Experiments in Aural Attention: Listening Away & Lingering Longer

Rebecca Collins

This exposition puts forward ‘lingering longer’ and ‘listening away’ as potential means to remain with non-semantic possibilities, resisting the tendency to know immediately or to classify — to get lost, albeit momentarily in a more messy moment of being. At stake in this investigation is the recognition that our experience of the world, characterized through a depth of engagement, is not limited to how relations operate on the surface. The direction or orientation of our attention, the intensity with which it is applied, and how it weighs on and shapes our experience implies choice and agency. Experiment I: Aural + Orientation = Aurientation emulates the experience of a fictional gallery-goer who encounters the sound installation, This is for You (Don’t Treat it like a Telephone) (2012). This piece was developed at the advanced centre for performance and scenography studies (a.pass) in Brussels and aims to consider how sound and the voice shape our orientation, when mediated through objects. Experiment in Aural Attention II: Vibrant Practice details the process undergone for creating Listening to Water (2013), a site-specific investigation into ancient well sites located in Powys and Ceredigion, two counties in Mid West Wales. The work, made in collaboration with Jane Lloyd-Francis and Naomi Heath, considers how a turn towards site, via a process of tuning in to the Welsh landscape, can bring attention to overlooked aspects of our environment.

Bibliography

Ackerman, Diane. 1991. A Natural History of the Senses (New York, NY: Vintage Books)

Ahmed, Sara. 2006. ‘Orientations: Toward a queer phenomenology’, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 12.4: 543–74

Arvidson, P. Sven. 2006. The Sphere of Attention Context and Margin (Dordrecht: Springer)

Basśo, Keith Hamilton. 1996. Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language among the Western Apache (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press)

Belinfante, Sam. 2014. ‘Listening, Curated by Sam Belinfante’, exhibition at BALTIC 39 for Hayward Touring Curatorial Open, Newcastle <https://www.sambelinfante.com/work/listening/> [accessed 13 July 2022]

Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press)

Cavarero, Adriana. 2005. For More than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press)

Chion, Michel. 1999. Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, trans. by Claudia Gorbman (New York, NY: Columbia University Press)

Dolar, Mladen. 2006. A Voice and Nothing More (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press)

Drobnick, Jim (ed.). 2004. Aural Cultures (Toronto: YYZ Books)

Feld, Steven. 2003. ‘A rainforest acoustemology’, in The Auditory Culture Reader, ed. by Michael Bull and Les Back (Oxford: Berg Publishers), pp.223-239

Goodman, Steve. 2009. Sonic Warfare (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press)

Goulish, Matthew and Laura Cull. 2009. ‘sub specie durationis’, in Deleuze and Performance, ed. by Laura Cull (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press), pp.126-147

Groth, Sanne Krogh and Holger Schulze. 2020. The Bloomsbury Handbook of Sound Art (New York, NY: Bloomsbury)

Home-Cook, George. 2015. Theatre and Aural Attention: Stretching Ourselves (New York, NY: Palgrave MacMillan)

Ihde, Don. 2007. Listening and Voice: Phenomenologies of Sound. 2^nd edition. (Albany: State University of new York Press)

Kester, Grant H. 2004. Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press)

Labelle, Brandon. 2010. Acoustic Territories: Sound Culture and Everyday Life (London: Continuum)

London, Barbara. 2013. ‘Soundings: A Contemporary Score’, exhibition, MoMA, New York <https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/1351> [accessed 28 May 2021]

Malpas, Jeff E. 2008. Heidegger’s Topology: Being, Place, World (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press)

Noë, Alva. 2004. Action in Perception (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press)

Patrice Pavis. 2011. ‘Preface’, in Theatre Noise: The Sound of Performance, ed. by Lynne Kendrick and David Roesner (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing), pp.x-xiv

Rancière, Jacques. 2005. The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. by Gabriel Rockill (London: Bloomsbury)

Serres, Michel. 2008. The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies (London: Continuum)

Shapiro, Michael J. 2013. Studies in Trans-Disciplinary Method: After the Aesthetic Turn (New York, NY: Routledge)

Stewart, Kathleen. 1996. ‘An Occupied Place’, in Senses of Place, ed. by Steven Feld and Keith Basso (Santa Fe: School of American Research), pp. 137-166

——. 2008. ‘Weak Theory in an Unfinished World’, Journal of Folklore Research, 45.1

Terada, Rei. 2009. Looking Away: Phenomenality and Dissatisfaction, Kant to Adorno (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press)

Voegelin, Salomé. 2013. Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards a Philosophy of Sound Art (London: Bloomsbury)

Tip

Tip

Rebecca Collins - Experiments in Aural Attention: Listening Away & Lingering Longer - 2022