“What You Listen To” an in-person performance based on my doctoral research, on the intensity of wireless density in the Smart Cities of the near future. When every object, item of clothing of the furniture is online, watching and recording us, the sheer density of these eyes and ears will constitute a new kind of noise pollution.
Part of my research practice: “New Ears, For New Noise”, interrogating Smart Cities as a new kind of noise pollution, in which humans become the object. An embodied listening exercise and performance took place at the School of Machines, Berlin, July 5th 2025.
Q: Smart City?
Smart Cities are urban centres where every object from clothing, accessories, the furniture, vehicle and home furnishings and even the architecture in external and internal public and private spaces is embedded with trillions of sensors observing, recording, communicating, storing and predicting information about our actions – day and night.
This sonic storytelling piece explores the theory that the artwork takes place in the body of the audience, just as Jean Epstein felt that cinema did when cinema’s silent era ended and the “talkies” began. “What You Listen To” progresses from there to question how contemporary arts are primarily visually led, and foregrounds instead aurality as a means to imagining and therefore experiencing these city futures.
How to grasp phenomenology?
At the start of 2025, Artnet asked several curators what they hoped for in the coming year. “An end to the immersive art work” answered one. The phenomenological experience is the antidote to this, placing the audience at the centre of the work not inside the work, but the work inside of them, as it takes place within the body-collective, experienced from each own unique perspective. A branch of performance, affect and philosophy studies this.
“What You Listen To” is a dramatised, aurally-led narrative on the oppression of technocracy. Sound here is a means of self-knowledge, of resistance to future meshes of surveillance embedded in Smart convenient automation. Drawing on my study in both central India and the Himalaya, and my doctoral research at the Centre for Research into Sound Art Practice, (CRiSAP) the piece plays out in the auditorium of the mind. My term developed for this place of internal and aural auditioning is “The imaginorium“.
This phenomenological performance piece is scored by myself, with live spoken word and digitally produced with the support of #LeSon7, a roaming, bodyless sound art exhibition which commissioned part of the sonics used in this performance, for the touring sound arts arts show under the same name “Le Son 7” (NYC, Paris, Buenos Aires and more). By drawing on previous immersive sound pieces made with Christopher John Weaver in our joint practice as Bradley-Weaver, “What You Listen To” is an iteration, seeking to position the listener at the heart of the experience and therefore the question, as well as the solution. This was the first performance directly about my PhD topic in my 5 years of doctoral research, but it was born out of a performance lecture I gave at Savvy Contemporary, Berlin in 2021 and another at Edinburgh international Festival, 2024.
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