From June 25 to July 10, 2021, the collaborative artwork How We Hear Now was installed for public view at the San Francisco Ferry Building. The artwork was developed by The ECOPOESIS Project, a multi-year initiative led by the Architectural Ecologies Lab and MFA in Writing program at the California College of the Arts. The project was initiated in the early weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic in lieu of the spring 2020 ECOPOESIS symposium/workshop gathering.
How We Hear Now invites participants to engage in audible changes in their environments—to record and transmit how the sounds of both human and nonhuman ecologies may have changed during and after the COVID-19 pandemic’s shelter-in-place orders. This installation of the project includes contributions from both 2020 and 2021; each participant constructed a sound recording of their environment on April 22 (Earth Day) and provided a description of ecological or cultural factors.