Personal Information
--------------------






Given name: Matt









Surname: Parker









Email: matt.parker@nottingham.edu.cn









I understand that by submitting this form, I consent to the use of my data for the purposes of the 2026 Forum on Artistic Research'.: Yes









I agree to the terms of service.: Yes













Your contribution
-----------------






Title: Listening with crystals









Format: Project presentation (2)









Main language: English









Abstract:
This artistic research project revisits the history and material life of Rochelle salt, a synthetic crystal first produced in seventeenth-century La Rochelle from wine lees and salt-marsh residues, and reanimates it through contemporary practice. Born under siege conditions during the French Reformation, Rochelle salt travelled from persecuted Huguenot apothecaries into colonial trade routes, later becoming one of the most powerful early piezoelectric materials used in sonar and crystal microphones. Today, it survives largely as a forgotten precursor, replaced by more stable industrial ceramics.
Through laboratory crystal-growing, archival research, and experimental sound practice, I treat Rochelle salt as an endangered conceptual world: a minor material language embedded within dominant technological histories. Growing crystals by hand using early twentieth-century methods, I engage transduction not only as a technical principle—the conversion of pressure into signal—but as an epistemic practice. The crystal becomes both sensor and teacher, revealing how landscapes, persecution, trade, and war sediment into the infrastructures of listening.
Against the homogenising tendencies of platform capitalism and algorithmic optimisation, this project foregrounds fragile, situated material knowledges. It asks what forms of innovation emerge when we attend to obsolete or minor technologies rather than maximised systems. By transposing a seventeenth-century salt into contemporary artistic and scientific contexts, Listening with Crystals demonstrates how artistic research can translate subjugated material histories into new sensory and conceptual capacities.
In doing so, the project explores how artistic research makes seeable and hearable the sedimented politics of media, offering transduction as a method for working across endangered conceptual worlds.











Link to the Exposition :  (https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/4208192/4208193)









Image: https://www.sar2026.ie/system/files/webform/submit_contribution/188/6.%2001%20RS%20BEFORE%20AND%20AFTERS-1.jpg









Short biographies of the presenter(s):
- Matt Parker is a critical sound explorer; an artist researching the resonances between things. His research engages with sound studies, media ecology, field recording and environmental humanities through a spectral art practice. His current book project, En/Counters with Wavefields: How Landscapes Become Stories of Technology, investigates how sonic, electromagnetic, and vibrational phenomena shape our cultural and ecological relationships with media infrastructures. He is an Assistant Professor in International Communications at the University of Nottingham, Ningbo, China. www.earthkeptwarm.com










Previous presentations or iterations of the research:
This work is in progress as part of a multimodal monograph project and as an ongoing artistic project with no concrete outcomes published to date. An article was published at an earlier date which briefly discusses the history of rochelle salt can be found at https://arowoftrees.co.uk/article/matt-parker-crystal-clear/.














Requirements
------------






Additional information:
This will be a research presentation where I tell this story interweaving media content, narrative, and archival materials to describe my practice methodology.










Spatial and technical requirements :
Traditional presentation.










Potential risks or ethical concerns:
none










Create a user account for SAR 2026: Yes









Create new user: Matt Parker