Testing Ground: Listening: Afterthoughts

How may a series of ‘afterthoughts’ from our invited testing-ground-guests act as a form of documentation, continued wonderings, a possible staying-with, and as dialogue across weeks and encounters?

 

With an ‘afterthought’ are we interested in engaging with the concept of possible ‘after-thinking’ – delayed thinking or thinking after-effect/affect – too-late (vs. not-yet) or still-evolving thinking… – thinking that takes place as experiences are reshaping you. A thinking not possible and unknown in the moment of participation.

Brandon LaBelle, for week I: Listening as a Framework

Barbora Kováčová, for week III: The Listening Body

Afterthought:

 

Fragments: resonance of the bodies through the stones, openness towards unknown and fragility inherent in the gesture, the natural habitat of the bodies in forgetful detachment, how to come across the feeling of pure being? Places that resound are like a settlement of bodies – changing little here and there, but persisting in time by their stubbornness, keeping the archive of everyone’s memories in resonating silence.

Jenny Gräf Sheppard, for week I: Listening as a Framework

Afterthought:

 

Following are some reflections on the Bureau for Listening days together with Lucas, Amelia and Brandon and those present in the public event in Jan 24 and 26, 2024. In Frameworks for Listening. Brandon, Lucas and I spent a number of hours on ideas around Frameworks for Listening on the 24th of January. 

 

Below reflections are a blend of the present and the two referenced dates – in a sort of dialogue between situated events.

 

(we begin by speaking about listening frameworks)

 

I stumble on this term, not because it isn’t a good one, but because somehow, I hear ‘framework’ as an enclosure, that in stark terms determines what lies inside and what remains out. And I think about how hard it is to discuss sound without the visual, to lead us into discussions of sound. It is hard to avoid using objects, nouns, subjects and objects, and pictorial words to describe our entanglement with sound, while its contingencies do not always fit squarely inside of a frame, or framework. How to work with non-figurative figuration, if there is even such a thing. How to speak of something so tenuous and changing as listening, sounding, while also becoming aware of our own listening positionality? A moving, changing, reacting, balancing and imbalancing set of coordinates that marks traces. A negotiation. Despite my initial reaction, I appreciate the use of the visual term “framework” as a device that can reflexively attune one to one’s own contingencies of listening, and as a means to distinguish others’ too.

 

Brandon mentions a potential nesting of frameworks. I think of the Russian Matryoshka dolls -containing dolls within dolls. How do we move between the layered frameworks that contribute and react to how we perceive and know. Do we move through the world with a polyphony of frames, or nested dolls, that each attune us variously? The variously shaped, changing and moving frames, with borders that blur and maybe even interact in ways like waves. Can I listen with multiple frameworks at once. Is there a hierarchy? How can we listen in ways that sustain ecosystems large or small?

 

What less 2-dimensional term could we use as a prompt to reflect upon how one conceives of listening and how one performs it based on certain concepts and expectations. What about a word that contains movement, and performs a non-fixed, instable, shifting negotiation.  If language can world (in the sense of Le Guin or Haraway) or wor(l)d (in the sense of Helen Palmer) might another word be a way of speaking of how we orient and disorient through sound? 

 

We discuss the importance of naming, how a name performs what it holds such as in Lukas, Randi and Amelia’s decision to name Bureau for Listening instead of “of” Listening. 

 

Brandon notes the value of stable frameworks and I find comfort in this. I to myself, Ok stop pushing back against stable frameworks and appreciate the fact that some things are more enduring than others. Remember photography, how a freeze frame can be just as important as an original time-based act itself. It represents something. It captures, and in the capture it reveals. My little bird (like the Shama Bird, first animal recording captured on a wax cylinder 1). But even our instruments for recording are tuned to listening frameworks. I put the microphone near it’s beak to get “closer”, but the bird is captive. A recording is made of a bird out of context. Who does the Shama Bird sing for?

 

Today, we discuss listening frameworks with a public group. The group is positioned so that everyone looks toward a large storefront window. Lukas leads us in a short listening session. In relative silence, we listened, moving from more local listening (Oliveros) to listening attentively to activity outside of the building (global listening), which we could see through the window. The movement between these two spatial conceptualizations, created a slight difference in orientation – a small disturbance in our perceived scope of listening. Although the world outside the glass was muted, our attention to the space changed the sound in a certain way. The act of listening had a certain kind of agency (change, movement, force, energy), that could render certain things audible. 

 

As we opened up for discussion, A man noted that due to our roles as expert or speaker who were in a sense leading the silent listening session, there was a sense of power imbedded in the silence. Our frameworks for listening may amplify differently, according to various systems of power, induce ripples of former frameworks to occur in this one. Frameworks for listening may be slippery.  

