Experiments in Aural Attention: Lingering Longer and Listening Away

Experiments in aural attention re-stages three practical experiments from a practice-based PhD in order to question how we are together through listening. Listening’s modus operandi is appropriated as an approach to making. This is reflected in the unfinished nature of the experiments that aim to echo the processual workings of this sense.

Aural attention is not only the subject matter of the exhibition but also the method by which it is explored – actively inviting visitors to experience the aural-as-encountered shaping their own path through aspects of the practices on display.

In This is for you (don’t treat it like a telephone) manmade objects are used in unusual combinations to estrange familiar conversational conditions in an installation that encourages visitors to position and shape their bodies in response to the sounds of others. Listening to water brings meanderings through the countryside of Powys and Ceredigion into the studio space to explore how an aural approach might reveal details of a landscape more often obscured. Stolen voices explores a practice of eavesdropping and how fiction might alter the attention we place on sounds of the everyday.

In this exhibition all three experiments are brought together for the first time to further question how it might be possible to practice aural attention.