What does a river remember? What has an 1800s railway car seen? And how do you hear 70 million years of seabed under your feet?

In this talk, Jay Simons from The Plant (The Playground and Laboratory for New Technologies) shares three projects that use sound to offer more sensorial and emotional ways of engaging with the past. Remixing the Ottawa traces the hidden role of steamboats in settler colonialism and ecological change along Canada’s Ottawa River. Artifacts of Industry brings back the noise, motion and memories of industrial objects held at Canada’s National Science and Technology Museum. Strata is an aural augmented reality walk through deep time in Maastricht, from the ENCI quarry to the Tongerseweg cemetery, in collaboration with Claartje Rasterhoff.

Together, these projects ask what we lose when history is only seen and what the act of listening can return: the textures of vanished landscapes, the voices of people who knew these places and things firsthand, and the sound of the gaps that ecological destruction leaves behind.