Braced Under the Heating Sun: Embodied Listening Practices
(2025)
author(s): Melissa Ryke
published in: Research Catalogue
How can embodied listening be performed, from my ears (body) to yours? How are we (dis)oriented? ‘Braced under the heating sun’ is centred around listening to and documenting my childhood home and its aural particularities through processes of embodied listening. The project is based on my recordings and experiences there between February and March 2020 (bookended by the waning Australian black summer bush fires and the burgeoning COVID-19 pandemic). The house is made from wood and so bends with the weather. The wooden structure amplifies the sounds of our habitation. The house is located on the edge of a small town and next to a sugarcane farm in North Queensland. Although in a tropical climate it has no flyscreens, and air-conditioning in only one room. The windows are open all of the time to let a breeze through. Most evenings you can find green tree frogs, geckos and insects amongst other animals in or around the house. In this way nature (a wild exterior) pushes against and blurs into the home (an organised interior). It is never silent there, the sounds are a mix of all forces; human/animal, natural/industrial. For me, it resonates as a site that is connected to the world despite its rural location. In this house the “rhythms and cycles of the living and the immediate needs of every living being are highlighted and played out. It is where intensities proliferate themselves, where forces are expressed for their own sake, where sensation lives and experiments, where the future is affectively and perceptually anticipated” (Elizabeth Grosz 2008). In this audio paper, I discuss this installation work and my continued research on embodied listening.
tppt
(2025)
author(s): Catarina Almeida
published in: Research Catalogue
theory
practice
theorize practice
practice theory
...
By using any of these words I am establishing an order of importance among them. My body cannot vocalize two of them at the same time. How in the world can this terrible order of things be abolished? How can we relate to a possible merge of the dichotomy theory/practice through language?
"16"
(2025)
author(s): Catarina Almeida
published in: Research Catalogue
The theory & practice affair: this is piece "16" from the series "x out of 5448643200", and it is an arrangement of 16 possible combinations among 5448643200 available of the letters {p, r, a, c, t, i, c, e, t, h, e, o, r, y}. These letters make the word 'practicetheory', and also the word 'theorypractic'e. In fact, none of these two words exist, and yet are identifiable 'theory' and 'practice' as constitutive halves within them. Discourse not only describes the world but actually produces the world. We, as researchers and as artists - and particularly as artist-researchers - are in permanent tension with the two blocks, theory and practice, and despite our struggles to merge both, we are, through language, every time referring to one after the other. One after the other, in a hierarchy. We cannot speak the two words at the same time and, unless we invent a new word to refer to the crossbreed of the two, we are condemned to this limiting dichotomy. "x out of 5448643200" presents the hypothesis of billions of possibilities to re-write the productive merging of theory and practice. "16" shows sixteen of them
(Thanks to Steve Norton and Robert Stevenson for collaboration)
Home page JSS
(2025)
author(s): Journal of Sonic Studies
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
Home page of the Journal of Sonic Studies
Soft letting of language — Listening for emergent wor(l)ds
(2025)
author(s): Emma Cocker
published in: Research Catalogue
My presentation for Listen for Beginnings drew on a number of recent collaborations to explore how the ethico-aesthetic practice of listening (and being listened to) has increasingly become a vital thread within my enquiry. The performativity of my presentation involved weaving between different research artefacts and materials generated in and through artistic collaboration (including video and transcript extracts), alongside "thinking with" a wider critical-contextual milieu (specifically the writing of thinkers such as Gemma Corradi Fiumara and Lispeth Lipari) to consider the relational and ethical ramifications of a listening attitude. I explored how forms of languaging developed through listening might in turn call for different kinds of reception (alternative ways of listening and reading), alongside proposing how a ‘listening stance’ might inform an approach to collaboration — collaboration conceived as a mode of in-touch-ness that also allows for adjacency and alongside-ness, for indirectness and obliqueness, for the reciprocity of listening and being listened to. Within this published context, I want to allow a ‘breathing space’ (perhaps even a ‘listening space’) for selected fragments of an emergent vocabulary of/through listening generated from within a process of collaborative research. My paper comprises extracts of conversational transcript from three different collaborative projects where an immanent and reflexive language for attesting to the qualities and conditions of listening emerges in and through a language-based practice that is itself imbued with a listening attitude — one that involves listening to oneself, listening to others, listening for emergent wor(l)ds. The textual extracts have been generated largely through a practice of conversation and/or the experimental reading of conversational transcripts within the following projects: I – “Dorsal Practices” is an artistic research collaboration with Katrina Brown for exploring how a back-oriented awareness and attitude might shape and inform our embodied, affective and relational experience of being-in-the-world; II — “thinking aesthetic thinking through aesthetic research practices” is an artistic research project involving Alex Arteaga, Emma Cocker, Nicole Wendel (with Sabine Zahn in the first phase) that focuses on ways in which aesthetic research practices enable and realise a specific form of thinking: aesthetic thinking; III — “The Appearance of the More” is an artistic research collaboration with Nicole Wendel for bringing-into-relation the unfolding, embodied processes of drawing and languaging as resonating fields of perception and cooperation.
