Campfire, created in collaboration with Jay Tobin, interprets the devastating 2018 Camp Fire in Northern California as a spatialized durational sound installation. The work, designed for New Ear’s octophonic cube, is driven by a remarkable data set collected by the Wildland-Urban Interface Fire Group (WUI) at NIST, the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
The Camp Fire was one of the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in California History, consuming 18,804 structures and causing 85 human deaths. The town of Paradise, only 7 miles up the hill from John Roach’s hometown of Chico, was largely burned to the ground, as were a handful of other small towns that existed in the embrace of the surrounding forests. In the wake of the fire, the WUI team’s access to quantitative measurements like wind speeds was limited, so they augmented the existing data by amassing evidence from 911 calls, videos and photos from social media posts, emergency vehicle locations, and civilian and first responder accounts. This painstaking on-the-ground collection allowed them to paint a picture of the fire as it
unfolded over time.
Campfire collapses the 35-hour timeframe of the WUI data collected from 11/08 to 11/09/2018 into 60 minutes. A clock in the gallery communicates the time of day and location as events unfold and pulls specific phrases from the data. Our aim in Campfire is not to create a strict sonification of the event, but to suggest instead a kind of evocative heatmap. To accomplish this, we’ve overlaid a virtual 3-dimensional grid onto the gallery space – imagine the room as a giant Rubik’s cube in which each individual block within the shape represents both a geographic space in Butte county, and the intensity of the fire. The horizontal axis represents the spatial progression of the fire as it sweeps from the north east to the southwest, while the vertical axis expresses levels of intensity, or the number of amassed fire reports and their severity at particular moments in time. All of this is processed in Max/MSP, which generates and launches sounds in response to the various events and modulates their spatial placement.
Campfire begins with field recordings recorded in March 2026 at dawn in Paradise, eight years after the fire. These sounds, captured in the now rehabilitated Bille Park, are gradually burned away as the fire mounts in intensity. What replaces the dawn chorus are layers of smoldering, crackling and raging textures, paired with the resonances of crystal bowls. Beyond the possible associations of devastation and healing that these sounds suggest, they likewise signal changes in the data: higher pitched crystal bowl tones communicate moments in which there are more concentrated reports of fire activity. As densities increase, these sounds move higher in the room.
Our aim in creating Campfire is not to craft a beautiful spatial experience. Instead, we hope that the data, representing two days in November of 2018, will shape and color the room. The work seeks to acknowledge the massive scale of this kind of devastation, which tore through 153,336 acres of forest, transformed ecosystems, and destroyed and displaced countless organisms.
While we know presentations like Campfire can never fully capture the profound impacts of catastrophic events like these, we nonetheless try. Every day, we watch as the presence of climate change grows clearer, as lands are destroyed or stolen, as species human and otherwise are driven from their homes, as places that represent what sometimes seem to be the last vestiges of refuge are threatened. We hope our work, may act as an acknowledgement of the ever-threatening situation at hand, and lead to some grain of greater understanding.
