Jana WinderenEnergy Field, documentary picture,
Greenland, 2007.
Photo: courtesy of the artist

Listening at Depth

When the composer and music theorist Pauline Oliveros wrote her book Deep Listening: A Composer’s Sound Practice (2005), she sought to bring to our attention the symbiotic relationship between sound and its surroundings. “As you listen, the particles of sound decide to be heard,”¹⁹ 19 - Pauline Oliveros, Deep Listening: A Composer’s Sound Practice (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005), 40. as she poetically put it. She defined “deep listening” as the heightened state of awareness that connects to all there is — the act of listening to more than one reality simultaneously.²⁰ 20 - Oliveros, Deep Listening, 30.

In 2021, the Brisbane-based artist Taloi Havini (Nakas Tribe, Hakö people) was commissioned by the TBA21 — Academy, a contemporary art organization and ocean-focused research centre, to create an installation based on her experience aboard a research vessel called RV Falkor, as part of the Schmidt Ocean Institute’s Artist-at-Sea program. Havini joined this scientific expedition, which was mapping the Great Barrier Reef off the Australian coast with state-of-the-art sonar technology. The resulting artwork, Answer to the Call (2021), was part of Havini’s exhibition The Soul Expanding Ocean #1 at Open Space, TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary’s venue in Venice.