Public Lecture Series: Sonic Detection: Echoes from the Future, Dr Johanna Linsley

Sonic detection is a framework for open-ended, collaborative intellectual and creative practice situated between sound studies, performance studies, and interdisciplinary writing, emerging from a decade-long working partnership between Rebecca Collins and Johanna Linsley. What began as a slowly evolving series of eavesdropping incursions on the east coast of the UK became an ongoing practice of aural attention modulated through text, performance and sound. The work was the product of exchange with multiple interlocutors, some formal and structured, some incidental and overheard. None of these meetings or conversations were thought of as separate or casual, but were instead incorporated into the developing investigation, as somehow informing what we shaped as it took shape — this is the performative apparatus we brought into being. In this talk, I will share some of the artefacts and outcomes from the work Rebecca and I created together, including live performance, an album of experimental sound works and a book that develops our thinking across critical and theoretical writing and performance fictions. After Rebecca’s untimely passing in June, 2024, I am reckoning with the echoes and resonances this work will carry going forward.

Johanna Linsley is an artist, writer and researcher working across performance, text and sound. She is based in Scotland where she is a Lecturer in Creative Practice at the University of Dundee. She had a decade-long collaboration with the late artist Rebecca Collins exploring the idea of 'sonic detection' as a method for site-responsive creative practice. Their album Stolen Voices001 (2021) was shortlisted for a Scottish Award for New Music. Their book Sonic Detection: Necessary Notes for Art and Performance is forthcoming from punctum press in the summer of 2025. Johanna currently has a grant from the Royal Society of Edinburgh for a project titled Listening to Scotland's Performance Archives where she is charting an alternative sonic history of experimental performance and Live Art.