a conclusion of questions.



Sweet, beautiful vibrations exist for my touch, even though
they travel through other substances than air to reach me.
So I imagine sweet, delightful sounds, and the artistic
arrangement of them which is called music, and I remember
that they travel through the air to the ear, conveying impressions
somewhat like mine. I also know what tones are, since they are
perceptible tactually in a voice.(1)


Helen Keller’s writings on her perception of the world deepen my sensitivity to how translations can take shape. Keller was an author and activist who had lost her hearing and sight before she was two years old. Her acute tenderness towards the world is the kind of attention I long for when I speak of listening. There is simply more to listening than hearing. Like the way we listen to a poem with our whole self as we read words that sting, silently. If we let it, listening is being—an undivided body, leaning in, and entering into an exchange with what is around us,      suspended expectations. What is around us changes us, and we change it. 


Sound artist Pauline Oliveros describes the gesture of deep listening as listening in every possible way to everything possible to hear, no matter what you are doing. How do we take this prompt further by translating this kind of attention towards the systems we are a part of, and how do we do so sustainably? Playfully, even?


Systems in power often compartmentalize life, enclosing boundaries like a closed circuit. We coerce our bodies and their knowings to knot and twist       and take the fixed shape of someone else’s plan. We are only at the beginning of a radical restrategizing of systems with a profound call to reach for new ways of being together.

To disrupt our failing systems, I’m convinced we must listen and translate them from closed circuits into living systems, like the bodies we come from. Systems that move away from external goals set by a select few, and closer to systems that listen, internally, to themselves and for themselves.

    reach (v) 1. move forward or upward in order to touch; also in a metaphorical sense.
                   2. to gain with effort


How do we breathe malleability into systems?
Might listening be our collective reach?                    

                                                                    How can we listen each other to speech?(2)


Addressing systems in art spaces draws them out of the rigid places we know. Too often when something becomes familiar, or banal, we stop listening. We stop reaching. We are familiar with the rigidity of goals, neglecting life’s needs along the way. We are familiar with heaving ourselves forward at all costs as a means to an external end. So, what happens when we liberate the familiarity of systems, of grids, of targets—  to practice listening out for them and softening their familiar boundaries, together? Can we move towards understanding systems as transformation?


Transformation does not require forward movement. Like a feedback loop, like a living threshold, transformation is rooted in attunement— a living system that serves itself, rather than an external goal. To be sure,  the progress made within such a system can only be measured by those within the system.


We live in a dearth of sensory data, keeping our attention on external goals. A call to listening internally— precisely without a fated end goal for our listening—  is to both cherish and engage with sensory data. Might someone who moves through the world in their listening stabilize them more abundantly in this world?                                                       Following a lineage of performance artists who worked with chance operations, I use performance as a container for this kind of hyper awareness among everyone in the room. Being witnessed in this way is transformative. It’s not scripted or rehearsed, but left open to engage in a complete presence that only performance can offer. I believe these practices of co-creating in real time continue to be a potent strategy for listening to and for one another and suspending expectations together.


I make work under the assumption that the art of listening, that which asks us to engage with possibility, is an art of leaning into uncertainty with the certainty that it will change us. 


    This desire to neglect the known and the preference towards the unknown and the incomplete is not a formal conceit, a stylistic fancy, but a serious response to the failings of a complete and reasonable world.(3)