Aartje (Aartje Hulstein)
Email: aartje@glanville.co.uk
Workshop or performance proposal:
As a physiotherapist I learned to listen to other people’s body and their movement by touch, looking and sensing.
This, over the years, has developed into a conversational approach, not knowing the answer, but exploring possibilities through mutual feed back on the experience, after careful and open listening.
In this workshop I would like to share my experience with you and explore touch and movement as a way to listen to each other.
Andrew_O (Andrew Owen Brightman)
Email: aobbright@gmail.com
Workshop or performance proposal:
Performance (15 min. followed by discussion) – “Listening with the Sensing Body” – a group improvisational performance at the interface of two movement-based listening practices: Contact Improvisation and Contemplative/Authentic Movement. These two practices of ‘deep listening’ will be integrated into one movement performance to ask the question of the performers and the audience: “Where are you listening and does it matter?” ‘Listening to what we are listening to’ (i.e. ‘noticing what we are noticing’) can be the beginning of a deeper, more embodied experience of the investigation of listening. In this performance improvisors will be continuously connecting, physically and energetically, without words, in order to find the emergent dance being created in the moment. This dance will range from the highly physical lifting of other bodies into space to the sensuous, small movements of intimate interactions. The practice of ‘witnessing’ (from Authentic Movement) will add another layer of interaction and listening to this creative process. Improvisers will have the option at any time to step away from the movement and give attention to all that is happening in the space. The ‘witnesses’ will ‘listen’ to the emerging dance, in its environment, with their whole being, from a slightly distanced and altered perceptive space. The ‘witness’ position is intermediate to the position of ‘audience’ in that the ‘witness’ can re-enter the dance at any time. This added layer of witnessing provides an opportunity, for the audience as well as the improvisors, to focus attention on how this ‘telescoping’ level of awareness alters participation in the emerging dance and how it alters the dance itself. A question for both then becomes, how does my listening to and experiencing of this dance alter its outcome? An occasional overlay of spoken text, apparently unrelated to the emergent dance and yet somehow influencing and influenced by it, will add a third layer of complexity. This layer is intended to further the exploration of how we ‘listen’ with our full range of senses when our ears are actively engaged. The ambient spoken soundscape is intended also to more closely replicate the noise-filled environment in which we often try to listen as we move, witness, and interact with our world.
Workshop (60 min.) – “An Introduction to Contemplative/Authentic Movement as a Practice of Deep Listening” – The practice of Authentic Movement can provide a rich path to original creative insights and to a deeper sense of listening or paying attention. Also known as Contemplative Dance, this simple yet profound movement form involves the interplay of the body and psyche in an expression of active imagination. In this workshop, I will facilitate an experience of moving from the inner impulse; an impulse to be active or to be still, that often arises from ‘listening’ to the knowings and experiences that reside deep in the subconscious of each individual. As a facilitator, I will serve as witness for the group. This role provides a safe space to participate (often with closed eyes) and provides a level of feedback and facilitation of response that is sensitive, non-judgmental, and reflective of the individual’s movement session as experienced from another’s perception. Time will be provided for creative process using journaling, drawing, or other art forms to bring to fuller consciousness the content gathered through this listening practice; i.e. the process of active imagination that occurred during the movement session. All experience levels are welcomed. Bringing a journal or notebook to record or reflect on personal experiences is encouraged. The workshop will be limited to a maximum of 25 participants and will require a room with open floor space for moving around.
boltmwj1 (Mark Johnson)
Email: johnsonmwj1@gmail.com
Website: http://dailyimprovisation.blogspot.com
Workshop or performance proposal:
“Modelling Listening”
This workshop combines a focus on listening with an concrete aim to identify models that might shed deeper light on the nature of listening and communication. The workshop comprises a series of ‘bursts’ of activity where each participant becomes an ‘agent’ acting within a square grid with a set of behaviours and strategies. In the ‘burst’, the behaviours and strategies are played-out. After the burst, a short period of reflection allows participants to consider “is this listening?”. In the light of reflection, behaviours and strategies are evolved and a new burst is conducted. The process repeats throughout the workshop.
It is hoped that by the end of the session a “model of listening” has been sufficiently refined to allow for it to be programmed. If there is time, it may be possible to implement this model using NetLogo before the end of the conference.
chris mann (chris mann)
Email: chrisman@rcn.com
Website: http://www.theuse.info
Workshop or performance proposal:
i’d like to offer a solo voice performance (up to 45 minutes duration (its some 4500 words)) on listening as a subject.
David Cox (David Cox)
Email: djcox@fuse.net
Workshop or performance proposal:
None
elizacorps (elizaBeth Simpson)
Email: ezb@creativeintervention.org
Website: http://www.ucpeopleshistory.org
Workshop or performance proposal:
Imagination and Listening Theatre Laboratory: Incorporating Theatre of the Oppressed, Playback Theatre, and other techniques, we will use prompted, improvisational movement and sound, guided by critical pedagogy, to explore themes related to the experience and interest of the participants, in light of the conference themes. (e.g. when we are not heard, when imagination is lacking or rejected) Outcomes will include experience with somatic learning, and critical pedagogy, increased sense of community, and strategies to address the issues explored. No theater experience is necessary.
