Practicing Aurality, Affect and Process

Description

By acknowledging the shared environment created by aural relations, my practice marks a shift away from the use of headphones in audio-based artwork, a dominant trend within the field of theatre and performance studies of the past decade. In this presentation, I am concerned with the articulation of process and affect occurring by aurally attending to the making, writing and thinking about contemporary performance practice. Here, I will discuss two projects; the first, Listening to Water is an artistic investigation into sensory connections to the landscape. It seeks to ask: how might listening inform our sense of place? Through walking, writing and field recordings taken at ancient well sites within and around rural Wales, connections between the vibrational quality inherent in both animate and inanimate objects are sensed. The second, Stolen Voices is an ongoing inquiry with rotating collaborators inspired by eavesdropping. The work imagines public spaces as semi-fictional constructions, as if an Agatha Christie novel had shattered over a town and fragments got caught in the local soundscape. Ultimately, by practising aural attention, I aim to make tangible that which might be at work in the production, transmission and mutation of affective tonality. In doing so, I put forward aural attention as a mode of becoming that an audience member might perform by lingering longer, exhausting and expanding the moment of encounter with another person, place or thing.

Period	Jun 2017
Event title	Taking Space: Women in Electronic Music
Event type	Symposium
Location	Durham, United KingdomShow on map