Over the last 200 years, humans have reshaped the seabed of the North Sea. With the advent of steamships in the 19th century, we fished away most of the North Sea oyster reefs. In the 20th century we constructed offshore oil and gas rigs, and kilometers of pipeline. The coming decades we’ll reshape the sea floor for the third time.
We often think of the sea as a liquid wilderness, a space without people. But the sea is increasingly a human space, not only on the water, with shipping and fishing, but alsounder water, and on-or-under the seabed. Underwater cables, deep sea mining, oil-andgas rigs, fish farms, and offshore windmills… Almost every cm3 of the North Sea knows a kind of human presence. It is as much a cultured landscape as the rest of Western Europe.
Now we’re at a new turn in our culturing of the sea bed. We’ll change the North Sea dramatically over the next few decades. In an effort to move away from fossil fuels, and increasingly for geopolitical purposes, Europe wants to grow the offshore electricity generation tenfold by 2050. This means constructing a lot of new windmills and accompanying infrastructure. Independently, we’re also looking into artificial oyster reefs, as a nature-based solution to defend against coastal erosion, and to creates sites to preserve and increase the biodiversity of the North Sea. Some hope to combine these two and rewild the hard substrate on which the windmills are built with artificial oyster reefs.
Sounding Lines reflects on these past, present and future changes of the North Sea seabed. The installation brings the sounds from offshore windfarms together with recordings from some of the last remaining wild oyster beds in the North Sea, and processed sea shanties. The sea shanties are sung by an amateur ladies choir from Ostend, embodying a traditional and generational bond to the sea. These three voices come together in an immersive spatialised sound installation. The piece exists in different forms, as a concert, as binaural experience wading through the water, and as an 8 channel surround sound installation. Sounding Lines offers a space where the audience can reflect in how we deal with a space so different from ours, how far our hands reach, ponder about how intertwined our society is with the sea, how complicated that balance is, and wonder where they see themselves in this relationship
The title of the installation, Sounding Lines, refers to the way we used to measure the depth of bodies of water. We’ve always wanted to know what’s down there, what’s beneath us. A question that starts with how much space there is there. Nowadays we measure this with sonar. But we used to throw a weight with a line of rope into the sea, with markers telling us the distance it travelled before it hit the sea bed. Sounding here refers to a sound as a body of water. But these days, we should perhaps also listen to the voices of the sea.
Sounding Lines premiered at Ars Electronica 2025. You can see a small snippet of the performance below.
About the artist
Stijn Demeulenaere is a Belgian sound artist with a background in sociology, journalism and radio. Since 2009 he creates installations, soundscapes and performances. He mixes disciplines and sectors and collaborates with choreographers, theatre- and film makers, and scientists. Stijn researches the relationship between identity, sound and listening. Through a field recording practice Stijn explores the bonds between sound, space and listening. From remote, pristine, nature areas, over sleepy villages, the sonic onslaught of a metropolis, to the umwelt of more-than-human spaces: Stijn tries to understand places by listening to them.
This researched is mirrored by Stijn’s curiosity on how people give meaning to sound, how they use it in the construction of their worldview and identity. Hearing is a sense of touch; sound is direct, but also malleable, and mysterious. Stijn tries to unravel social structures, personal history and the unconscious imagination of people through listening. Figuring out how we give meaning to sound, and how sound gives meaning to places.
Exhibitions (past & upcoming)
POROUS, UN Ocean Conference, June 2025, Villa d’Arson, Nice, France
PANIC: yes/no, Ars Electronica Festival, 3-7 September, 2025, Linz, Austria
