Our latest Landscape Surgery session gave space for reflection and discussion of the recent GeoHumanities Summer School, organised around the theme of ‘Listening: Field, Voice, Body’.
The summer school was a week-long residency to Bude in Cornwall during July 2019, around the site of a GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters) listening station, where participants explored listening as an approach to research across a range of disciplines and perspectives.
The summer school was the culmination of a two-year programme funded by a TECHNE Conflux grant of £10,000, and was co-organised by Royal Holloway geographers Dr. Sofie Narbed, Dr. Cecilie Sachs-Olsen and Dr. Sasha Engelmann, alongside Dr. Mark Peter Wright and Prof. Angus Carlyle, sound artists from the University of the Arts London.
The programme began in September 2018 with a workshop held at the Chisenhale Dance Studio in East London, where participants took part in a number of choreographic experiments involving both embodied exercises and a range of sensing technologies, situated in different ‘stations’ in the studio.
Since the opening workshop, the conflux has involved a series of group meetings, attended by 13 students and 18 staff members in total. These seminars helped to establish three interweaving strands of interest:
Voice – understanding listening and responding as a physical practice; recognising the affective, political, more-than-human and haunting qualities of various types of voices.
Field – understanding listening as an extension and amplification of research into the world, as well as a series of embodied practices and events.
Body – understanding listening as a process of attunement, with heightened attention to movement, distance, stillness and proximity through the body.
The site of the summer school at Bude connected with these themes through its long history of listening in the form of surveillance. An internal NSA (National Security Agency) newsletter leaked by Edward Snowden revealed that surveillance of satellite communications has been taking place at Bude, and its sister sites in the US, since the 1960s.
For participants in the programme, thinking about ideas and practices of listening at this site raised three main questions:
How do we listen if we’re already being listened to?
What do we ‘take’ by listening?
What are the ethics of recording?
The film
The week-long trip to Bude was documented in the form of a film by MA Cultural Geography graduate Matthew Phillips. Matthew created a cut of this film specifically to be screened in Landscape Surgery, which was followed by some words from him on what his aims were and the challenges he faced.
Matthew explained that his MA dissertation was researching the topic of ethnographic films, and through his practice he was exploring the possibilities of occupying a middle ground between the observational and participatory aspects of ethnography. In this way, his film attempted to encapsulate the events of the Summer School both from his perspective and that of the other participants.
Yet this was not a straightforward endeavour, as Matthew realised that he was actively participating in the very practices of surveillance that the attendees were questioning during the trip. While these concerns could be practically addressed by asking for permission, which gave the other participants the choice to opt out, other ethical issues were harder to negotiate. Access was a particular worry, with constant uncertainty about what he could and couldn’t film in the environs of the listening station. These anxieties also extended to the local residents, who overwhelmingly refused to be recorded when approached.
In the end, the trip resulted in roughly 900 GB of footage – about 12 hours in total – which required a time-consuming process of editing to whittle down. Matthew outlined two key themes he sought to emphasise in the final film: reaching out (with aerials, arms, and the various communication methods used during the trip) and waves (the nearby sea, but also electromagnetic waves).
Senses and presences
The screening of Matthew’s film was followed in the session by a wider discussion about the geographies of listening that were examined and performed during the Summer School, with four other participants in the programme also present in the room.
These participants kicked off the discussion by reflecting on the different senses and practices invoked in the process of listening. John Hughes, a practice-based PhD student at Kingston University whose work uses radio broadcast and performance, remarked that he found himself drawing rather than adopting the familiar methodologies of field recording while in Bude. Alternatively, for Sofie Narbed, her realisation from the Summer School was that there is value in resisting the impulse we have as researchers to document as much as possible, and instead just ‘being’; letting momentary conversations and occurrences unfold and pass.
These experiences drew out a broader theme across the Summer School participants of multi-modal and multisensory practices of listening – particularly in how often we incorporate visuals to accompany sound, or attempt to ‘translate’ different forms of recording for different outputs. In this regard, Oli Mould considered what the notion of ‘multisensory listening’ can add to conservations around the politics of listening; potentially resisting some assumptions we tend to have around auditory practices and those who are marginalised as a result.
In thinking about different communities of listening, the discussion then turned to what is lost and gained during both group and individual listening. Sasha Engelmann recounted one of the Summer School activities which prompted participants to choose their own ‘field’ in Bude and spend time there by themselves, while responding to prompts from ‘HQ’ using a group chat on Whatsapp. This sharing of individual experiences from each participant’s field attempted to mediate the individual and group perspectives by forming a collective archive that brought these various fields, voices and bodies together digitally.
As well as the dynamics of the Summer School group, some of the participants contemplated their embeddedness within the wider local community in Bude. Anecdotal conversations with locals about alien landings, MI5, events surrounding the construction of the listening station, and the impact of the station on tourism were characterised by superstition, fear of being recorded, rumour and gossip – all of which spoke to a core tension in practices of listening between truth and fiction.
The final pivot of discussion concerned the physical presence of the listening station itself. Multiple participants highlighted the iconic presence that the station has in the landscape, and the need for people to have something physical to which they can attach their imaginaries and fears of surveillance. Despite this, the dangers of these forms of listening are largely ‘invisible’ to us today; contained within smartphones, PCs, servers and other digital infrastructures.
Sasha highlighted how the listening station is anachronistic in this sense, as the satellite transmissions that the station’s big dishes were built to monitor no longer form such an important part of our communications. Yet it is harder for us to imagine the more pervasive practices of ‘algorithmic listening’ that infiltrate our everyday communications, so sites like Bude still maintain a powerful aura in our cultural conceptions of surveillance and espionage.
We would like to thank Sofie Narbed and Sasha Engelmann for organising and leading this engaging session on listening; Matthew Phillips for arranging the film screening; and the other Summer School participants – John Hughes, Carolyn Roy and Liz Miller – for their contributions to the discussion.
Written by Jack Lowe, edited by Megan Harvey
Landscape Surgery 