 

When is listening a form of control, when is it not a form of control but performed via conditions of power? 

And when is the power of listening limited to the person listening and when is it a distributed power, or agency. 

When is listening a gift and when is listening becoming an accomplice. When is it a gift to be someone’s accomplice. When is listening dangerous?

 

Thinking of frameworks for listening is a bit like thinking of orientations. The ways in which we orient, shape and reflect what we perceive. Frameworks and orientations are potential, infinite configurations, cosmologies and scales of time. They can operate without people knowing and they can be intentionally attended (for example by working with Pauline Oliveros’ scores) realised through Amacher’s spatioacoustic works/ binaural compositionings. 

 

How is it possible to hear another person’s framework and is that even fair?

 The listening framework of a rock, of a bat, of a river, of a person born into conflict of war.

 

One listening is different from another. 

Listening across space-time logics as mother’s voice 

breaths ‘hi’ into my hypnopompic right ear.

 

What is animated by listening is not always seen.

Attending to that which is animated by listening is important.

In what ways does listening act upon the world, seen or unseen, heard or unheard, tasted, smelled, intuited?

 

Isn’t about attention?

The intention inside of attention.

 

Institutions as frameworks, and frameworks of differing durations

 

How a can listening situate you, when does it unsettle you?

Nana Francisca Schottländer, for week III: The Listening Body

Afterthought:

 

This is species evolutionary training. By training our abilities to attune our bodies to sense and respond, we develop our response-ability. We store new forms of knowing and other ways of being-with all that is here with us in the fleshy archives of our bodies. Experiences and embodied realizations forming part of the continuous evolution of our own cultural-natural bodies and the interconnections between them forming our local and global collective body/ies.

 

By letting these experiences, realizations and ways of knowing resonate into our flesh, we transmit them to other bodies, human and more, through our reverberating, resonant encounters. And thus, our species will evolve in intra-active exchanges that reshape our ways of being in and with the world and will travel on as genetic imprints passed on to future generations.

 

The entry-point into this training is anytime, anywhere. We train our abilities to enter into resonant, reciprocal encounters and exchanges with that, which is right here, right now, against all (capitalistic) odds, that tell us, that the right time/way/place is always sometime/someplace/somehow different that we must earn through our commitment to the production/consumption/growth/optimizations wheel.

 

But even within these structures, the staying-with what is right here, right now, inside, outside, can be an entry point to a tangent of awareness and sensuous re-calibration, that breaks this cycle and opens a different trajectory.

 

The training is humble, ongoing, curious and deeply revolutionary.

Preparing us for another world, which we already encounter and create as we train for it.

 

Do not underestimate the deeply transformative potential of an intimate encounter with a cigarette bud, a cobblestone, a crack in the paint and the resonances from this, traveling on through the individual and collective flesh of the world.

Louise Vind Nielsen, for week IV: Spatial Listening

Afterthought:

 

On fogs and a deaf dog

 

What does a deaf dog have to do with fog horns, the edge of a table and ear crystals?

When I was invited to dive into the concept of spatial listening, I was wondering what this has to do with me and my (sound) art practice.

 

I guess, so far, I have associated spatial listening with a highly technical approach to listening in space. How three-dimensional listening environments are created by means of technical equipment, either physically in space with immersive audio experiences, or virtually, through augmented audio or binaural technology.

 

I’m a very analog being, often working very “economical” using the equipment I have at hand and know how to master. My approach to sound and listening is thereby not very technical, but rather rooted in a passion for psychology, interhuman as well as interspecies-relations with a hint of mythology.

 

But upon entering the area of spatial listening I pretty soon came to the conclusion that spatial listening does indeed have a lot to do with me.
It has to do with all of us,
all the time.

 

We are all immersed in sound and space, all the time. Our bodies are constantly exposed to acoustic vibrations. Our ears incessantly pick up the vibrations, which are sent to our brains. The gift of hearing with two ears helps us to navigate in space. At least, when you are a hearing being, that is. But even if you are not, your body is still able to listen with more than just your ears. Even deaf dogs are floating around in this seemingly endless mosh pit of sound waves picking up the tactile vibrations that life on earth produces, orienting themselves though other senses than that of hearing.

 

Within the frame of Testing Ground IV I allowed myself to flow with the same dynamic in an ocean of inputs, collective readings, discussions, rituals and experiments. I allowed myself not to panic, but to stay open and to listen, in order to learn, exchange and enter new spaces. I was amazed how many areas of discussion we touched upon during those four intense days in the foggy fish tank.

