Public Knowledge: Quantum Listening with Ignota Books - Camden Art Centre

Does sound have consciousness? Can you imagine listening beyond the edge of your own imagination?

Camden Art Centre and Ignota Books are pleased to celebrate the 50th anniversary of pioneering musician Pauline Oliveros’ Quantum Listening. This marks the latest in a QUANTUM LISTENING season of events that will explore the roots and legacies of Deep Listening® with a broad curiosity toward vibration, resonance and altered states.

Join us for an evening of sonic meditation, ambient resonance and abyssal sounds hosted by Ignota’s Susanna Davies-Crook and Camden Art Centre’s Matt Williams with anti-disciplinary artist Vivienne Griffin.

Quantum Listening is a manifesto for listening as activism. Through simple yet profound exercises, Oliveros shows how Deep Listening is the foundation for a radically transformed social matrix: one in which compassion and peace form the basis for our actions in the world.

For the occasion, artist Aura Satz has produced limited edition prints taken from the Tuning Fork spells made for Ignota’s Quantum Listening publication. This event constitutes a node in Ignota’s new membership portal The Mountain: a platform for aural exploration and sonic content including poetry readings, music mixes, weird tech, ritual and practice commissioned by Ignota and Ignota’s Pillars of the Mountain Himali Singh Soin, Jay Springett, Tabitha Thorlu-Bangura and Leila Sadeghee.

The Speakers

The Speakers

Vivienne Griffin (they/them) was born in Dublin, Ireland and lives in London. Griffin studied fine art at Hunter City University New York supported by a Fulbright Scholarship. Moving between digital and physical worlds Griffin is an anti-disciplinary artist who uses video, sound, metal, stone and drawing. Griffin explores the emancipatory prompts that technology can offer us through the ancient technology of the voice, raw materials and the digital binary.

Recent shows include Transmediale, Berlin, 2023, On Paper, ECHO, Cologne, 2022, Latent Joy, St Mary Le Strand, with Paul Purgas and invited guests, 2022, Mercy, a single channel video, funded by King’s x Somerset House Studios research fund with law researcher Cari Hyde-Vaamonde in 2022, Poet Slash Artist at Manchester International Festival, 2021, the AGM in Somerset House, 2021, Montez Press Radio in NYC, Condo at Southard Reid, London. They won an Oram Award in 2021, they are a resident at Somerset House Studios, London and are represented by Bureau NYC. They completed a one-year DPhil at the Royal College of Art, where they are now an Associate Lecturer and are finishing a PhD at the Sonic Arts Research Centre, the Centre for Interdisciplinary Sound Research in Belfast.

Matt Williams has organised numerous national and international monographic, group exhibitions, public programmes and commissions at public institutions to develop a unique portfolio of cultural initiatives and interdisciplinary projects at the intersection of art, culture, and society in conversation with creative practitioners, academics, and publishers, and independent organisations.

Susanna Davies-Crook is Head of Growth at Ignota. She has worked as an editor at publications including DAZED and Sleek, and curator on exhibitions including Transformer: A Rebirth of Wonder at 180 Strand. She is the recipient of an Arts Council DYCP grant to develop her creative and critical writing practice on Nervous Systems and complete her first novel. She is also a hypnotherapist and yoga teacher.