Audition #4 – Listening bodies, listening ecologies

Amias Hanley and Patrick Hase presenting Sonic Entanglements: Bodies of the Valley, SUNKLAND, and SUNKLAND.XYZ

Convener: Ben Byrne

Fri, Nov 4, 6pm for a 6:20pm sharp start – FREE by RSVP

RMIT Melbourne City campus. BUILDING 12, 394 - 412 Swanston Street.

To gain access to Black Box Theatre please meet outside Little Bang Cafe or RMIT Tram stop (eastern side) on Swanston street.

Accessible entry details via RMIT City Campus mobility map

Audition #4 will feature Amias Hanley and Patrick Hase presenting a body of work that enfolds listening bodies and ecologies. Hanley will present their audio works Sonic Entanglements: Bodies of the Valley (2018) and SUNKLAND (2021), using the Black Box’s 24.2 spatial audio system. Alongside this, Patrick Hase will lead a live Let’s Play of the pair’s collaborative interactive audio work SUNKLAND.XYZ (2021).

Amias Hanley is an artist currently living on Wurundjeri Country in Melbourne, Australia. Their practice uses sound and media to explore relations among queer ecologies, attunement, situatedness and speculative practices. Engaging forms of performance, installation and collaboration, Amias' work is interested in audition as an affective practice and the possibilities of sound and technology to support and alter the sonic expressions of humans and more-than-humans.

Patrick Hase is an artist and researcher focused on digital interaction design in audio-visual browser based projects. His practice often leads to the construction of playful and collaborative digital interfaces grounded through previous experiences working in music production & performance, 3D animation and VR.

Sonic Entanglements: Bodies of the Valley (2018)

Sonic Entanglements: Bodies of the Valley is a practice-based creative research project that uses the theoretical framework of queer ecologies and an iterative audio recording/playback methodology to problematise the inside-outside distinction between listening-hearing and self-environment.

The research practice is inspired by Alvin Lucier’s I am Sitting in a Room (1981), though my research is conducted in the Brunswick Valley, known as Moonee Moonee or Moonee Ponds Creek, Victoria, Australia. This work aims to enact an embodied listening experience that stimulates an awareness of the interdependence and multiple temporalities of bodies and environments.

The intention of the project is to compel a listener to critically consider how an awareness of the permeability of boundaries between bodies can challenge us to rethink the anthropocentric concept of “Nature”— to consider humans and technology, not merely in relation to the environment, but rather as part of the environment.

SUNKLAND (2021)

SUNKLAND imagines a speculative swampland wherein multiple species, forms and forces are transforming through a series of open-ended vocal exchanges. This work is a sonic fabulation that is informed by a pre-colonised Carrum Carrum Swamp, settler governance of watercourses and the drainage of wetlands in the area where McClelland Sculpture Park exists, Bunurong Country. The swampland is a slice of tangled time—it carries both remnants of the past and feelings of futurity, which coalesce in a kind of nonlinear discontinuous present.

This work draws on queer perspectives of non-biological kin and the sonic body as a site of becoming and ambiguity. Exploring the poetics of care and exchange through themes of hybridity and heritage, the work invites listeners to imagine the ways that kinship might be felt through embodying the expressions of another species or form—questioning, how might these events allow for listening to the worlds of others in ways that matter?

This work was originally composed for 24.2 channels by Amias Hanley and first exhibited at Liquid Architecture’s Unheard Relations, as part of McClelland Sculpture Park and Gallery’s Site & Sound: Sonic art as ecological practice 2021.

SUNKLAND.XYZ (2021)

SUNKLAND.XYZ is an experimental web app for being with a multichannel audio composition, first published by Disclaimer journal. The work invites users to move through, explore and respond to the composition of sounds, textures and spatial arrangements, providing navigational agency to engage in nonlinear, repetitious, permeable and static ways.

Patrick will be presenting a live Let's Play of SUNKLAND.XYZ and discussing the adjunctive digital spaces that facilitated its collaborative creation.

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AUDITION is a new event series for sonic research and practice. It is a collaboration between researchers and artists at three RMIT University labs: Sound Art & Auditory Culture (School of Art), Screen and Sound Cultures (School of Media and Communication), and Design & Sonic Practice (School of Design). Programs will take place at RMIT and external venues, each event convened by a different group member.

RMIT University acknowledges the people of the Woi wurrung and Boon wurrung language groups of the eastern Kulin Nation on whose unceded lands we conduct the business of the University. RMIT University respectfully acknowledges their Ancestors and Elders, past and present.