 

Testing Ground IV was a place for orientation and disorientation in space. It became a space for my deaf dog “Mino” to enter the stage (at least conceptually). It was a series of rituals for moving in space, making space, defining space, enclosing as well as disclosing possible spaces for listening. It was insisting on listening and insisting on an endless possibility of space.

 

Thanks to Bureau for Listening for holding space.

Thanks to ArtHub for giving space.

Thanks to Elisabeth Holager Lund for your knowledge of space.

Thanks to Dorte from Døveforeningen for signing space.

 

In the misty shroud where fogs unfurl
A deaf dog filled with wonder twirl
Through veils of gray, he wanders free
Guided not by sound, but what he sees

 

Upon the edges of tables bare
He rests his head with gentle care
A tactile world, a guiding hand
In silence, he begins to understand

 

In whispers soft ear crystals sway
Within his labyrinth they seek to hold sway
Though silence reigns, they dance and spin
Echoing a dissonance from within

 

No need for words in this endless land
Where touch speaks volumes, signs of hand
So let the fog horns fill the night
As they journey on their common flight

Elisabeth Holager Lund, for week IV: Spatial Listening

Afterthought (1):

To hold space for listening

To listen to a space
can be done anywhere, anytime.

But to create a space
for listening
is a more demanding task.

To lower the paste,
slow down time.

Giving space – and time – for

breaks, thoughts to find shape, reactions to happen, blank space and, seemingly, un-utilised time.

The courage to sink a bit into one self,
also in the presence and community of others.

To find
peace and calmness
in introversy
in the company of others
is radical
takes courage
needs training.
To not respond.
To not fill in the blanks.
To not entertain.

To not show off your identity and abilities in the presence of others.

To be seemingly passive.
Such a taboo.
To take in
and reflect
– internally –
in community with others.
Not sexy.
Not cool.
Hard to promote.
To hold a space for listening.
What does it really take ?

An acoustically improved, warm, neat and democratic space

with fat boys and yogi tea ?
If boiled down;
What are the essentials ?
The elements that are not only helpful

but crucial

for the activity, the event, to take place.
A space – or something experienced as a space

A listener – someone or something with a sensory ability, of some kind

Time

Afterthought (2):

Stillheten åpner opp.
Jeg kan høre deg.
Med mine øyne.
Merker hjertet som slår varmt i ditt bryst.
Uten berøring.
Fremmede, lyttende sammen.
En intimitet; Skrøpelig. Potent.
Vi sitter her, lyttende sammen.
Tiende eksplosivitet.

. . .

The silence opens.
I can hear you.
With my eyes.
Feeling the heart beating warm inside your chest.
Without touch.
Strangers, listening together.
An intimacy; Vulnerable. Potent.
We are here, listening together.
Muted explosiveness.

Christine Hvidt, for week II: Slow Listening

Afterthought:

 

Slow Listening affords the silencing of words and language of abstraction
Letting yourself fully immerse into becoming all ear to matter and pattern,
there will be no space for signifier or signified, 
I think-sense

 

That’s what I thought and partly believe still. I remember meeting either an external or internal desire to describe what, why, and how it felt in the context we were in. Engaging with listening in this intense form, we were just as much engaging with formulation and translation of our lived experiences into something meaningful through our language and human abstractions.

 

With the Listening with Darkness session, I tried to reach beyond the delimited and habitual human sphere, language and conceptualisation. However, I ended right in the middle of this as soon as I had to process, formulate, and convey the experience to myself and others. This is to me a paradox and an open question: How can we approach and shape a language around a (listening) sensation that is at one and the same time tied to our human nature all the while immersed in the unknown realms of existence moved by forms and forces for which we have no language?

Carolyn F. Strauss, for week II: Slow Listening

Afterthought:

 

It’s been surprisingly challenging to sum up thoughts on ‘Testing Ground: Slow Listening’ at ArtHub Copenhagen: a handful of days nested within a longer trajectory of shared inquiry and conviviality cultivated between Slow Research Lab and Bureau for Listening over the past 12 months – and an even smaller fraction of the 20+ years of my research into the nature of Slowness in which practices of listening have played an essential role.

 

Reflecting on ‘Slow Listening’ as the pretext for coming together in Copenhagen, another such compound term comes to my mind. It is Martinican philosopher Edouard Glissant’s donner-avec, first put forward in his seminal work, Poetics of Relation (1997). As interpreted by translator Betsy Wing, Glissant’s somewhat enigmatic term — which literally translates from French to English as to give-with — ‘relays the concept of understanding into the world of Relation, translating, contesting, then reconstituting its elements in a new order. […] Donner (to give) is meant as a generosity of perception.’ 

