About this Event
How to listen ahead, how to hold the future in mind when listening? In an age of intersecting political, man-made and ecological disasters, ‘Preemptive Listening’ is an ode to the sirens that are and those that could be. Siren compositions from over 20 collaborators form a resonant voice to ask; Does an alarm have to be alarming?
The screening, introduced by Aura Satz is the first of two events celebrating the recent work of researchers on the Scoring Warnings AHRC Research Project at the RCA. The second is the launch of Francesca Laura Cavallo’s book Aesthetics of Risk.
Aura Satz is a London-based artist based who works with film, sound, performance and sculpture. Her works are made in conversation, using dialogue as both method and subject matter. Satz has made several film portraits of listening and compositional practices as well as works centred on sound technology and unusual notation systems. She recently completed ‘Preemptive Listening’, a documentary feature film on sirens and emergency listening, with support from an artist’s residencies at Walker Arts Centre and EMPAC, and funded by an AHRC fellowship hosted at the Royal College of Art. The world premiere was at MoMA’s Doc Fortnight, the UK premiere at Tate Modern, and the European premiere at CPH Dox in Copenhagen, where it won the NEW:VISION award. She is a Reader in Contemporary Art Practice, RCA, where she is currently co-leading the AHRC-funded research grant Scoring Warnings (2025-28).
About the film:
Winner of the New Vision award at CPH dox film festival, and Best Feature Film at St Moritz Art and Film Festival, the film has toured internationally across film and music festivals. For more information and links to interviews and reviews, please visit https://preemptivelisteningfilm.com/
On occasion of the UK premiere at Tate Modern in April 2024, the screening was followed by a series of performances, talks and a symposium across three days, including many of the film’s contributors. The events and presentations are collected in a special issue of Disclaimer, a journal for new thinking and writing on listening and sound, published by Liquid Architecture. Guest-edited by the Preemptive Listening team (Aura Satz, Francesca Laura Cavallo and Irene Revell) with Tate Film (Valentine Umansky and Beatriz Garcia-Velasco) https://disclaimer.org.au/contents/preemptive-listening
Event venue & nearby stays
Gorvy Lecture Theatre, Royal College of Art, 1 Hester Road, London, United Kingdom
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