CO_128_F2601

1. Individual reflection

1–2 minutes to write down answers before speaking.

Prompt:

Which form of listening from the presentation stayed with you most: survival, evidence, power, intimacy, body, environment, or collective system? Why?

2. From references to experience

Where do you experience this kind of listening in real life?

Examples:

• listening to old family recordings
• waiting on a phone call
• overhearing in public space
• being monitored
• listening through headphones in the city
• listening to silence
• listening to someone in distress
• listening to machines, systems, or data

This prevents the conversation from staying only about art references.

3. Ethics

Presentation includes surveillance, hidden messages, hotlines, intimacy, and care.

1) When does listening become care, and when does it become intrusion?.
2) Who has permission to listen? Who benefits from listening? Who is exposed?

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4. Form

Possible project development.

If we had to design a listening experience, should it be private, collective, public, intimate, uncomfortable, playful, or investigative?

5. Project directions

What should the listener do?

Possible answers:

• decode something
• wait
• follow a voice
• hear something hidden
• contribute their own voice
• move through a space
• listen to another person
• listen to their own body
• become aware they are being listened to

Turns the topic into an interaction design problem.

Discussion questions

Conceptual questions

1. Is listening an action, a skill, or a responsibility?
2. Can listening happen without sound?
3. What is the difference between hearing and listening?
4. Can silence be a form of communication?
5. Can listening be violent?

Ethical questions

1. When does listening become surveillance?
2. Is hidden listening ever acceptable?
3. What happens when a voice is recorded, archived, or replayed later?
4. Who is allowed to listen to whom?
5. Can a machine listen empathetically?

Project questions

1. What kind of listener do we want to create: detective, witness, companion, performer, intruder, caretaker?
2. Should the audience listen alone or together?
3. Should the work reveal something hidden, or create a shared moment?
4. What role should the voice have?
5. What would make someone listen more carefully?

Exercise

“Design a listening situation”

Complete this sentence:

A person enters a situation where they can only understand what is happening by listening to **____.**

• a voice from the past
• a stranger on the phone
• a room
• a city
• their own body
• a machine
• a group of people
• an archive
• someone who is not present
• something hidden in noise

Suggested final discussion slide

Open questions

• What kind of listening are we most interested in?
• Who is listening, and who is being listened to?
• Is the listener caring, decoding, spying, remembering, or composing?
• Should the experience be intimate, public, collective, or hidden?
• What should change in the listener after the experience?

That final question is probably the strongest one:

What should change in the listener after they listen?