Rethinking Technological Sobriety Through Artistic Practice & Anthropology
A series of five progressive workshops & online seminars led by Dr. Anne Dubos (anthropologist & artist)
December 2026 – May 2028
Hosted by Centre for Music and Technology CM&T at Helsinki University of the Arts, Sibelius Academy (Prof. Jan Schacher Dr. Alejandro Olarte) in the context of the
Voice and Justice Project funded by the Jane and Aatos Erkko foundation
About
Our experiences are built from perceptions processed though our bodies, as life is a matter of duration: it is evolutive and relative, lived in relation to others. But we are pulled between the two poles of “relation and ecology” versus “economy and efficiency.”
If there is something to reclaim in our post-industrial worlds, that might be listening.
Because listening is already dwelling. And if we have anything to claim in this “disjointed world,”it’s a right for uncertainty.
Situated knowledge is humbling, as it also requires cooperative work to create a common truth about things. To transform the condition of our common world, we need to be able to change the way we look at things, and especially to stop looking at living beings as if they were dead.
Listening as an embodied, situated and relational practice
The Gestures of Listening project explores these notions through sound arts and musical processes, inviting musicians with their instruments, technologies, performing bodies, awareness and social sensibilities to engage with communities through the act of dwelling in sound, sharing experiences of the world through sounding and listening.
It develops a research practice at the intersection of research-creation and anthropology, where artistic production meets ethnographic fieldwork and archival processes.
In this encounter, the making of the work becomes inseparable from the collection of situated materials, allowing the researcher-artist to produce not only aesthetic and poetic objects, but also forms of knowledge.
At stake is a possible epistemological shift, in response to a crucial and urgent question that concerns and unsettles us all: the need for a sober use of digital technologies.
Keywords
Sound studies, anthropology, artistic research, relational ecology, situated knowledge, post-industrial critique
Workshop Program
The program offers five workshops introducing artistic and anthropological research. In each session, students develop a project or a prototype document it, and present it at the end. The fifth session brings the projects together, exhibited or discussed, at a festival accompanied by a symposium.
Overall Structure of the Series
- Workshop 1: The Perceptual shift . Gestures of Listening
- Workshop 2: Embodiment . The Body as an Instrument:
- Workshop 3: Relation . Listening to Communities
- Workshop 4: Technology . Low Tech and Creative Misuse
- Workshop 5: A Collective form . The Project Archive . Symposium & Festival
Online seminar
In addition, an online seminar will be held once a month, providing participants with an opportunity to further explore the theoretical questions developed during the practical workshops.
Workshops Descriptions
Workshop 1 — Gestures of Listening
General objective (direction)
Shifting the notion of listening toward an embodied practice of attention.
This shift is grounded in a broader inquiry into how attention, perception, and knowledge are being reshaped within post-industrial conditions, and how the gesture of listening might operate as a situated and embodied mode of ecological relation to the world (see relevant literature below).[1]
Research Question
What is a gesture of listening?
Why and how listening can be described (defined) as a gesture?
- Prolonged listening exercises (silence / immediate environment)
- “Stillness” experiments (J. Schacher)
- Discussion: passive vs active listening
- Soundfield recording: initiation methods & material archive
- Deep listening (P. Oliveiros) description and exercises —» connect with Deep-Listening practitioners in HEL & SAMA
- Listening walk and listening protocol (revisiting the Sonographies protocol of Listening; A. Dubos)
- Listening cartographies; sound mapping (the methodological question of the visual to figure sounds)
Final objective
To produce an individual protocol of situated listening.
[1] Oliveiros, 2005; Haraway 2000; Ingold, 2011; Gibson, 1979.
Workshop 2 — The Body as an Instrument of Listening
General objective
Exploring the full body as a perceptual interface (developing the question of awareness and the idea that the sense of touch is already a way of listening).