AND/OR
Imagination and Listening Story Circle: Story circles are a participatory, egalitarian means to explore and identify emergent wisdom within a group. It is particularly useful for ‘sticky’ or non-linear topics that don’t offer a clear starting point for inquiry. Such topics can be personal or professional in nature. Grounded in personal experience, story circles can be used for learning, sharing/witnessing, research, and as a powerful form of decision making. During this session I propose to use a story circle to explore an question that rises from the conference activities prior to it. (e.g. in a recent workshop on Science and Society, we explored the use of personal affect in professional settings). Outcomes will include increased skill in attention, listening, and recursive learning, as well as increased knowledge and wisdom on the topic we explore.
hletiche (hugo letiche)
Email: h.letiche@uvh.nl
Workshop or performance proposal:
Rhythmanalysis
Listening can be approached from an anthropocentric and phenomenological position. Attention is then centred on what persons hear. The emphasis is rapidly placed on meaning, structure, melody and order, and not on potentia, chaos, noise and vibration. Rhythmanalysis follows via Bachelard (2000) and Lefebvre (2004) on the thoughts of the Brazilian philosopher Pinheiro dos Santos (writing in 1931). The effort is to break with the Platonic tradition of understanding rhythm as the ordered tempo of existence, speech and drama. The assertion is that, not continuous similarity and measured cadence, but quantum vibration and motion, are characteristic of existence. Music and melody are the exception; motion, tension and ‘screech’ are the commonplace. Sound is mostly portrayed at equilibrium – ie as ordered, continuous and harmonic; but “far from equilibrium” energy and vibration is ontologically the foundation of existence. Vibration is a priori — motion and energy is primary. But only a narrow range of humanly perceptible and interpretable vibrations are normally recognized as ‘listenable’. Other intensities and frequencies form rhythms of existence that differ from (only) those of humanly and socially ordered cadence(s). Rhythmanalysis has as its goal the appreciation of vibrations, energies, motions and intensities that are turbulent. Prioritizing the frequencies that are under (human perceptual) control makes existence look ordered, rational and anthropocentric. Openness to the frequencies outside human (social) control is unnerving, but it does acknowledge the quantum reality of matter, existence and process.
Sound and affect (Goodman, 2010) is an unsettling and provocative field of study. The turn to affect in social studies (and especially anthropology) approaches research not from what is under anthropocentric control, but from what strikes and/or moves us (Stewart, 1006, 2007; Clough & Halley, 2007). Rhythm is affect-ive — ie it moves us. The energies, vibrations and momentums of quantum motion make and affect us. But they are not simply ‘hearable’ or reducible to sensemaking. Sound as commanding affect comes from the ‘white noise’ (Serres, 1984,1993), which is0 originatory to all existence.
In this workshop, the effort will be to hear rhythm as experimental sound attempts to. The Italian ‘futurists’ already began to call for ‘noise’ and ontologically significant sound (versus anthropocentric and clichéd ordered sounds) at the beginning of the 20th century. Unsettling and affective noise (Bain, 2003) has been developed into an ‘art form’. But noise as the pulsation and vibration of energy, and not as the rhythm of control, is still today little heard, understood or experienced. In this workshop, steps will be taken to do rhythmanalysis.
jlombardi (jude lombardi)
Email: jlombardi@jlombardi.net
Website: http://www.jlombardi.net
Workshop or performance proposal:
Remembering Ernst.
Autobiography of Gertrude Stein, written by jLombardi as performed by Mark Enslin.
laudrich (Larry Richards)
Email: laudrich@iue.edu
Workshop or performance proposal:
I am willing to do a pre-conference workshop, with others or alone, on difference-making from a cybernetic perspective. It could serve as a tutorial, but would be more participatory than a typical tutorial. It would focus on listening and its circularities as essential to a second-order cybernetic perspective on making a difference in the world. The idea is to have the participants in the workshop experience the concepts first-hand through their interactions.
mcgree (Elizabeth McGregor)
Email: mcgree@gmail.com
Workshop or performance proposal:
I would like to give a presentation on the current theories, in psychology, that pertain to how we learn from one another. This presentation will highlight how we interpret information as listeners and how we create a mental frameworks for conversations, learning, and etc. I will also give some brief insights into my current research about learning from the web.
Olover (Oliver Rizzi Carlson)
Email: oliver8@hotmail.com
Website: http://www.thecultureofpeace.org
Workshop or performance proposal:
I would like to offer a workshop on peacebernetics, related to my interest stated above. I understand correctly that today (May 10) is not the final deadline for workshop proposals? Thank you!
Paulineo (Pauline Oliveros)
Email: paulineo@deeplistening.org
Website: http://paulineoliveros.us
Workshop or performance proposal:
i will facilitate a performance of my Tuning Meditation around the swimming pool. I will also speak at the dinner on the subject of Deep Listening.
