ABOUT THIS PRESENTATION
This talk traces the emergence of a compositional, curatorial, and performative practice that seeks to move beyond abstract environmental concepts of “matters of concern” (Latour, 2004) towards “matters of care” (de la Bellacasa, 2017). This shift highlights the distinctive contribution that arts practices can make to environmental communication: the capacity to implicate audiences in relationships of responsibility through shared affective experience.
The term Sounding refers to “the activation of a place or space by a musician that is both investigative, information-seeking, and performative” (for example, Sounding the Condamine, Clocked Out, 2012). As Mat Klotz observes, “sounding amounts to a committed and intentional orientation towards the nuances and politics of place” (Klotz, 2024). Such practices generate “new knowledge, new relationships, and new experiences for performers and listeners” while deepening understandings of place (Tomlinson, 2019).
Listening within site-specific environmental sound practices invites deeper engagement with place through cultivating what Anna Tsing describes as the “art of noticing” (Tsing, 2015): a careful and sustained attention to the bodies, relationships, and processes particular to place. Such listening can reveal subtle shifts in ecological dynamics and foster a more responsive environmental awareness (Rose, 2013; Wright, 2016).
Drawing together matters of care, sounding, and listening, this keynote explores a range of performative approaches that foreground directionality, proximity, time travel, multispecies performance, technologically mediated sound practices, and imagination. The talk will be grounded through three creative projects: P.L.A.C.E. (Tomlinson, 2021, 2026), Imaginary Aviary (Tomlinson, 2023), and Made of Wood: Easter at the Piano Mill (2025), alongside the article “Intersecting Place, Environment, Sound, and Music” (Tomlinson, 2019).
Video examples and live participatory sonic happenings will be included.
KEYNOTE SPEAKER
Vanessa Tomlinson
Director, Queensland Conservatorium, Griffith University
Vanessa Tomlinson is a percussionist-composer working as a solo artist, as one half of Clocked Out, and in collaboration across artforms. Her work orbits around site-specific investigations, minimalist reduction, free improvisation, and creating a sense of embodied play. With a long history in experimental and improvised music, she has toured internationally for more than three decades, creating new contexts for improvisation, premiering hundreds of works, performing at major international festivals, and sharing her knowledge as a teacher, mentor, director, and arts advocate.
Vanessa’s recordings appear on Innova, Black Truffle, Earshift, Unsound, Immediate, Room40, Etcetera, Jazzhead, Mode, Tzadik, Hathut, and Clocked Out labels. Her writing has been published in Leonardo, Contemporary Music Review, Intelligent Arts, Uro Publications, and the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology, among others. A leading contributor to the development of Artistic Research in Australia for more than twenty years, she recently co-hosted the Artistic Research Summit in Sydney.
She is Professor of Music and Director of the Queensland Conservatorium, Griffith University.