Only Expansion

In this site-responsive audio tour, make your way through the familiar tracks of the city. You will be prompted to observe your environment in timescales that are both fleeting and geologic, to notice how your understanding of the landscape might alter under climate collapse.

Using real-time audio software, Only Expansion remixes the sound of the city around you with recordings of rapid environmental change in progress: rampant wildfires in the United States, the crumbling cliffs of England’s east coast, rising seas around Norway, the eroding windy dunes of the Northern Sahara. Inducing a sense of telescopic detachment, the impression becomes nearly cinematic, focusing a kind of documentary attention on the everyday places we inhabit. It’s a poetic reflection that endows the shifting urban environment with both tenderness and grief in the face of imminent ecological crisis.