A Methodology for Geological Listening: An Experiential Field Approach

Tina Mariane Krogh Madsen

 

Introduction – listening, affect, geological expansion, and lithic relations

As an artist and researcher, something which is crucial for me to engage with is relation. As a  method to attune to places, listening sessions, meditations, and walks become important parts of my practice as a way to meaningful engagement in artistic research. Upon writing this essay, I am in the process of writing my doctoral thesis, an artistic-philosophical endeavour across performance art, sound, and listening. This written piece will in a more exploratory tone delve into some aspects from my practice, particularly focusing on specific sessions which deal with geological listening. It will include sounds and their absence too, their complexity, and affective resonances. It captures moments of presence and activation, of sensory environments and the thresholds and agencies which they communicate with and through.

 

In my artistic work and research, the micro-political gesture of listening is opening up for potentialities beyond the visual. Composer Pauline Oliveros invites us to fold out our antennas to an even greater extent and to expand our listening potential in a Deep Listening practice (Oliveros 2005), which also includes the affective. Quantum listening is here a way of listening to more realities simultaneously and encountering how one is changed by that experience (Oliveros 2022). After many years of entering the field as a listener, aurally and physically, I decided in 2019 and 2020 to do the Deep Listening intensives and certification from Oliveros’ Center for Deep Listening at Rensselaer Polytech Institute (US). This gave me an even more profound insight into the didactics and potentials of the multifaceted practice of listening facilitation. 

 

Using my body as a tool has been crucial for my performance work which started around 1998 and already then had a specific attention towards agency and relation. It would be strange to write an essay about my listening practice without mentioning the Body Interfaces performance work which has been central to my artistic methods as a way of body-relational listening. After its conception in 2014 as a discussion of embodiment, it implemented itself though a series of interventions at Fljótstunga artist residency in Iceland in 2015, and which to this day has stayed as an important technique for me to engage in a critical mode of place-making (see also Madsen 2016 and 2019), to  focus on affective relation and body-resonance (Madsen 2023a and 2023c). I wish to mention Body Interfaces to also emphasize on listening as a physical practice, and to be taking further the minor potentialities of agency and touch, sound and vibration.

 

Across my practice with sound and performance art, I work with geological matter as a collaborator and agential informant. I am here trying to listen, negotiate (move and sound) with matter, being well aware that we do not necessarily have the same mode of expression and are leading to different registers of movement but can always try to sense the responses that come out of this connection. As the philosopher Gilles Deleuze (and later also together with philosopher and psychoanalyst Félix Guattari) emphasise on an affective framework and how it is possible to enter into composition with something (else), building upon the thinking of philosopher Baruch Spinoza, and our ability to consider what the body is capable of doing, and how it affects and is affected back (Spinoza [1677]1985; Deleuze [1968]1990; Deleuze [1970]1988; Deleuze and Guattari [1972]2019; [1980]1987). In my research in geological affect, I am entering this composite space between, and specifically in relation to what I have chosen to term attached and detached geology. The first as rock-formations, mountains and their plateaus, and the latter as infrastructural geology which I also refer to as lithics.(1) Often I work with local geological sounds and acoustics as well as re-located sounds through field recordings.(2) In the following, I will though revisit some processes around geological listening facilitations, as fieldwork, performance, and their pedagogical potentials.

Infrastructural listening in Turku

In October 2022, I was an artist in residency at Titanik A.i.R in Turku (FI), doing fieldwork and a sound performance as a part of my doctoral thesis work. In this framework, I began working with a rock-boulder wall situated next to the gallery, just below the street which was running above it. I started to write scores for engagements and listening activations of this wall, and simultaneously tried to capture the resonance of it as well.

 

– score for the wall beneath the street

pick a boulder on the wall

approach it, and place your

chin and ear gently on it

listen

try to approach

its travelling movement(s)

 

These vibrational recordings at first became a part of my Matter-as-Collaborator Lab performance, and the wall was also later the departure point for my presentation at The Listening Academy, both events taking place in the Titanik A.i.R studio in close proximity. The work with the rock-boulder wall thus evolved to become a proper relation, and the anchoring point for a sound installation which I did in the Titanik Gallery in early 2024 titled The Wall Beneath the Street, embracing both what I had already explored when in residency but also extending into a greater scope of infrastructural geology. In the next section, I have collected aspects from each of these ideas and their inherent processes to unfold how this listening connection came about and how it has continued to grow. 

