Collective Listening Across Distance
At Women in Revolt: Radical Acts, Contemporary Resonances conference, Tate Britain, March 2024.
Originally a live performance, this piece shares the praxis and the thinking behind our methodology of listening across distance. Through a distributed group practice, we listen for the electromagnetic transmissions embedded within a soundscape. We combine our individual and topical experiences into a collective network of listenings. We celebrate the fragility of what is heard, the intricate buzzes and clicks alongside the voices and music, reception as determined by the atmospheric conditions of the moment, or the sound of nothing at all when things do not work or there is nothing that we can hear. It is a plurality of possibilities that we listen to, rather than an illusion of singularity where there is one way of being and one body. These processes allow us to listen to the environmental transmissions that surround us in a way that is open and accessible to all.
|
|
A short extract from the performance script:
Radio is not a sound or a station - it’s a range of frequencies on the electromagnetic spectrum. Radio waves are both human-transmitted, and natural phenomena - they are bursts of energy emitted by solar storms and lightning. Radio waves are carrier waves - audio, images and data can hitch a ride and travel across the globe, bouncing off a part of the Earth’s upper atmosphere: the ionosphere.
When our collective meets, our faces and voices are transmitted to each other via wifi signals. They become data loaded onto radio waves that can travel vast distances. Our individual selves become collectively enmeshed in the electromagnetic commons.
As a collective, we learn together as equal non-experts. We think about ways to oppose the gendered language of these technologies, and interact with them through a feminist lens. Part of our ethos is ‘learning through doing’: practice, sharing knowledge, and curious exploration, as well as failure, help us to demystify aspects of technology.
We work at distance, across time zones, between or alongside our other commitments, connected through digital conversations and online meetings that often take place during the unsociable hours when our paths can align. At in-person events like this one today, only a few of us are present, but the whole collective has been part of the work that we are sharing and the sounds we’re transmitting.
Radio is not a sound or a station - it’s a range of frequencies on the electromagnetic spectrum. Radio waves are both human-transmitted, and natural phenomena - they are bursts of energy emitted by solar storms and lightning. Radio waves are carrier waves - audio, images and data can hitch a ride and travel across the globe, bouncing off a part of the Earth’s upper atmosphere: the ionosphere.
When our collective meets, our faces and voices are transmitted to each other via wifi signals. They become data loaded onto radio waves that can travel vast distances. Our individual selves become collectively enmeshed in the electromagnetic commons.
As a collective, we learn together as equal non-experts. We think about ways to oppose the gendered language of these technologies, and interact with them through a feminist lens. Part of our ethos is ‘learning through doing’: practice, sharing knowledge, and curious exploration, as well as failure, help us to demystify aspects of technology.
We work at distance, across time zones, between or alongside our other commitments, connected through digital conversations and online meetings that often take place during the unsociable hours when our paths can align. At in-person events like this one today, only a few of us are present, but the whole collective has been part of the work that we are sharing and the sounds we’re transmitting.