A performative survey of listening, as we managed to find it being used as a tool in different practices, disciplines and communities in North America (music, poetry, film, philosophy, activism…). A set of performances that demonstrate how listening can be used to consider history, language, space, liberty, politics… 

We have been asked to organise a program of events at the 2012 Whitney Biennial.  The information you’ll find here sets out that program.

Often today, listening is reduced to our experience of what we hear: we might call this an aesthetic experience.  We would like to focus on other equally important but often less considered aspects of listening – how we hear, with whom, and how this causes us to think: what you might call the social, political, philosophical or cognitive experience of listening.

And so we’ve undertaken a brief survey of some of the different registers of listening evident to us in North America, as practiced by musicians, artists, filmmakers, activists and philosophers. Each of the performances, talks, investigations, installations or publications you will find in our program concern many things: but each also exemplifies a different mode of listening, made evident by a key informant in our survey - someone from a specific community, illuminating a way of listening in a particular context.

You are hereby invited to consider these modes of listening, how they cause us to think, and how they might engage with our own lives, experiences and situations. 

Key informants in our survey include: Christopher DeLaurenti, Craig Dworkin, Andrea Geyer, The Indivisible or Inadmissable Committee, Brandon LaBelle, Sean Meehan, Christof Migone, Vanessa Place, Eugene Thacker, TEST, Yasunao Tone, Ultra-red (and George Lewis, members of the House| Ballroom scene, Nancy Nevárez, Fred Moten) & Evan Calder Williams. 

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