 

I wish to begin with an extract from my presentation – or lecture performance meditation – at The Listening Academy, here connecting sensation, relation, and places. During the session, I was reading reflections and facts aloud in-between the instructions to inform the experience. I wanted to activate three geological components which had impacted my research the previous months (kaolin, water, granite)(3) with whatever other sounds and sensations that were present in the space. As I often do improvised meditations and include potentialities which unfold themselves spatio-temporally, I had for this one an outlined framework to which I would engage. I here wanted to attune to this threshold relation, and invite the participants to move into a deep engagement with these geological agencies and their composition.

affective-geological-listening: composition across the dry, wet, and hard

Part 1– dry (kaolin):

Take a small amount of kaolin between your fingers (only use your one hand).

Let your fingers slowly sense the structure of the dried matter.

The powder, the pieces.

Let it be rubbed onto your skin.

Kaolinite is a clay mineral, important in industry, and rocks which are rich in kaolinite are known as kaolin (Hayden 2006). This matter would have been found at a transition zone which goes from weathered sedimentary rock to pure clay, a movement from southern to northern zones. Colour and mineralogical composition of the clays here depends on their primary rock (Laajoki 1975, 88).

 

Try to sense the movements of the mineral.

Where is the in-between, where are the thresholds?

 

When kaolin is dissolved and mixed into water, its plasticity depends on its content of solid and liquid matter, and its ability to be moulded under stress without breaking (Hayden 2006, 94).

Part 2 – wet (kaolin-water):

Put a drop or a few drops of water into the kaolin on your fingers.

Sense the difference between the dry and wet agents, and the minerals mixing.

 

Lets stay with the water for a moment, this is local tap-water from Turku. The natural purification process of the infiltrated water within the sand and gravel aquifer is essential to water quality, and clay is first removed from the water, then it travels into bedrock, filled by sand and gravel (Turku.fi 2021, n.p; Turun Vesihuolto n.d, n.p). This means that geology is part of the drinking water infrastructure.

 

How does the drip sounds on the kaolin (now we are mixing clay back into the water).

 

This lithic infrastructure, we, as humans, use in our everyday lives. We are now in composition with kaolin and water touching the skin. 

 

Stay with this sensation.

 

Consider the moment where it dissolves and becomes something else.

Do you dissolve too.

Become fluid.

Part 3 – composite and hard (granite):

For the last part of the meditation, I will return to this rock-boulder wall which I worked with while in residency here (at Titanik). In any case, Finnish granitoids or granite are evidently present, as it is a crucial part of the bedrock as well as in the cityscape (rocks and boulders comes from e. g. tunnel-work and other intrusions into the natural bedrock). Since much of the cobblestones in Turku are local granite then I am considering that this is also the case of this structure next to Titanik.(4)

 

For the last part of the meditation, I invite you to move towards the granite rock-boulder wall, with kaolin in your one hand, then touching the wall with the other (it might even be wet from rain). Use a few minutes to sense the kaolin on the fingers (listen to the components of kaolin) and the granite rocks (listen to the granite).

Consider how this is both re/located geology. (end)

Through this listening mediation, I wanted to connect to my own processes with the rock-boulder wall and the kaolinite which originated from another fieldwork in Kainuu when I was at the Mustarinda residency (FI), also in 2022. Additionally through its molecular engagement, it embraced the idea of composite geology (Yusoff 2015) which is important for my overall research and to connect to local and relocated modes of engagement with rocks and minerals.