Phillip Guddemi (Phillip Guddemi)
Email: pguddemi@mac.com
Workshop or performance proposal:
If Nora Bateson is also attending, I would consider joining with her in a showing of her film or other performance or workshop.
pmlewin (Philip Lewin)
Email: pmlewin@yahoo.com
Workshop or performance proposal:
A proposal for a workshop on the state of contemporary education
Both the cure and the disease of the contemporary classroom, if not of the culture more generally, is arguably the nexus of phenomena centering around electronic technologies and the internet. Even to begin to name the manifestations of this reality is to grow weary — smart phones linked to the social media of Internet 2.0, Ipads, computer classrooms, scanners, digital cameras, laptops, academic databases, fansites, blogs, Powerpoint presentations, Facebook — so familiar and pervasive, so endlessly recreative and mutually reinforcing, has this domain become — and, I would add, so recent, no more than 15 years old at its limits, yet old enough that the generation of students currently in the classroom has never known a world that was not electronically saturated.
I would propose holding a conversation about the nature of the kind of education that is appropriate for this time and place. Obviously, any inquiry into education raises issues that touch on virtually every aspect of society and culture. I would hope that an engagement over this question that involved cyberneticians of a variety of ages, experiences, and backgrounds could be fruitful, not so much in terms of providing a solution to the problematic that I outline, but in terms of raising considerations that each of us alone may not fully appreciate.
My opening gambit is that traditional liberal arts education makes sense only in the context of the worldview of the modern, and thus is no longer appropriate within the increasing hegemony of the digital postmodern. I would be eager to listen to the variety of alternative perspectives that those who are also concerned with the nature of contemporary education might offer.
ranulph (Ranulph Glanville)
Email: ranulph@glanville.co.uk
Workshop or performance proposal:
I can offer a piece of music lasting 20 minutes, which demands acute listening. It needs very high quality audio speakers and amplifiers.
Sabine Breitsameter (Sabine Breitsameter)
Email: sabine.breitsameter@h-da.de
Website: http://www.sonic-media-art.net
Workshop or performance proposal:
Acoustic Ecology Workshop
Listening as a systemic concept: conversation, improvisation and locality
A joint workshop and lecture performance by Sabine Breitsameter, in cooperation with Eric Leonardson and Jay Needham.
The submission will be conveyed by Jay Needham.
spaceimprov (Jay Needham)
Email: jayneedham@neondsl.com
Website: http://www.wavespace.org
Workshop or performance proposal:
Acoustic Ecology Workshop
Listening as a systemic concept: conversation, improvisation, and locality
A joint workshop and lecture performance by Sabine Breitsameter, in collaboration with Eric Leonardson and Jay Needham.
Our workshop will provide a three-tier perspective on a consistently systemic approach to listening, which is Acoustic Ecology. Acoustic Ecology, coined and founded by Canadian sound researcher, pedagogue, and composer R. Murray Schafer, is a scientific, scholarly, as well as aesthetic approach to understanding the prerequisites for and the process of listening. It is interdisciplinary and explores the interrelations and the causal dynamics between the qualities of sonic environments and the auditory perceptional abilities of an individual or a society. The system itself consists of three main factors: listener/sound/environment (cf. Truax), and can be regarded as a regulatory circuit. They exist and behave in a dynamic relationship of mutual influences.
The three tiers represented in the workshop are history, conversation/improvisation, and locality. One of the team members, all leading artists and scholars in the field of Acoustic Ecology, will teach each component of the workshop. The aesthetic as well as the cognitive synthesis of the workshop will be moderated jointly.
The portion dedicated to history will introduce the system of Acoustic Ecology and its relation to cybernetics, and exemplify and discuss it by means of a diverse range of historical perspectives including Weizenbaum’s “Eliza”, the ancient Greek “Ars Sermonis” and the “conversation” as a figure of thought by the German poet Friedrich Hoelderlin.
The portion dedicated to improvisation will be an active forum where we consider improvisation as conversation and vice versa. Presuming that effective listening is not a natural gift but a skill that gains strength through practice, this component of the workshop is intended for non-musicians and musicians alike. This workshop will set a context that engages multiple modes of listening simultaneously, removing dominating forms of communication. Improvisation and conversation are practices that create physical connections for the improviser with objects, sounds, and people. In the workshop, attendees will perform simple exercises that can be executed using one’s own body, voice, language, and readily available objects. We anticipate that the participants will gain a new appreciation for their acoustic environment, or soundscape.
The portion dedicated to locality will consider listening to environments as active and participatory. Departing from the notion that an aural sense of place is governed and negotiated, workshop attendees will learn to listen and contextualize ambience as informed by contemporary art practices.
The over-all workshop explores the diverse set of relations and schisms between content-based factuality and sensuality-based aesthetics. Workshop participants will be introduced to a vocabulary that is specific to sound and listening. The workshop addresses the basic methodological problem of analyzing the process of listening and offers new insights into our relation to locality and our culture’s multiform aesthetic practices.
We would like to request that the workshop be 90 min. in length in order to facilitate team teaching with the three workshop leaders and to include a feedback session at the end of the workshop.
tfischer (Thomas Fischer)
Email: Thomas.Fischer@xjtlu.edu.cn
Workshop or performance proposal:
If this is of interest, I can facilitate a discussion about the past and future of cybernetics during the ASC meeting, using films by the Eames couple.
