Mapping Dissonance

The rapid industrialization and gentrification around metropolitan areas in the name of city developments leads to immense changes in local ecologies and natural habitats. Through grassroots engagement with situated communities, the project »Mapping Dissonance« will build a digital living archive that withholds what will be lost in that process and establishes new forms of collective land stewardship in urban areas.

beatnyk, Delhi / Chennai, India — Jan. 28, 2026

Spectrographic image from the project »Room Full of Noise« by beatnyk, using recordings contributed by Suvani Suri, Geetam Biswas, Mirra Kannan, Prithvi, Mangesh Mahajan, and Padmanabhan.

Mapping Dissonance is a digital community dedicated to archiving the fading soundscapes of the Global South. Inspired by the accelerated developments in Delhi and Chennai, the project extends its focus to rural and suburban spaces where urbanization is aggressively erasing natural habitats.

The platform functions as a digital memorial of an ephemeral ecology, inviting participants to document these environments through sound, video, and personal stories.

This project aims to create a deep, interpersonal connection to the land, even for those engaging digitally from afar. Through the residency, beatnyk’s objective is to develop an ecosystem built on shared collective responsibility. This ensures that the burden of preservation does not fall solely on the locals.

By using smart contracts to validate both recording and witnessing, the project creates a global network where everyone is equally responsible for protecting our ecological history.

Mapping Dissonance will be realized as a browser-based decentralized application (dApp) built entirely with FOSS tools. It features an accessible, interactive map for archiving geo-located soundscapes, governed by transparent smart contracts on a low-energy blockchain. Crucially, the platform integrates a system that sonifies the archive’s data into a real-time digital memorial. All source code and documentation will be open source, to foster community replication.