The Wall Beneath the Street

As mentioned in the introduction to this section, the activation of the rock-boulder wall became a longer one which culminated in a sound installation in early 2024. The title The Wall Beneath the Street has in its phrasing a loose reference to a Situationist slogan connected to the 1968s demonstrations. This beach or beneath connects the act of taking out paving stones from the street for riots, which in this installation was extended to a relocation of geological entities connected to broader acts of resistance. These everyday lithic infrastructures which themselves have been violently shaped by humans are in focus, their eventness, and points of stability and collapse. They are here reconsidered with a critical and artistic potential in mind. According to the collective writings of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, the political event is thus based on a series of amplified instabilities and fluctuations which in the 1968s uproar were connected to a need for a possibility for something else; creating new collective assemblages of agency and enunciation (Deleuze and Guattari 1984/2006).(5) Those rocks of potential are reterritorialized as infrastructures but deterritorialized as tools of protest and means of artistic production. The Wall Beneath the Street here wanted as an installation to facilitate these modes of collective assemblages in its composite sonic nature, and its gestures of listening as a multiplicity – to the space, the street, the bodies present in them, and across them. It additionally wanted to connect enunciated words, randomized into scores, to enact these relations, where the queer properties of geology are amplified in the space via their metamorphic resonances.

 

The installation consisted of different elements which together created a listening environment for the visitors to engage with. There were five series of sound cycles randomized in the two bigger spaces of the gallery amplified by speakers, as well as three cards for the visitors to take with them based on a list of words which were randomly generated by a python script. The words departed from a selection which I had compiled specifically for this purpose coming from my lithic affective research, and the cards invited the visitors to participate in this relation; to move outside to the rock-boulder wall and use these constellated words to approach its agency, as a listening score.

 

 

 

 

 

geological-depth(s)
vibrating
underneath
collective
displacement
machinic
passage-ways
for
micro-moving

 

 

 

 

 

—

 

 

 

 

 

amplifying
over-distance
desire
encounter
except
threshold(s)
above
among
granite

 

 

 

 

 

—

 

 

 

 

 

affect(s)

contemplated-potential(s)

without
passage-ways
error
clay
movement
disruption
lithic

 

 

 

 

 

There thus was an invitation on the backside of the cards: “Engage with the machinic propositions and collective arrangement of words printed on the card. Consider this as a score of agency and potential” (Madsen 2024). Additionally, as a durational act, I did an infrastructural geological mapping of the streets and buildings in Turku on a central wall in the space. On the last day of the installation, I invited the visitors for a lithic listening walk departing in this mapping and indulging in these relations. Additionally, during the installation days the visitors were encouraged to activate the above mentioned listening propositions, read texts, and scores placed in the space, as well as to write notes in a collective listening protocol which many decided to do. This gave an insight into the multidimensional aspect of experience entering a condensed sonic space and its connections, listening beyond the gallery walls.

Affective listening with a (post)industrial landscape: the raw mineralogy of Aalborg

Mapping infrastructural geology was also the departure-point for the listening score publication the composite geology of place – affective listening with a (post)industrial landscape which I created specifically for my solo installation The Metabolism of the Earth, taking place at the exhibition space XM3 space for contemporary art in Aalborg (DK) in May 2023. The publication was a supplement to the listening sessions which were planned in connection to the exhibition, but the publication was also created to stand alone, as a guide for listening together with the environment.(6) Aalborg here became a starting point for a global reflection on raw materials used in industrial infrastructures and our relationship to these, both on a minor multi-sensorial scale but also in its greater political framework. The planned listening sessions were made as dialogues with selected places and their characteristics and potentials, where mineralogy, construction, social community and collaboration became central to these sessions. 

 

Something which became an important focal point was how to activate an urban geological awareness which takes into considerations and listens to the complexity of matter which exists beneath our feet. Aalborg has a rich production history of raw materials as there is a large amount of limestone, clay, and gravel below the city. This mode of extraction of raw materials results in the formation of pits and lakes where abandoned sites are often reused as recreational areas (Berthelsen 1987, 45-46). Aalborg’s underground and geology here has a significance for the city, its structure, industry, and also the location of various neighborhoods, and road names as they are today (Berthelsen 1987, 57-58). Remnants of these processes and their histories are thus present everywhere, and the processed stone material that is seen on streets, and in buildings are a great examples of this usage. This was some of the movements behind creating the score publication to facilitate and open up for an engagement with the industrial past and its future (this was continued in the previously mentioned lithic listening walk in Turku). The seven score-fragments inserted below are from different parts of the listening publication (Madsen 2023), which connects multiple modalities of relation across the (post)industrial land- and cityscape.

