“For Sprang, “radical listening” is intentional listening, the type that’s cognizant of historical, social, and cultural contexts. It invites listeners not only to receive information, but to discover how they participate in shaping it.”
Turning Towards a Radical Listening, 2019. Photographs by Paula Court.
Turning Towards a Radical Listening was a 70-minute immersive sound work finalized in 2019 at The Kitchen and Knockdown Center, as public concern around artificial intelligence, algorithmicbias, and automated systems was rapidly entering the mainstream.While spatializing recorded conversations with poets and peers to create a soundscape, thework considered the distance between what was spoken, what was heard, and what wasultimately represented. As language passed through Google’s speech to text algorithms, errors,substitutions, and omissions accumulated, forming a concrete poem that made visible what canbe lost—or revealed—in translation.The work asked what happens to voices when they are translated, categorized, and transcribedthrough technologies that are not neutral, and how racial, gendered, and social biases surfacethrough seemingly ordinary acts of technological mediation.At its center was a question of attention: Can we listen beyond information toward knowledge?What becomes possible when we attend not only to what is communicated, but also to whatdisappears in translation?
“The performance uses voice-to-text software, altered DJ equipment, and the glitch. Theoristsand artists, such as Peter Krapp and Rosa Menkman, among others, view glitches both asfailures—a non-register between materiality and meaning, or break in algorithmic stream—andnodes of potential..”
—Art Papers
Turning Towards a Radical Listening, 2019. Photographs by E Aaron Ross.
James Allister Sprang: Lead Artist
COLLABORATORS
Ryan Seelig: Lighting Design
Bona Lee: Associate Lighting Designer
Chloe Alexandra Thompson: Wave Field Synthesis Engineer
Bobby McElver: Wave Field Synthesis sound processing and spatialization tools
Keenan Hurley: Technical Wave Field Synthesis Assistant
Aon: Music Production Assistant
Matt Romein: Projection Designer
Satchel Spencer: Visual API Programmer
Sandra Garner, Lingua Franca Arts: Line Producer
Wave Field Synthesis sound equipment provided courtesy of Bobby McElver and Andrew Schneider; development and construction of Wave Field Synthesis sound equipment originally made possible by Science Sandbox, an initiative of the Simons Foundation.
Recorded conversations included M. NourbeSe Philip, Rachel Eliza Griffiths, TracieMorris, Safia Elhillo, Arielle M. John, Amber Rose Johnson, Sophia Le Fraga, Meg Onli, Raquel Salas Riviera and Sarah Jane Stoner.
Turning Towards a Radical Listening was developed in part during residencies at Shandaken: Projects, Storm King, New Windsor, NY; The Fountainhead, Miami; Baryshnikov Arts Center, New York, NY and FringeArts, Philadelphia, PA as well as during workshop showings at The Tank, New York, NY.
PRESS AND LINKS
James Allister Sprang Blends Concrete Sculptures and Musique Concrète by Sean J PatrickCarney, Art in America
A breaking from, a breaking with, a breaking out with Laurel V. McLaughlin, Art Papers
Conversation with Tim Griffin