Experiments in Aural Attention: Listening Away & Lingering Longer
(2022)
author(s): Rebecca Collins
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
This exposition puts forward ‘lingering longer’ and ‘listening away’ as potential means to remain with non-semantic possibilities, resisting the tendency to know immediately or to classify — to get lost, albeit momentarily in a more messy moment of being. At stake in this investigation is the recognition that our experience of the world, characterized through a depth of engagement, is not limited to how relations operate on the surface. The direction or orientation of our attention, the intensity with which it is applied, and how it weighs on and shapes our experience implies choice and agency.
Experiment I: Aural + Orientation = Aurientation emulates the experience of a fictional gallery-goer who encounters the sound installation, This is for You (Don’t Treat it like a Telephone) (2012). This piece was developed at the advanced centre for performance and scenography studies (a.pass) in Brussels and aims to consider how sound and the voice shape our orientation, when mediated through objects. Experiment in Aural Attention II: Vibrant Practice details the process undergone for creating Listening to Water (2013), a site-specific investigation into ancient well sites located in Powys and Ceredigion, two counties in Mid West Wales. The work, made in collaboration with Jane Lloyd-Francis and Naomi Heath, considers how a turn towards site, via a process of tuning in to the Welsh landscape, can bring attention to overlooked aspects of our environment.
Tracing Rhythm
(last edited: 2025)
author(s): Geir Harald Samuelsen
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Rhythm is everywhere. It is breathing and beating hearts; it is the sound of a drum and the repetitive carved lines in stone done by a prehistoric human being. It is the flickering screen and a million digital processes too small to see. It is engraved in the depth of our minds and bodies. It is remembering.
According to Encyclopedia Britannica, rhythm (Greek rhythmos, derived from rhein, “to flow”) is an ordered alternation of contrasting elements, and according to Roland Barthes both painting and writing started with the same gesture, one which was neither figurative nor semantic, but simply rhythmic.
In this exposition we are approaching rhythm through contemporary artistic and archaeological gestures, starting with some engraved and painted lines drawn by our stone age ancestors in France and South Africa.
The participants are all from the artisitc research project: Matter, Gesture and Soul, which is based at the Art Academy in Bergen.