 

enter a place slowly and be

open to what you encounter.

look around you and listen

with the whole body.

 

The first listening session in Aalborg departed in a more remote locality of the city, and focused on construction and urban geology, specifically the built environment (limestone in cement and the clay in the bricks, concrete blocks, gravel, clay, relocated rocks and boulders). The eastern part of Aalborg is here close to a gravel area and on the border of a chalk area in Aalborg’s raw matter infrastructure, as a place which hosts multiple geological and lithic infrastructures.

 

do you notice visual traces and do

you auditively hear sounds which

witness history?

 

what can you sense and

what happens if you touch

a rock on the ground, does

it give resistance, does its

shape inform you about the

past?

 

has a condensation taken place?

 

The second listening session had a focus on the mineralogy of a chosen (post)industrial location, inhabited by minerals. I used the chalk pit as an example of such a place, as testimony of old industry, extraction, and transformation of the landscape. To enter into this type of relation it is crucial to move very close to the elements (micro), and using touch as a tool for listening (which was also the case in affective-geological-listening); with very slow movements, to be sensing the texture, and how porous it is (between the fingers). 

 

regard this place as a composite

organism, in which you are a

dynamic part of, and move

beyond the binary.

 

imagine your own body as a part

of the complex infrastructure of

the place.

 

recognize your privileges as

a human-body in dialogue with a

geological-body, a wind-body.

 

The third listening session was activating a complex urban space where (post)industries, recreative infrastructures, and movements on various levels became present factors (thus combining the themes from the previous two sessions). I was here moving from a park which was a former clay pit (Østre Anlæg), towards the harbour, by Limfjorden, where the presence of the wind also played a major role. A more transversal approach was taken into usage here, to look at the slightly larger movements of Aalborg’s past and future.

Outro

As I have outlined in this essay, through facilitated listening sessions and environments, a methodology for geological and lithic listening is here activating an attentive and care-ful space of relation, where molecular dimensions are explored. It becomes collaboration in close engagement with matter. This is both the case when being in the field with attached rock-formations, as well as with detached rocks and boulders used in city infrastructures. My practice thus considers both of these as crucial for our affective connection to geology, and its processes on multiple levels.

 

This essay has also been an attempt to document experience, to use this anthology as a place of unfolding the spatio-temporal relations which inform my artistic work and research in the examples mentioned here. This means an engagement through re-encountering the processual framework of these projects, but already through this essays they are extending themselves into becoming something else, continuing the questions and ideas raised in the scores, sessions, walks… and their inherent departure points of inquiry in critical listening. It also embraces how to include others in this experience, to facilitate and be collective in a posthumanist consideration for our involvement with the geology surrounding us and of the earth.

Notes:

1) Lithic means stone tools but in my research in geological infrastructures this also includes pavement stones, gravel etc. as lithic entities since humans use these as “tools” of city infrastructures.

2) These includes soundscape recordings and ambience as well as seismographic recordings with the geophone as the main source of information. In live performances, I also activate matter with and without piezoelectric-discs, as well as omnidirectional sounds of stones and their acoustics.

3) The kaolin used was from the Kainuu region of Finland and retrieved while in residency at Mustarinda in Hyrynsalmi (FI). It was taken with great care and permission. This was also the last time I have taken geological agencies with me as resituated matter without the possibility to return them again. The water is a reference to the local water of Turku which was used and the granite was the rock-boulder wall.

4) A geotechnical report on usage of stone infrastructures in Turku mentions local cobblestone (Selonen and Ehlers 2021), but not the granite of the rock-boulder wall next to Titanik. Later in my research in 2024, I was informed by Turku Museum (via email correspondence) that in some newer town squares there are imported rock (a lighter granite) but supposedly not these older boulders which according to a report was renovated as a wall in 2007-2008.

5) When Deleuze and Guattari titles their essay that “May ’68 Did Not Take Place,” it was due to the lack of matching the event of May 1968 with a new possible subjectivity and collective enunciation which in a way renders this out as a result, this never became an actuality.

