Water Songs: An artist’s talk discussing “Documenting the Imperceptible”
Proposal Type
Individual Talk
Location
Hypertexts & Fictions
Start Date
July 2026
End Date
July 2026
Abstract
Water Songs: An artist’s talk discussing “Documenting the Imperceptible” https://scalar.rula.info/water-songs-documenting-the-imperceptible/index
“Listening is always listening with: with other people; with ghosts, deities, or other spirits; with animals, trees, and plants; with everyday objects; and with acoustic spaces. In asking how other people listen as part of ethnographic research, we necessarily listen with others, moving away from a solitary, agentive human listener as sound resonates across bodies and buildings.” (Peterson and Brennan, 2020, p. 372)
In this talk we will discuss the creation of our exhibition of sound documentation experiments with thinking beyond human perception. We will discuss the origins of the idea, starting with John Berger, “Seeing comes before words” but in a world saturated with imagery, we ask: what if we were to privilege sound? Along with seeing, and invoking of our senses before language, at the moment, we show how what is required is more listening. With Nancy, we ask, “What secret is at stake when one truly listens, that is, when one tries to capture or surprise the sonority rather than the message”(5). We will explain how as storytelling and documentarians we have been asking what can listening in on our environment effect at a micro level, finding ways to tap into sounds and sights– stories – beyond ordinary human perception, and beyond the sensory hegemonies of modern Western visual culture. What can this peculiar listening tell us about climate and environmental changes that have already impacted our immediate environments through devastating fires and floods? As Ritts suggests, sound can “show through a historically attentive sensibility how sound’s transitory natures can unfold the deep structuration and entanglements of the human and natural world” (Ritts, 2024, p. 5). Can we re-sensitize ourselves to our environments on a micro-level, find our relationality with the non-human, beyond human?
We will explain how we chose to create our project using various technologies such as ecoutic, contact, and aquatic microphones to listen in on the stories that tree trunks, bark and moss, water, snow, ice, dirt and stones have to tell us. We will describe the sources of inspiration, mainly a belief that by making the imperceptible perceivable, humans can broaden their appreciation and understanding of their environments and attune themselves differently vis-a-vis the ecologies of complex organisms and the vibrations of non-human and non-living natural matter: “Listening is central to an anthropogenic sensorium that shifts away from human exceptionalism.” (Peterson and Brennan, 2020, p. 371). By learning how to listen and see differently, we propose this as a first step toward developing a lexicon of understanding that exists outside of but alongside human language in order to address the climate crisis by conceiving of the world differently. Our project shows the small but not insignificant ways we can modify our relationship with the natural environment by using other senses to perceive the livingness – aliveness – of everything around us. The project we will discuss (and has been proposed as an exhibition piece for ELO 2026) consists of an archive of gathered sound, accompanied by some microscopic observations, and tracings of various elements under varying environmental conditions, the result of which is an unusual acoustic story about the world around us that uses neither words nor conventional narrative structures: “Listening to the uncertainty of climate change may also involve attuning and attending to atmospheric conditions, or to silence itself” (Peterson and Brennan, 2020, p. 373).
Works cited:
Nancy, Jean-Luc, et al. Listening. 1. ed., [Nachdr.], Fordham University Press, 2009.
Peterson, Marina L., and Vicki L. Brennan. “A Sonic Ethnography.” Resonance, vol. 1, no. 4, Dec. 2020, pp. 371–75. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.1525/res.2020.1.4.371.
Ritts, Max. A Resonant Ecology. 1st ed, Duke University Press, 2024. Sign, Storage, Transmission Series.
Water Songs: An artist’s talk discussing “Documenting the Imperceptible”
Hypertexts & Fictions
Water Songs: An artist’s talk discussing “Documenting the Imperceptible” https://scalar.rula.info/water-songs-documenting-the-imperceptible/index
“Listening is always listening with: with other people; with ghosts, deities, or other spirits; with animals, trees, and plants; with everyday objects; and with acoustic spaces. In asking how other people listen as part of ethnographic research, we necessarily listen with others, moving away from a solitary, agentive human listener as sound resonates across bodies and buildings.” (Peterson and Brennan, 2020, p. 372)
In this talk we will discuss the creation of our exhibition of sound documentation experiments with thinking beyond human perception. We will discuss the origins of the idea, starting with John Berger, “Seeing comes before words” but in a world saturated with imagery, we ask: what if we were to privilege sound? Along with seeing, and invoking of our senses before language, at the moment, we show how what is required is more listening. With Nancy, we ask, “What secret is at stake when one truly listens, that is, when one tries to capture or surprise the sonority rather than the message”(5). We will explain how as storytelling and documentarians we have been asking what can listening in on our environment effect at a micro level, finding ways to tap into sounds and sights– stories – beyond ordinary human perception, and beyond the sensory hegemonies of modern Western visual culture. What can this peculiar listening tell us about climate and environmental changes that have already impacted our immediate environments through devastating fires and floods? As Ritts suggests, sound can “show through a historically attentive sensibility how sound’s transitory natures can unfold the deep structuration and entanglements of the human and natural world” (Ritts, 2024, p. 5). Can we re-sensitize ourselves to our environments on a micro-level, find our relationality with the non-human, beyond human?
