Listening Collectively: Acoustic Flows

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How do we listen together? How does sound shape our perception of spaces, bodies, communities and public life? And what shared environments can we build from there? We invite artists, researchers, performers, sound practitioners and interdisciplinary thinkers to join LISTENING COLLECTIVELY: ACOUSTIC FLOWS — a three-day Artistic Research Lab taking place at Seestadt Studios Vienna as part of SONIC TERRITORIES Festival 2026. Together we will explore listening as a collective, bodily, material and spatial practice, investigating how sound, resonance and attention move through bodies, environments and communities, shaping relations, perceptions and shared temporalities. The Lab asks how listening can generate academic, artistic and vernacular forms of knowledge and exchange, and how these different practices can flow into one another. WHAT TO EXPECT Shared methods of perception and practice emerge in the context of listening sessions, conversations, somatic exercises, experimental methods and collaborative working formats. This is not a workshop in the traditional sense. It is a collaborative research environment in which all participants contribute their own perspectives, methods and experiences and become co-producers of an open, experimental process. PROGRAMME DAY 1 — LISTENING THROUGH THE BODY On the first day we will give you an overview of the following days as well as possibilities to get to know the place, facilitators and participants. We will also start with our somatic listening practice. Yvo Kaufmann begins with the kidneys as a point of attention, inviting us to explore listening through the body, within ourselves, with others, and in relation to the space around us. Touch may become part of the practice, but it is not required; likewise, voice and the making of sound are optional ways of deepening collective listening and sensing. DAY 2 — LANGUAGE, KNOWLEDGE AND SONIC THINKING On day two, a workshop with Serena Lee will reflect on the technology of words, and the resonances between listening, reading, and writing with the whole body. By unpacking cosmological and cultural assumptions of meaning-making, we will play with language as an embodied practice, making space for articulation and that which escapes it. A participatory morning session with Kristina Pia Hofer will contextualize these practices with theory inputs from contemporary sound studies, and invite participants to activate their academic, artistic and vernacular knowledges about, with and through sonic thinking. DAY 3 — RADIO, ECOLOGY AND SPECULATIVE RESEARCH On the final day, Kate Donovan's session proposes a de-centralised radio model in order to undo certain binaries of transmitter–receiver (enunciator–listener). It creates space for listening to intersect with ecological thinking, the more-than-human, and the trans-scalar. Building on that, Denise Sumi will offer a live audio performance combining sonic exploration with theoretical discourse. This approach to theory offers unconventional methods of bridging the gap between academia and embodied knowledge through more speculative research.

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