Laboratory for Listening

Laboratory for Listening is a long-term exploration and physical manifestation project of Bureau for Listening in collaboration with SPOR Festival.

 

As a laboratory we will through the ‘bureau’ installation and performative apparatus of the project’s staff and events investigate how to consider listening an artistic, critical and relational practice of its own. We seek to cultivate diverse listening practices, and learn from different listening situations by offering different ‘listening services’, share manuals and scores for listening, facilitate different participatory events and workshops. The laboratory function as a bureau to visit with ‘opening hours’ and a scheduled program for which you can drop by for – the final program of events can be seen at SPOR Festival. SPOR Festival and it listening guests makes up an ideal testing ground for a possible laboratory for listening – how do you listen? And in what ways can we learn to listen differently, together?

Bureau for Listening as a platform is committed to expand, investigate and promote listening from the artistic and activistic realm, through a critical explorative perspective, to larger transformative societal structures. In short: Bureau for Listening believes in the potential of listening, and this Laboratory for Listening is an attempt to test and share this potential.

We ask that listening is practiced as a transdisciplinary phenomena, that is to be experienced and implemented across the humanities, arts, and societies. Listening is for us understood as more than the hearing of audible signals; rather, we experience how it supports a range of relevant processes and projects, including, but not limited to: emotional and social recognition, fostering community relations, establishing attunement and discovery across human and more- than-human worlds, co-learning, and decolonial, eco- feminist initiatives. We consider listening as a creative inquiry and sensitivity; one that stimulates a caring and artistic being-with.

Welcome and lounge music for the Laboratory for Listening.

As the project develops we will attempt to keep a documentation… please see more at this site.

 

However, the laboratory is a a performative and a slow-growing space why not all of our activities or findings will have a durable digital mode for documentation. We rather invite you to visit the laboratory in-person; to take part in possible listening practices and help us expand and share these.

 

During the festival we will set up ‘A Place to Lay Down and Listen’.

 

Different Manuals for Listening will be available at the bureau. (Online sharing/documentation is coming)

 

Consult our Listening Hotline – that will be serviced by bureau staff members during the festival.

 

We will host different Listening Walks during the festival. Visit the installation at Institut for X or the SPOR Festival program to see more

 

Collective Listening – a small manual for listening.

 

We invite you to drop by the bureau and engage in ‘Listening Counseling with Bureau Staff’ and ‘optimize’ your listening (documentation to soon to follow). Please consult the SPOR Festival program for exact time-slots.

 

You may also engage our artistic and idiosyncratic survey: ‘Rate Your Listening’.

 

Ongoing documentation of the physical manifestation of the laboratory

 

We created a special Uniform For Listening for the manifestation of the bureau. Please see Uniform for Listening #III.

 

We are installing a Library and Reading Room for Listening during the festival – please drop by to discover more.

 

The Launch of Listening Club together with Aarhus Lydforening on the initiative of SPOR Festival.

 

More to come.

INTERMEZZO:

 

Field recording, from the 10th of May 2023, created by a SPOR Festival volunteer and explores the area around the laboratory (Institut for X):

 

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More formal information:

The project is among others supported by: Statens Kunstfonds Projektstøtteudvalg for Billedkunst 

 

The project will run for three years, starting in 2023.

 

Please see this polish report in the magasin Glissando on SPOR 2023 featuring our work for listening:

Glissando – Słuchać całą sobą (Lyt med hele dit væsen). SPOR Festival 2023.