We will explain how we chose to create our project using various technologies such as ecoutic, contact, and aquatic microphones to listen in on the stories that tree trunks, bark and moss, water, snow, ice, dirt and stones have to tell us. We will describe the sources of inspiration, mainly a belief that by making the imperceptible perceivable, humans can broaden their appreciation and understanding of their environments and attune themselves differently vis-a-vis the ecologies of complex organisms and the vibrations of non-human and non-living natural matter: “Listening is central to an anthropogenic sensorium that shifts away from human exceptionalism.” (Peterson and Brennan, 2020, p. 371). By learning how to listen and see differently, we propose this as a first step toward developing a lexicon of understanding that exists outside of but alongside human language in order to address the climate crisis by conceiving of the world differently. Our project shows the small but not insignificant ways we can modify our relationship with the natural environment by using other senses to perceive the livingness – aliveness – of everything around us. The project we will discuss (and has been proposed as an exhibition piece for ELO 2026) consists of an archive of gathered sound, accompanied by some microscopic observations, and tracings of various elements under varying environmental conditions, the result of which is an unusual acoustic story about the world around us that uses neither words nor conventional narrative structures: “Listening to the uncertainty of climate change may also involve attuning and attending to atmospheric conditions, or to silence itself” (Peterson and Brennan, 2020, p. 373).
Works cited:
Nancy, Jean-Luc, et al. Listening. 1. ed., [Nachdr.], Fordham University Press, 2009.
Peterson, Marina L., and Vicki L. Brennan. “A Sonic Ethnography.” Resonance, vol. 1, no. 4, Dec. 2020, pp. 371–75. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.1525/res.2020.1.4.371.
Ritts, Max. A Resonant Ecology. 1st ed, Duke University Press, 2024. Sign, Storage, Transmission Series.
Bio
Professor Tschofen joined Toronto Metropolitan University’s Department of English in 1999 after teaching at Athabasca University and the University of Alberta. Her publications in the areas of new media, visual culture, Canadian studies, and globalization include textbooks on film and literature, literature and multimedia, and literary hypertext as well as edited collections of essays on Canadian writers and filmmaker Atom Egoyan.
Her current research has two branches. One theorizes the relationship between art and philosophy. Asking about the conditions under which an artwork can be an “act of theory,” she writes on Gertrude Stein, digital installation art, experimental cinema, and ekphrastic poetry.
Her recent work with the Decameron Collective, a group of nine interdisciplinary scholar-creators from across Canada, emerged from a practice of collaborative research co-creation anchored in care ethics. Investigations of past and present moments experiment with creative digital humanities and research creation methodologies. Four projects that can be understood as both i-docs and e-lit, two web-based, one designed for VR, and one in AR, have been exhibited to date.
Her experimental interactive work Happenings: A Tragico-Lyrical Philosophical Essay was shortlisted for both the Chris Meade Memorial Main Prize and the Social Good Prize in the 2024 New Media Writing Prize (UK), and was selected runner up for the Robert Coover Award for a Work of Electronic Literature (2025). Her documentary Aquaphoria (before the waters rise), was awarded best environmental documentary of the Montreal Women Film Festival 2025, and best environmental documentary at the Toronto Independent Film Festival of Cift.
With Jolene Armstrong, she has an installation Fire and Water (2025), an interactive documentary called Solastalgia (2025), and a body of new sound works that cross sculptural forms with field sound recording. Their creative practice together is richly archival, and fuses poetry, algorithmic generation, digital photography, animation, sound art, with the histories of manuscript culture and book making.
Jolene is currently Chair of the Centre for Humanities and Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and English at Athabasca University. having also taught at the University of Alberta and MacEwan university prior to her faculty appointment in 2006. She is a member of the Decameron Collective, whose past work with the Collective includes Decameron 2.0, Memory Eternal, Deformances Unlinked (Spelarne), and Metamorphoses (2025) which have exhibited internationally in Italy, Portugal, Estonia, Japan, the United States, and Canada. As a multimedia artist, Armstrong's creative and translated work has appeared in Galaxy Brain, Peatsmoke Journal, DeLuge Literary Journal, MacroMicrocosm (Folk Issue), Wildroof Journal, Beyond Words Literary Magazine (Issue 22, 25, 26, 28), The Hunger Mountain Review, The Society for Misfit Stories, The Silk Road Review, and The Antonym. She is particularly interested in the intersection of art and literature and the potential that immersive environments present as storytelling mediums. As part of a daily creative practice, she assembles in images and words the shimmering, sometimes terrifying, ephemeral beauty that marks our collective existence on this blue planet. She lives and works in Amiskwaciy-Wâskahikan, treaty 6 territory (Edmonton) with her two kids and a menagerie of weird pets and projects strewn about her house. www.jolenearmstrong.ca
In Collaboration with Hendrick de Haan, Jolene created Slava Ukraini, a virtual realty piece that is a meditation on the disruption to Ukrainian culture and sovereignty caused by the 2022 full scale Russian invasion. In this VR experience, traditional embroidery is streamed as the visual focus, while spatialized recordings of battle threaten to disrupt this ancient folk tradition, itself a form of cultural memory and storytelling. Slava Ukraini has been exhibited at ICIDS in Colombia; was also invited to exhibit at the Tokyo International Short Film Festival in June of 2025, and was awarded a monthly (March) prize for best VR work by Bridge Fest and Runner up for best VR for 2025, as well as inclusion in their yearly film festival (Vancouver, virtual, December 2025); exhibited at Roma Short Film Festival; exhibited at the Bangkok Movie awards and won best VR at the Bangkok Movie Awards, exhibited at FIVARS 2025, Toronto. It was longlisted for the New Media Writing Prize, Opening Up category, 2024.
With Monique Tschofen, she created the installation Fire and Water (2025), as well as an interactive documentary called Solastalgia (2025), and a body of new sound works tentatively entitled "Water Songs" that is comprised of experimental field sound recording of inanimate objects. Their collaborative creative work combines archival and memory work, creative writing, and blue humanities research with multimedia documentation, drawing upon historic work, as well as book making culture.