Through his seemingly insignificant walks, Francis Alÿs not only reimagines the city, he also creates narratives, spreads rumors, maps the social fabric of the place through actions that are sometimes short sometimes carried out over long distances or many hours, by turns dragging, pushing or carrying an accessory that stands in for a clue to reading the fable spun by the body in motion.
Spatial sound encapsulates emotional and physical responses that are inscribed in our ancient memories, it’s how we’ve evolved to interact with everything; the way we listen based on the threats and the enticements of the natural world.
Recognized since the early 1990s for his manipulations of telephone conversations—intercepted and mixed live during his performances—Robin Rimbaud, known as Scanner, tracks the hidden sounds of urban environments and uses them as raw material for his sonic landscapes. His installation Esprits de Paris, created in collaboration with Mike Kelley, exemplifies this approach. The piece is built around recordings of "relative silence" captured in various Parisian locations imbued with historical and esoteric resonance.
Listening Where We Are: The Poetics of Site-Specific Listening
Remote sensing is a way of imaging the earth from space.
i see music
A tender reminder that silence is not the absence of sound but the presence of an inward-listening awareness.
“Listening is not a reaction, it is a connection. Listening to a conversation or a story, we don’t so much respond as join in—become part of the action,” writes Le Guin. You are authentically interested in the other’s different point of view, not proving your own as right. An authentic conversation asks you to be fully present, appreciate another’s uniqueness, and discover what you have in common. You drop your old ideas for new ones that emerge through the iterative, back-and-forth interaction, a sacred reciprocity. You create meaning together, but that’s not even the whole point. Conversation is the vehicle, the artery of connection, whether with a friend or a field of clover. Somewhere in the conversation, the content is almost not important anymore. The exchange itself creates and deepens relationship.
Both within the framework of the arts, of living and simply being on this sounding and walkable planet, generations of interdisciplinary artists and other practitioners have continued to investigate and put forth the relationship between body and our shared environment by experimenting with multiple ways of listening through soundwalks and listening walks. We are unable to take a step without it sounding, within positioning ourselves to new sound, without being in a completely different relationship with ungraspable other-than-human entities.
Group soundwalks are often led by a listening guide who will suggest ways of listening including musical listening to pitches, rhythms, textures, harmonies; subjective listening while thinking about relationships between bodily sounds and their surroundings; historical listening in which people think of other times they and others have walked in that place or in similar places and how the present sounds are similar or different; political...