Dawn Scarfe is an artist working with sound installation and performance, she is based in London. Her work explores ideas of resonance, natural and manufactured.She works with soundCamp to organise Reveil: an annual crowd sourced live broadcast which tracks the sound of the sunrise around the world for 24hrs. Her work has been aired on BBC Radio 3 and Resonance FM. She has exhibited at ZKM Karlsruhe, Q-02 Brussels and New Mart, Seoul. Residencies include Sound and Music’s Embedded programme with Forestry Commission England, MoKS Centre for Art and Social Practice, Estonia, TOPOS Exeter and Octopus Collective with Cumbria Wildlife Trust at South Walney, Cumbria.Interview below with Gudrun Filipska:GF: Your sound work focuses often on the relationship between movement and place often through the recording of repetitive actions as in 'Etchings', you seem to use recording sound as a kind of research method...in that sense to you consider your self to be a 'Sound artist' or is the mode/medium of your exploratory practice potentially interchangeable...?
DS: With ‘Etchings’ I was interested in the aura of the Old Dairy building and I found a long stick outside that turned out to be a good instrument to explore it with. Swingng the stick at different speeds I felt that I was cutting the air, making impressions in the atmosphere that were reflected by the walls of the room. An ongoing concern of mine is using devices to extend the senses. Influences here include Rebecca Horn's 'body extension' works like 'Scratching both sides of the wall at once' and Robert Hooke's acoustic experiments. I'm most interested in devices that produce or capture sound as they allow me to work with ambience.
‘Etchings’ Performance documentation. Dawn Scarfe.
GF: It strikes me that there is an interesting slippage between what is performative and what is documentary in your sound work...the subtle interventions that go into some of your works, like 'Tree Music' where you fitted small speakers to the branches of trees, were the actions themselves considered part of the piece? You also conduct more formal performance pieces such as 'Rounds: Smeaton's Lighthouse' how do these practices differ for you and how does the mode of collaborating with other musicians and performers change the process?
DS: Making ‘Tree Music’ involves listening under a tree, making a drone based composition in response which extends and repeats some of the sounds heard, and then playing the sounds back through small speakers that hang from the ends of the branches (like the seeds of the London Plane tree) and move in the wind (again subtly changing the tone of the sound). So I'm interested in blending documentary and live elements. I'd like people to be unsure at times whether or not they are hearing the work or the environment. 
‘Tree Music’. Dawn Scarfe. image courtesy the artist.
Working with other performers making Rounds involves sharing immediate responses to the atmosphere of a place. The experience of playing acoustic instruments and live is different and a bit more of a challenge for me personally as I'm shy. Players stand on the top level of multi storey buildings (Smeaton's Lighthouse and the Radcliffe Observatory), so although the 'intervention' is more obvious than in Tree Music, when visitors enter the space from the lower floors the performers are concealed. Unlike a formal concert people are asked to wander in and out while the piece evolves, and the concern is with heightening the atmosphere of the buildings rather than making music to be recorded and taken anywhere else.GF: The work also often seems like a process of collaboration between human and more incidental forces of nature – intense sonic observations which make me think of scientific field studies...however there is something in your work which suggests you are making a critique of the (pompous male?) ethnographer through your playing with the same vernacular (you name one of your pieces 'Field notes' for example) and arranging your sound pieces into very conscious archives) what are your thoughts on this?
DS: The works are a series of observations or experiments. I'm interested in what can happen differently with each iteration. There's usually room for improvisation from human performers or the influence of changing environmental conditions. I like to explore what people notice about their surroundings and ways of tuning into certain details such as the pitch of insects wings as they fly by and what that can tell us about the speed of the vibration (‘Bee Strings’). I'm inspired by histories of listening and things like Goethe's theory of Colours: a compelling archive of seeing, containing case studies that can be repeated with materials found around the house. I'm drawn to types of experiments that would be rejected by modern physicists.GF: How was your Forestry Commission(Forestry England) residency, were there any parameters put in place as to what you would explore or where you would go?
DS: The great thing about the residency was that it was an open invitation to explore any of the FC sites in England, so I embraced that and tried to visit as many as possible.
GF: I am interested in your Bivvy Broadcasts work; The idea of camps, semi-permanent, transient structures are fascinating.'Wilderness' survival and field studies as traditionally very male and colonial practices---yet the digital nature your work and the idea of the broadcast seems to have an egalitarian air which circumvent these ideas of grounding in place or taking ‘possession’ of place (or its sounds)...There is also something interesting about the tenuousness of the signals – the idea of you out there in the woods trying to broadcast, with interruptions and glitches, a futility which sets itself nicely against the qualitative research methodologies of traditional observational field techniques...there is something about the idea of reaching out through a broadcast which sets your work apart from many 'traditional' sonic artists...
DS: Setting up a Bivvy Broadcast is about sending a signal - I'm out there somewhere...and making a connection to people listening in from elsewhere. There is a kind of anxiety around the drop-outs, when the signal dies that connection is lost. It is as much about opening a channel to other people, as it is about listening to a particular place. I position the mic close to where I sleep, so I can sometimes be heard shuffling around in the sleeping bag or breathing in the mix.
I don't reveal the location until after the live stream finishes, this was encouraged by the FC and WFC for my own safety. Stealth and darkness are a big part of the work. I carry all the kit I need in a small rucksack, travel by train and public transport to places I've not been to before, arriving late evening as darkness falls, and stream through the night from 11pm to 7am. I ask remote listeners to keep vigil over the stream but I don't expect them to stay up all night. I like the idea that people tune in and then fall asleep, maybe catching a small segment in the morning as they wake up. However I find it quite hard to sleep, being hyper-aware of unfamiliar sounds and often disturbed by the slightest rustle of a leaf.
Wooler bivvy. Image courtesy Dawn Scarfe.
GF: There is still a very much gendered ethos around even recreational camping/hiking, backgrounded against the long history of the male explorer. Setting such a project as 'Bivvy Broadcasts' in managed and controlled forests such as Thetford, or urban woodland sseems to make a clever and (somewhat ironic?) statement about this type of camping – as a women possibly also regarding parameters of safety...? Was the gendered nature of exploration and 'camp making' on your mind when you made Bivvy broadcasts? And what are yourt houghts more widely on the complicated connections between sound recording practices and travel cultures? DS: In the introduction phase of forest visits I went to Kielder and Hamsterley, places I'd been to as a kid. What has seemed like vast ‘wilderness' then now felt more like tree farms, with my eyes drawn to the clear fell sections and planting in rigid rows. We visited new woodlands on former landfill sites such as Thames Chase, and foresters explained how even sites like the New Forest are carefully managed and controlled. Camping overnight isn't permitted and one of the biggest concerns was coming into contact with other (unofficial) human visitors, rather than wildlife. The impulse to access these places out of hours came from the fact that they are normally off limitsin the dark - particularly to women and girls.I think it is becoming harder to justify using air miles to capture exotic sounds. I work with Sound camp, a collective whose aim is to encourage people to share live sounds of their local environment with a network of remote listeners over the internet. This network involves artists, radio enthusiasts, birders, conservationists, activists and others. In order to be sustainable over the longer term the microphones need tobe embedded in a particular home or community and this type of arrangement feels moreappropriate and meaningful at the present moment than a project with top down structure.