This exploration extends the broader inquiry into listening as an embodied and situated practice of attention, where perception is distributed across the sensory body and its environment, and where sensor-based interactions also open onto practices of care, understood as forms of situated attention, reciprocity, and relational attunement.
Research Question:
How can embodied gestures and sensor-based interactions help or generate new forms of listening?
- Body improvisations guided by sound.
Introduction to somatic practices through the lens of awareness (meditation, yoga & kalarippayattu, three South Indian techniques of perception). - Micro-movements & gestures of listening; Introduction to bodily feedback.
- Same experiment, sensor-mediated.
- Work in pairs (gesture–sound resonance) / dancer-sound artist or anthropologist – sound artist.
- Proposing a media-lab: gestures / sensors9 / sounds
See reference texts:
some_augmented_gestures:https://annedubos.com/index.php/2021/02/15/des_gestes_augmentes/ On sounding bodies: https://annedubos.com/index.php/2021/02/16/on-sounding-bodies/)
- Body improvisations guided by sound.
Final objective:
To produce short gestural scores (or performance; or documented performance) in which listening is analysed and described.
Workshop 3 — Situated Sound Ecologies: Listening to the communities
General objective
Working with listening in various environments; engaging with communities.
This workshop extends the broader inquiry into listening as a situated and relational practice, where engaging with communities through sound also involves the co-production of sonic archives that, in turn, generate new communities of listening.
Research Question
What kind of methodologies or tools can we develop to co-create a sound archive with specific community members?
In this session, students are invited to develop a project in collaboration with a community of their choice (e.g., visually impaired or deaf individuals, migrants, elderly people, children, autistic participants, single mothers, non-human communities are a possibility field for exploration etc.)
NB: Issues related to establishing contact and addressing ethical considerations in this form of community engagement will be discussed during the online seminar.
Field recording (urban / natural).
Analysis of human / non-human relationships.Listening walk (soundwalks): create a sound walk protocol for the members of the community you are working with.
On what scale your sound protocol is operating: body, listening community members, city members?
Create composition from field recordings.
Archive your methodological process.
Sound mapping: questions of how to represent sounds on a map?
Create a collective archive.
Final objective
To create a situated collective sound archive. Parts of the archives will be invited to the festival & symposium.
Workshop 4 — Low-Tech Approaches & Creative Misuse
General objective
Questioning technological tools and their perceptual implications.
This workshop continues the exploration of listening as a situated and embodied practice, where listening is not only perceptual but also political: as a form of care, it shifts our attention from relations of extraction and control toward relations of reciprocity, reopening the possibility of thinking and inhabiting the world otherwise
Research Question:
How does the use of technologies affect the gestures of listening?
Experimentation with simple (or repurposed) sensors.
Critical analysis of devices (what they reveal / conceal).
Construction of DIY micro sound systems.
“Less technology, more relationship”?
Playing with existing objects.
Invention of sound and gestural scores with or without technologies. How does the use of digital technologies affect notation of a score? The score writing/edition?
Final objective
To produce a minimal sound prototype for an installation or a performance. The installation or performance will be invited in the festival.
Workshop 5 — Co-creating a Form of Listening
General objective
Transforming explorations into a collective apparatus.
This workshop situates listening as a collective and political practice, where improvisation, curation, and spatialization allow prior explorations to be assembled into a shared apparatus. In doing so, it proposes listening not as a fixed skill but as a co-produced epistemological and relational infrastructure.
Research Question
How do collective processes of improvisation, curation, and spatialization give rise to new forms of listening?
Assembling materials from previous workshops for a festival = curating work
Guided collective improvisation design.
Spatialization (installation / performance / situation).
Final reflective symposium: What is a “form of listening”?
Final objective
To produce an exhibition & a symposium in the form of a festival over the last two days Performance, installation, open protocol, talks, roundtables and discussion.
Expected commitment by the students
Students may attend all workshops, or choose to attend one or several, as each teaching unit is independent. However, attendance at one of workshops 1–4 is a prerequisite for participation in the fifth.