How We Hear Now is a participatory, collective artwork presented 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, as humans moved into isolation, nonhuman ecologies have grown noticeably more audible during the COVID–19 pandemic’s shelter-in-place orders. Each participant constructed a sound recording of their environment on April 22, 2020, the fiftieth anniversary Earth Day, and provided a description of ecological or cultural factors. The audio recordings and environmental descriptions are compiled into a layered stream of sound and text, a visual and aural landscape of ecological observations collected during this unique time. The individual contributions meld together with a visualization of seismic data collected on April 22, representing the concurrent geological sound occurring at a planetary scale. The call for participation was re-issued for Earth Day 2021, expanding the artwork to include additional contributors.
How We Hear Now emerged in a space called “in lieu of” – in lieu of a physical gathering of people, how can human understandings of the environment be shared in a time of isolation. Where Virginia Woolf’s notion of ‘street haunting’ (1930, essay of the same name) describes the stepping outside from the interiority of the home into the roiling anonymity and connectivity of the modern city, the reality of the pandemic opens a range of new sensory aspects towards the environment. Encouraging reflections on the materiality of environmental experience, this project acts as a transmitter collecting and sharing these through observation, sound, and text.
Each iteration of How We Hear Now is unique. The sequence and overlap of individual contributions varies with each instance of the artwork, producing new patterns, rhythms, experiences, and unanticipated connections between the individual recordings and voices. This video above contains 45 minutes of How We Hear Now, providing a glimpse of the collective voice that emerges.
How We Hear Now is a collaborative exercise in ecological thought and emotional response. It offers an open-ended field of text, recording and visual patterns to create an immersion space of reading and listening. With no beginning, end, or prescribed sequence, it simply asks to consider how do we hear the world now? These different narratives of environmental experience from the same day offer viewers/listeners a prompt to consider their sense of environmental presence and its complex nature. On another level, the project is an open framework that can be transformed for future iterations, to different circumstances, and still open for additional participatory input.
From June 25 to July 10, 2021, How We Hear Now was installed at the San Francisco Ferry Building.
Project team: Leslie Carol Roberts, Adam Marcus, Chris Falliers, Patrick Monte, Vishnu Balunsat, Margot Becker
Creative Direction, Coding, and Design: Patrick Monte
Technical Assistant, Ferry Building Installation: Samuel Higgwe
Contributors: Erik Adigard, Rob Bailey, Amy Balkin, Vishnu Balunsat, Michelle Boyd, Rita Bullwinkel, Civyiu Kkliu / Robert Machado, Kevin Claiborne, William Cook, Ellora Daley, Alicia Escott, Christopher Falliers, Isha Fathmath, Garth Fry, Guillermo Galindo (aka gal*in_dog), Edith Garcia, David Gross, Lindsay Haddix, Shy Pacheco Hamilton, Gregory W. Hurcomb, Evan Jones, Wioleta Kaminska, Adam Marcus, Christie McGee, Sarah Meftah, Marc Northstar, Denise Newman, Helen-Maria Nugent, Catie Newell, Colin Priest, Kaus Raghukumar, Leslie Carol Roberts, Sharan Saboji, Alex Schofield, Shobha Shivakumar, Ross Simonini, Allison Smith, Ignacio Valero, Michael Wertz
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