Conditioned Listening

Maoyi Qiu & Tomi Hilsee

Available & the Rat
Rotterdam, The Netherlands

April 22nd -23rd South Explorer
Open from April 22nd -May 29th.

Conditioned Listeing is a constructed acoustic space, conceived not in relation to the visitor as a spectator but as a playful participant in an active testing site on the shared creation and responsibility of composer and listener.  A score sheet, layered with relational sounding diaries and multi-verging paths, joins visitors, and us, into the process of researching, proposing and composing a narrative; constructing the exhibition through how an object and sound feels.  The dual acts of composition and listening, opens up the question of what agent, object, or action we are conditioned to or what the sound signifies. 


These two days of scored movements are conceived as an externalisation, opening up and feed-forward of our very much ongoing play with these questions, which we hope will bring us to rewrite our descriptions of what’s happening.


‘A score is not a script but the beginning of something’

(paraphrase of Anna Halprin)