital component of any environment, and it can provide us with an understanding of the material world as a feature of a point in space. Our sense of vision has generally dominated the way we understand and acquire knowledge of spaces and places. Our vision has become our primary method of looking at and experiencing our reality, making our other senses irrelevant. ‘"We only look through linear space, and linear time, we don’tdon't smell, we don’tdon't taste, we don’tdon't touch’." – Aand we don’tdon't listen. We often turn to visual descriptions when examining our environments and landscapes, which is evident from our maps used as a central tool of interpretation.
The Sabah Al-Ahmad Nature Reserve is a war- printed landscape located north of Kuwait’sKuwait's capital and is a vital component of Kuwait’sKuwait's hinterland condition. It is an open, arid, semi-desert landscape with wetlands, inland pools, scrubs, and rocks. A variety of borders shape the reserve, separating and confining it from the rest of the national space. There is a coastal border to the south-east,, and a fenced perimeter to the west shared between the reserve and a former military base. TheseOn a map, these borders fences and lines divide the landscape by defining one body from the other on a map. The carvings mark territories that claim where the war ended and where nature begins but does not include the landscape’slandscape's natural habitat as part of its reality.
‘'The sound of the border’' seeks to examines the western border edge created by these two adjacent conditions by analysing sound. The project looks beyond cartography and its visual limitations by researching alternative modes of investigation; by utilising utilizing data- mining methods and open-source processing of sound materials. Rather than analysing this condition from a specific viewpoint, the approach is experiential and derives from an extensive collection of sound-data made by birds found in that arearegion.
Although Kuwait is a relatively small area compared to its neighbours, it has an outstanding vibrant birdlife. Its unique location places the country at the heart of many important bird- migration routes, such as the Eastern Flyway connecting Eurasia and Africa. Three distinct ecoregions meet in Kuwait—; the Arabian Desert, the subtropical Gulf Coast, and the Mesopotamian Delta. These conditions enable migration for many birds with routes that guide them south in the autumn and north in the spring. Kuwait continues to offer a vital staging ground for these seasonal mass bird movements and habitat sanctuaries along this migration corridor.
The Sabah Al-Ahmad Nature Reserve functions as one of these sanctuaries for various bird species, albeit carrying a history of warfare that impacted its ecosystem during Kuwait’sKuwait's invasion and occupation in 1990-91. As it shares a border with one of the prominent military locations of that war, it had to endure elaborate fortifications that impacted its natural condition and fauna habitation. The use of heavy machinery, vehicles vehicles, and the fortification system composed of twenty-four- thousand structures resulted in severe soil compaction and sand erosion.
Although the active aggression imposed on the landscape ended after the war, the military-base and its surrounding fence remain and exist as war objects. Today, the reserve and base are prohibited areas with limited public access, and their barriers function as borders. However, research teams and particular individuals that exercise their rights to visit these spaces from for a host of reasons—from birding to falconry and desert- plants research—and have generously recorded the evolving environment over the years. Although these methods are sometimes exercised as hobbies, there are many information records of open-source materials found available online. These include varying data that examine the ecology and biodiversity of the area and a compilation of sound data recorded from 200 species of birds over the past decades.
Birding and falconry are traditions practised for centuries in Kuwait and the Gulf region. This cultural heritage has subsequently formed the sound database used to map and reconstruct the western border in this project. As theThe found data covers the entire nature reserve area, the data and was is filtered by first determining a set of organised organized principles that would apply to the found archives. This is done: by identifying each bird species, determining if they were migratory birds, identifying the season of migration, which species were residents, how frequently they visited visited, and how rare they were. The birds’birds' preferred habitation based on their location and the year of these recordings further informed the constructed data set.
These principles determined the source material’smaterial's content, ultimately informing how the data is analysed and processed. Considering sound is the main component of this investigation, identifying the different bird species, their spatial habitation, and contrasting bird songs were crucial. The western border lies in an open, arid area., However,but bird- song recordings of 55 out of 200 bird species demonstrate that this landscape type is potentially an attractive migration sitesite for migration. The different bird species such as The the greater Hoopoe-Lark inhabit this landscape because of the land’sland´s conditions that allow this bird species to run around and dig for food in the sand with its long nib. The Desert Wheatear also prefers to spend most of its time on the ground, resting on stones or low bushes and catching prey.
Through the extracted auditory knowledge derived from this experiment, an opportunity to map these birds’birds' movement as the border landscape was changing is made possible. The sound data collected presents evidence that the nature reserve’sreserve's ecology is still recovering, decades after the war, as, certain bird species are returning and increasing in population.
The existing and absent sounds in the space propose a new medium to reconstruct the west border’sborder's sonic environments over the last decade. The birds’birds' movement mapped through sound can shift into visual translations that allow us to understand specific sites’sites' invisible changing conditions. The sound data is used as input in digital visualizsation software that allows the border to be materializedmaterialised as the sound data manipulates the point cloud data set.
This method of using extracted data as input has allowed us to influence our understanding of borderlines and their perceived rigidity. The collection of bird songs, which are pre-existing components of the western border’sborder’s environment, draw up a visual and sensory experience of this space that allows us a perspective that is usually not seen or heard. This sonic study aims to dismantle the map’smap's fixed-line and military base fence and illustrate these lines as unfixed bodies and evolving and changing places.