Ecologies of Listening: responding to John Berger through intimate audio

Since August 2019 I have been working with visual artist Rachel O’Neill, responding to the writings of John Berger through a range of intermedial performance outcomes. Our starting point has been the poetic and personal reflections on time and space, loss and distance in Berger’s 1984 book and our faces my heart brief as photos. and our faces... was a 20-minute performance installation incorporating recorded audio and virtual reality developed at the National Theatre of Scotland. Brief as photos was a 30-minute audio lecture created for Forest Fringe TV during lockdown in June 2020 and designed to be listened to by audiences at home. Our most recent project combines a response to Berger’s essay “Field” with 360 video footage of Fife and Dundee in Scotland, where Berger came to stay and write with filmmaker Timothy Neat.

This paper will reflect on the ways that these intimate and immersive intermedial performances have playfully extended Berger’s ideas on visual perception to foreground aural and embodied modes of attention. I will describe the strategies that these performances employed to structure the audience experience as a kind of ‘listening to’ material and virtual space, layered temporalities and affective registers. Ultimately, I will argue for the ways that this project explored methods of creative response as what Donna Haraway terms “becoming with” non-human things (2007) to explore ecologies of listening, transposing, and resonating with and beyond Berger’s work.