6) I have since then been taking this score publication to other locations and frameworks as well, e. g for a listening meditation which I facilitated in a mining town in Sweden in June 2024.

References:

Berthelsen, Ole. 1987. Geologi i Aalborgområdet. Råstoffer – Fundering – Vandindvinding. København: DGU.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. [1984]2006. “May ’68 Did Not Take Place.” In Gilles Deleuze, Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975-1995. Edited by David Lapoujade. Translated by Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina, 233-236. New York: Semiotext(e).

Deleuze, Gilles. [1968]1990. Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza. Translated by Martin Joughin. NY: Zone Books.

Deleuze, Gilles. [1970]1988. Spinoza, Practical Philosophy. Translated by Robert Hurley. San Francisco: City Lights.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. [1972]2019. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by R. Hurley, M. Seem, and H. R. Lane. London/NY: Bloomsbury Academic.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari.[1980]1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Laajoki, Kauko. 1975. “On the Stratigraphic Position of Kaolin in Väyrylänkylä, South Puolanka

Area, Finland.” In Bulletin of the Geological Society of Finland 47 (1975): 83-91. Accessed

01.11.2022, https://doi.org/10.17741/bgsf/47.1-2.010

 

Madsen, Tina Mariane Krogh. 2016. “Body Interfaces: Contesting Agency”. In Interface Politics. Edited by Teresa Martínez Figuerola and Jorge Luis Marzo, 341–358. Barcelona: BAU, Centre Universitari de Disseny.

 

Madsen, Tina Mariane Krogh. 2019. “Body Interfaces – Becoming-Environment”. In Women Eco Artist Dialog, Issue 10: HER<e>TECH. Edited by Praba Pilar. Accessed 1.3.2021. https://directory.weadartists.org/body-interfaces

 

Madsen, Tina Mariane Krogh. 2023a. “A Liminal Body of Performative Becoming”. In Taboo-Transgression Transcendence in Art & Science 2020. Edited by Dalila Honorato, Ingeborg Reichle, María Antonia González Valerio, Andreas Giannakoulopoulos, 278–287. Corfu: Ionian University.

Madsen, Tina Mariane Krogh. 2023b. the composite geology of place – affective listening with a (post)industrial landscape (publication published for the exhibition The Metabolism of the Earth, XM3 space for contemporary art).

 

Madsen, Tina Mariane Krogh. 2023c. “Kropsresonans”. In A Sound Word Almanac. Edited by Bernd Herzogenrath, 35–38. London/NY: Bloomsbury Academic.

 

Murray, Haydn H. 2006. “Kaolin Applications.” Developments in Clay Science. Elsevier, Volume 2 (2006): 85-109. Accessed 20.7.2024, https://doi.org/10.1016/S1572-4352(06)02005-8 

 

Oliveros, Pauline. 2005. Deep Listening: A Composer’s Sound Practice. Kingston/NY: iUniverse.

 

Oliveros. Pauline. 2022. Quantum Listening, London: Ignota Books.

 

Selonen, Olavi, and Carl Ehlers. 2021. Natural Stone in Urban Design in the City of Turku in Southwestern Finland. Geotechnical report 17. Lahti: Kivi – Stone From Finland. https://kivi.info/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/geotechnical_report_17_web2.pdf 

Spinoza, Baruch. [1677]1985. The Ethics. The Collected Works of Spinoza. Vol I. Edited and translated by Edwin Curley. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Yusoff, Kathryn. 2015. “Geological Subjects: Nonhuman Origins, Geomorphic Aesthetics and the Art of Becoming Inhuman,” Cultural Geographies Vol. 22(3): 383–407.

Turku.fi. 2021. “The Quality of Water Produced by Turku Region Water Is Rated the Best in the World by Unesco.” Turku.fi. Published 01.12.2021. https://www.turku.fi/en/news/2021-12-01_quality-water-produced-turku-region-water-rated-best-world-unesco

Turun Vesihuolto. n.d. “Where Does Water Come From: Here is How Tap Water is Made.” Turun Vesihuolto.fi. Accessed 01.11.2022. https://www.turunvesihuolto.fi/en/where-does-water-come-from/#