 

That spirit of generosity was echoed by Olafur Eliasson, Eric Ellingsen and Christina Werner in their contribution to our first Slow Reader (2016), where they wrote of donner-avec as a “poetic momentum [that] unfolds in the listening.” In our second publication, Slow Spatial Reader (2021), Glissant’s hyphenate appears again, this time in a section of the book titled  “Giving-With, Looking Toward (After Edouard Glissant),” in which I wrote of donner-avec as: ‘a dynamic form of gifting that operates beyond the confines of capitalist logic, resisting enclosure or appropriation of any kind—an “aesthetics of rupture and connection” that, in bringing forth an expanded repertoire of relation-identities, “opens on totality.”’

 

Reflecting on ‘Testing Ground: Slow Listening,’ I feel prompted to update my prior understanding of donner-avec, now also adding to it the quality of solidarity. Assembling daily with Amalia and Lukas and Randi and Christine and the ArtHub team there was a shared commitment to (in Amalia’s words) “being an organism together” for a time, caring for a space together and saying yes to a series of ‘minor invitations’ that might nudge us — and the publics also invited to join — to gentler, Slower encounters with space, pace, self, and other. From walking very slowly shoulder-to-shoulder to silent acts of protest and resistance to hunkering down together outdoors in the wee hours of a freezing night, spending a week comparing practices of what (we think) Slow Listening is about was a precious time of being and becoming-more, together. It was the kind of solidarity-making time that surely would enrich our world, but that sadly far too few people can afford to partake in. 

 

That fact begs the question: What is the point of creating these (art) spaces that seem to benefit only a lucky few? I myself like to think that something more profound is in the works. That in anchoring space and one other through shared inquiry and attention and donner-avec, even a small group can serve as ballast for a larger humanity. That was certainly how I felt a few months prior to the ‘Testing Ground’ week when I spent a shorter span of days in Copenhagen, invited by Bureau for Listening to bear witness to a durational performance by the Swedish conceptual artist Jesper Norda. The 12,5 hour performance took place on a brisk fall day, beginning just after the break of dawn and enduring until long after the sun had set again, with Norda holding vigil at the keys of the piano, steadily making his way through a piece he had composed some 10 years earlier but had never played in its entirety. I stayed for the entire duration, while other bodies came, listened, rested, and left again. It was a long day and a tiring one, yet an inexplicably enlivening experience. Immersed so thickly in the intimacy of Norda’s pursuit and in the carefully-crafted atmosphere of hosting created by Bureau for Listening, I found myself in an exquisite state of Slowness, oblivious to — somehow outside of — the logic of clock time.

 

It was only the next morning that I came to hear of another occurrence that had taken place the same day, October 7th, 2023. While our intimate group was safely nestled in a small wooden house at the harbor of a prosperous Scandinavian city sharing in the experience of a singular work of art, elsewhere on the planet terrible events were unfolding. Many would regard our circumstances in Copenhagen as a luxury of the privileged; and yet, I felt something quite to the contrary: a deep sense somehow of having been of service. It seemed to me that the intensity of our (Slow) listening — the unwavering levels of attention and trust and care that permeated the experience — was needed more than ever on that day. 

 

On the opening page of her book Staying With the Trouble (2016), Donna Haraway wrote: ‘Our task is to make trouble, to stir up potent response to devastating events, as well as to settle troubled waters and rebuild quiet places.’ What Slow Research Lab and Bureau for Listening have been cultivating in our shared pursuit of ‘Slow Listening’ is in many ways a response to that call: a commitment to carving out space-times — testing grounds —for living, loving, listening differently in a deeply troubled world. Nurturing glimpses of what could be.

 

.

Slow

Listening 

is …

near

far

intimate

expansive

quiet

curious

mingling

anchoring

a

being-with

becoming-with

just in time

out of time

here

and 

now

.

—

1. Wing, Betsy ‘Translator’s Introduction’ to Glissant, Edouard, Poetics of Relation (University of Michigan Press, 1997), xiii
2. Eliasson, Ellingsen and Werner, C., ‘From the Past With Love’ in Strauss and Pais, eds., Slow Reader: a Resource for Design Thinking and Practice (Valiz 2016), 136
3.  Edouard Glissant, op.cit., 151
4. Ibid., 192
5.  Strauss, Carolyn, ed., Slow Spatial Reader: Chronicles of Radical Affection (Vaiz 2021), 260
6.  Haraway, Donna, Staying With the Trouble (Duke University Press, 2016), 1

—

An afterthought offered by Bureau for Listening will be added after all four weeks of the testing ground program is ‘completed’.