A Nomad’s Guide to Listening

The augmented book project contextualizes streams of thoughts triggered by an itinerant listener’s interaction with various intermingling auditory situations leaving their traces in listening. The sounds of the everyday offer an entryway into a poetic contemplative mood in which a constant traveller of the physical world may indulge involving pre-cognition. Instead of articulating corporeal “things” in the physical space of the world the traveller may prefer to remain detached as an elevated self and engage with the streams of thoughts triggered by the infinite sonic events emanating from the physical world into the domain of a metaphysical mindfulness as an inward and poetic resonance of listening. The intention of the artists’ book project is to explore these mindful sonic states by examining the relationship between various interwoven sound environments or auditory situations and their contemplative, intuitive, poetic and introspective capacities at triggering streams of thoughts in the itinerant listener’s mind, transcending mere epistemic comprehension of the sonic phenomenon. These thought processes, when expressed into textual forms, can render subjectivity and poetics involved with the juxtaposition of physical navigation and their virtual interpretations. The project thus uses information about listener’s navigation between digital and physical boundaries incorporating them into an artistic production. This methodology disrupts the ontological constraints of a sonic perception in a physical space creating an augmented experience wherein the mental/virtual can blend with the material as its extension.

Publications:

2020. The Nomadic Listener. Berlin: Errant Bodies Press (in press).

2015. Auditory (Con)texts: Writing on Sound, Ear │ Wave │ Event, issue 2.

2013. “Auditory (Con)texts: Textualizing the Sonic Phenomena”, paper presented at ‘Literature, Media, Sound‘, Aarhus University, 28-30 November.

2013. Auditory Situations: Notes from Nowhere, Journal of Sonic Studies. Vol. 4. Issue 1 (Special Issue: Sonic Epistemologies).

2012. A Nomad’s Guide to Listening. jərˈmān, June edition, English Department, University of Montana.

Release:

2020. The Nomadic Listener, Gruenrekorder, Frankfurt AM.

Presentation:

Vorspiel, transmediale, Berlin, 2020.

ICCR, Calcutta, 2018.

Q-O2, Brussels, 2017.

Ideas Block, Vilnius, 2017.

Errant Sound, Berlin, 2016.

Performative reading at LiteraturHaus, Copenhagen, 2015.

Other events:

Mellem Bølgerne, installation, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, March 2013.

Fragments and excerpts:

5.

How does waiting sound? Waiting opens up every single object in attention; they blossom like morning flowers, they start to smell of themselves. A paper-weight regains its shape, a coffee-cup maintains its emptiness around the marks of yesterday’s drink; an apple becomes desirable; an optical mouse appears as a brand; the open book becomes a page by itself; the headphone is understood as a split between myself and the surrounding if it is not connected to a microphone. I simply cannot take away my glance from every single thing that prepares itself for its presentation. I wait for the answering machine, and the time unfolds into a relentless string of relatedness between myself and the objects around me; as an extension of practice, I touch myself, and the object-hood of me becomes clearer; the statutory hairs on my hand and the mark of age on the finger-joints; the uncut nails appear as social parasites; and the eagerness of each finger-tip to reach out to the other is recognized as an organizational strategy of hyper-communication. In the situation of the waiting, I don’t hear anything, as a result, I see, cognize, and recognize things lying in the context of me.