Betsey Biggs

Generative web-based audiovisual installation made with geo-tagged field recordings, geo-tagged 360-degree panoramic images, sine tones, and software. Constantly evolving. With August Black.

We Are Here FM is a live, real-time web-hosted generative installation that reconfigures the earth’s sights and sounds. A constantly evolving immersive transmission traversing our world, it searches databases for geo-tagged media to bring together co-located audio files and immersive panoramic images with quiet ambient generative music to create unnamed, hyperreal panoramic landscapes in which audio-visual pairings that have never coexisted acquire a veneer of the ‘real.’ These experiences are often magically experimental, occasionally hauntingly disturbing, and at times utterly mundane. Quiet ambient music generated from predominant frequencies of the audio stream functions as non-diegetic mood-setting sound, connects the scenes, and plants the imaginary landscape firmly in the present.

Participants — whether experiencing We Are Here FM on the web, on a mobile device, or in person at a gallery installation — are immersed both sonically and visually in a realistic yet artificially created landscape made from sounds and images from the past, and must locate themselves — physically, emotionally, socially, and politically — within a present space. No place names or context are offered, and the scene changes every few minutes, when a new set of randomly chosen geographical coordinates is chosen. Without any identifying information given, the landscapes are presented equally on their own terms, and participants must negotiate the space using their own eyes, ears, and imaginations, unaffected by any preconceptions context might give. Experiencing this together (even if via a personal device), a new, speculative future reality is created by the group. This experience of co-creation leads visitors to form a temporary sense of community, together navigating a weird, funny, and complicated world.

This project is an ongoing collaboration with my colleague August Black; our most recent upgrades include slow automatic panning and the ability for participants to move around the 360 image. The software we designed for the project is informing some of our future collaborative ideas, including Drop the Needle, an ongoing audio stream that will traverse the world in 365 days, mixing geo-tagged field recordings, poetry, music and radio broadcasts into generative ambient music.

We Are Here FM was profiled in the Canadian art magazine Blackflash in Spring 2022, and Professor Black and I published a paper about it in the online journal The Digital Review in Fall 2022. It has been exhibited at Norway's Piksel Fest in two different iterations, at the University of Colorado Art Museum, and was selected for exhibition at the 2025 SMC (Sound and Music Computing) Conference in Graz, Austria this summer.

CREDITS

concept, design, composition, software: Betsey Biggs and August Black

PERFORMANCES AND EXHIBITIONS

Ongoing: https://www.wearehere.fm

2025: Sound and Music Computing Conference, Graz, Austria.

2023: “Faculty Art Show,” University of Colorado Art Museum, Boulder, CO, USA.

2022: as single-channel room installation, Piksel Festival, Bergen, Norway.

2021: as single-channel small-screen installation, Piksel Festival, Bergen, Norway.

PUBLICATIONS

2022: with August Black, “We Are Here FM,” The Digital Review, published online on September 1, 2022.

PRESS

2022: Cléo Sallis-Parchet, “Shifting and Transitory: The Soundscapes of ‘We Are Here FM,’” Blackflash, Spring 2022.