What Listening Knows

Background Collaborator Sonia Leber and I were awarded the inaugural artist residency, commission and a solo exhibition at Messums Wiltshire UK, to research listening and hearing as complex cultural and phenomenological activities. The video artwork draws on structuralist film-maker Michael Snow’s robotically filmed La Région Centrale (1971), the phenomenology of musique concrete and the field observations of sound artist Brunhild Ferrari. Contribution What Listening Knows interrogates the act of listening through the concept of Ferrari’s ‘microphone’s gaze’, which shifts the idea of the ocular gaze into an acoustic dimension. The research explores ear perspective versus microphone perspective; intuition; non-human listening; animism, and marginal listening to different presences, absences and spaces. Across three cinematically scaled screens, the wordless, sonically rich film-essay employs a camera choreography that is both grounded and ungrounded, as if imbued with an acoustic consciousness and a non-human perspective. The camera twists across lumpy hillsides, dips into insect worlds, then levitates towards a tilted cloudy sky. The work’s semantic and phenomenological sound design creates uncertainty as to whether audiences are listening to a soundtrack of effects, a unified natural soundscape or non-diegetic music. The sound design draws listeners into an in-between space, a temporal interval at the edge of framing that contests the singularity of our point of view. Significance The major seven-week solo exhibition at Messums Wiltshire presented our work to British audiences. The exhibition received full page feature stories in The Age and Sydney Morning Herald, a four-page feature story in Resurgence and Ecologist Magazine, UK, a small story in NewScientist, UK, and is the subject of two podcasts by ABC journalist Fiona Gruber and sound artist Gary Warner. Conference papers include Royal Musical Association Conference at Goldsmiths and ANAT Spectres.