Turning Towards a Radical Listening is an immersive metaphor in which an audience is asked to reckon and reconcile with how their sonic experience is represented, documented, given language and transcribed over the course of 70 minutes. The resulting nonsense concrete poem demands consideration of how we exist between input and output— holding space for us to tune into what has been lost in translation.
In an age of information, in which meaning is so often generated through processes akin to machine learning— patterned behavior based on biased data sets— Turning Towards a Radical Listening questions the ways in which language and algorithms shape and even program our lives.
Using spatial sound and recordings from conversations with poets and peers, James Allister Sprang asks: Can we begin to address the chasm between information and knowledge? What happens to black voices when they are translated and transcribed through apps and other modes of technology? And can we hold space for the ways in which these translations and transcriptions reveal racial, gender and social biases that exist beyond our screens?
