Unsoundwalking or, Extra-human hearing
Listening otherwise takes us beyond the self and out into the groundlessness and ambiguity of the radical alterity of the other (Lipari 2009: 54).
The practice and discourse of everyday listening (government consultations, surveys, media, therapeutics, classroom discipline and so on) invariably privileges the human, and is often framed narrowly as the comprehension of spoken language. The pre-conscious affects of sound are excluded, producing a deafness towards the myriad ways in which other kinds of bodies – animals, plants, technologies, buildings, materials – respond to vibration.
It becomes important therefore, to develop an ‘extra-human hearing’ strategy as part of an overall response. ‘Extra-human’ refers to going beyond human hubris and into other agencies and life forms including the supernatural and alien. Speculative, flawed and imaginative by nature, this strand of the residency hopes to build a set of creative and critical scenarios through ‘Unsoundwalking’, a method that endeavours to perform a listening out of the human and extra-human, mechanical and organic, architectural and environmental.
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