Herculeslab

Hannah Kemp-Welch is an artist and researcher based in London. Working across sound and transmission arts, her practice takes the form of audio works, analogue films and community workshops that foreground collective listening as both a creative and critical method. Hannah teaches sound arts, collaborative practice and curation at University of the Arts London. She is an active member of the feminist radio art group Shortwave Collective, with whom she develops research projects and facilitate workshops. She edited the book Listening Glossary (Silver Press, October 2026), gathering over two hundred terms from art, ecology, activism, psychology, education and philosophy across nine decades of thinking about listening as a way of relating to others, environments and structures of power.

Peter Cusack is a field recordist, sound artist, and musician with a long interest in the environment. He initiated the Favourite Sounds Project to discover what people find positive about soundscapes where they live and Sounds From Dangerous Places (sonic journalism) to investigate major environmental damage in areas such as the Chernobyl exclusion zone, the Azerbaijan oil fields, brown coal mining in Germany and the Czech Republic and the Bialowieza Forest in Poland. He is currently working on Aral Sea Stories, about the destruction and subsequent partial restoration of the Aral Sea in Kazakhstan - a much-needed positive example in today’s climate change debate.

The work of Jacob Kirkegaard explores ways to reflect on complex, unnoticed or unapproachable conditions and environments. His works have treated themes such as radioactivity in Chernobyl, melting ice in the Arctic, border walls in global and metaphorical contexts, immersive acoustic explorations into global waste management, and processes related to when a human being dies. Using his recordings of firearms, grenades and tanks his recent work explores the sound of warfare orchestrated for the Royal Lifeguard's Music Corps. Another recent work unfolds the mechanical elements of agriculture and food production. Since 2006 Kirkegaard has also been extensively researching, recording and creating works using otoacoustic emissions; tones generated from the actual human ear. The core element and method of Jacob Kirkegaard's work derive from the use of sound recordings of the tangible aspects from its intangible themes.

On the morning of 28 October, Jacob Kirkegaard will also lead an otoacoustic workshop at the media arts programme of KASK & Conservatorium.

Cathy Lane established the department of Sound Arts and Design at London College of Communication (LCC) and previously directed and co-directed, with Angus Carlyle, Creative Research in Sound Arts Practice (CRiSAP). She is interested in how sound relates to the past, our histories, our environment and our collective and individual memories. This informs her current work as a composer, sound artist, lecturer and researcher. 

Books include In the Field (Uniformbooks, 2013), a collection of interviews with eighteen contemporary sound artists who use field recording in their work and On Listening (2013) a collection of essays about some of the ways in which listening is used in disciplines including anthropology, community activism, bioacoustics, conflict mediation and religious studies, music, ethnomusicology and field recording.