Moving together in the border space: collaborative explorations using sonic objects to sound-scape interdependencies

In this Dream Team session, participants are invited to engage in the co-production of sonic landscapes using guitar and synth pedals. No musical experience is necessary. We invite listening to self and other(s), self in relation to other(s), and bring an opportunity to reflect on habitual patterns of engagement with the social and physical environment, the timbre and tempo of co-presences becoming mutually aware, and how rhythmic flows may evolve in relation to individual and mutually emergent feelings and urgencies. Starting from no input, the evolving sonic landscape offers a means of articulating qualitative shifts in participants' ongoing interconnectedness, through shared communication and expression, enabling knowing and be(com)ing known in ways rendered inaccessible by the constraints of verbal and visual language, bringing a different perspective from which participants may experience a common recognition and mutually apprehended understanding of individual and shared psychosocial tendencies.

As a mode of engagement, the sonic offers a means to experiment with progression and change in relation to others, to observe conditions (both internal and external) that enable or constrain interdependency and to develop co-constructed worlds through an unfolding, improvised soundscape. The workshop invites and accommodates multiple readings and/or analogies, with opportunity for further reflection across modalities (verbal and/or written/visual), and an emphasis on emergent rather than intended outcomes.

We are interested in evolving our understandings of auditory modes of relation, moving toward audio inquiry as a method for exploring relational questions that exist between (or around or through) people who are informed by differing cultural frameworks, plural lived experiences and not-yet-compatible theoretical perspectives.

Without wishing, therefore, to impose our own perspectives on the process of sense- making through this auditory encounter, Ettinger’s (1995) notion of subjectivity-as- encounter in the matrixial borderspace (see also Giffney, Mulhall & O’Rourke, 2009) provides a provisional meeting point for ransdisciplinary reflection on experiences of contact and connection, and of making meaning as we go along, in the absence of shared lexical and conceptual references, and in a scenario where participants may experience themselves as partial subjects. As Butler (2004:99) describes it: ‘We are invited into the space in which we are not one, cannot be, and yet we are not without the capacity to see. We see here, as a child or, perhaps, an infant, whose body is given as the remnants of another’s trauma and desires. By grounding in a mostly non-lexical experience, and then facilitating critical reflection across modalities, we navigate that loss (and other losses) and familiarise ourselves with a primal territory of being-in-relation that is often outside conscious awareness.