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SWS23 2023

Embodied Listening

Alexandra Park, Saint Helen's Road, Hastings, United Kingdom
21 minutes
Free
English

Landscape

Collection · 461 items

sound

Collection · 392 items

psychogeography

Collection · 283 items

history

Collection · 187 items
Sound walk

I started to develop the sound walk during the summer and autumn (2022) by first exploring the landscape as I moved my body along the path of the Tree Walk in Alexandra Park, breathing in the atmosphere and observing the trees within the landscape. I then began collaborating with the composer and multi-instrumentalist Black Astronaut. Once I selected the specific seven trees for the sound walk, we applied a form of ‘entangled listening’ to plants through recording the inner sounds of seven trees using specialist microphones. I researched the forgotten histories of each tree, excluded in colonial botany’s renaming and categorisation of these plants in Victorian times. Through the semi-autobiographical voice-over of Anna Woods, I resurrected these forgotten histories and the associated indigenous ecological practices. The voice-over was also developed through an engagement with critical plant studies in an attempt to convey the vast complexity, agency and intelligence of plants.

During the two accompanying sound walk events (that worked in partnership with the local arts organisation Arts on Prescription), I developed the interactive elements of the sound walk, to enable the participants to have a more reflective and embodied engagement with the more-than-human world. The reflective activities at the end incorporated producing reflective writing and co-created mixed media ‘Tree of Life’ collages.

Embodied Listening

Fair use: Annie Goliath, Black Astronaut, Beth Organ

Credits

Research, Voice-over lines, singing & delivery of accompanying events:
Annie Goliath
Spoken voice-over lines of Anna Woods:
Beth Organ
Recordings of Environmental Sounds & Composer:
Black Astronaut

APA style reference

Goliath, A. (2023). Embodied Listening. walk · listen · create. https://walklistencreate.org/walkingpiece/embodied-listening/

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GPS, geo-poetic system

Geo-poetic system was a term coined by Lucy Frears during locative media art research (published 2017). The basis of geopoetics, a theory and practice developed by Scottish philosopher and poet Kenneth White, is to connect humans to the lines of the earth (White cited in McManus 2007: 183), or ‘what’s out there’ (Ingold 1993; 154; White 2005: 200; White 2006: 9). The contact White describes is often between the human mind and the earth, what he calls ‘landscape-mindscape’ (Legendre 2011: 121). Because of the embodied nature of locative media experiences using a smartphone in landscape for these walking art experiences using gps technologies Frears expanded this notion to being ‘landscape-mindscape-bodyscape’ (2017).

Added by Lucy Frears

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