About this Event
About
Sonic Detection, published by punctum books, is part sonic noir, part performance document and part critical investigation of listening at the margins. Emerging from a decade-long collaboration between artists Rebecca Collins and Johanna Linsley, the book uses eavesdropping as an expanded creative methodology, taking in both illicit listening-in and the accidentally overheard. Here, sonic detectives hold open a collective sonorous space. They are the embodiment of the phenomenophile, lingering longer in listening. This is a methodology particularly attuned to informal, after-hours, and transient spaces.
The launch event will include a performance lecture by Johanna Linsley that animates parts of Sonic Detection, sounds from Stolen Voices001 (a 2020 album that complements the book), and a conversation between Linsley and Professor Kristen Kreider (The UCL Slade School of Fine Art).
The event will be of particular interest to artists, urbanists, academics, and general audiences with an interest in sound studies, performance studies, critical practice, artistic research, and site-responsive creative practice.
Speaker Biographies
Rebecca Collins (d. 2024) was an award-winning artist researcher and lecturer working at the intersection between contemporary performance and sound. Her main research interests were in listening, performance, sound studies, and creative/critical writing. Rebecca’s practice focused on the dynamics of the sonic operating within specific environments and technologies to explore methodologies of writing and making contemporary performance. She shared her scholarship and practice through multiple forms, including live performance, limited-edition vinyl, radio broadcasts, exhibitions, workshops, text scores, policy documents, and academic/experimental publications. Rebecca was a Lecturer in Contemporary Art Theory at Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh. Shortly before her untimely passing, Rebecca had been named a Ramón and Cajal Research Fellow at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) in Madrid (for 2024-29).
is an artist and researcher who works across performance, text, and sound. Her work is collaborative and often iterative, resulting in multiple outcomes or versions. She is interested in contemporary performance and Live Art; documentation of performance; sound, listening, and the voice; queer domesticity; and modes of assembly and collective imagination. She has published research in Contemporary Theatre Review and Performance Research and Cultural Geographies. Her work in performance, both solo and with the London-based performance collective I’m With You, has been widely presented internationally. She is based at the University of Dundee.
is a writer and artist situated at a crossover of poetry, art and architecture. She works collaboratively with architect James O'Leary to make performance, installation and time-based media work in relation to sites of cultural interest and political significance. Combining situated practice and material poetics, Kreider + O'Leary's research exposes and interweaves layers of meaning through image, object, action, text. Their aim is to realise possibilities of place through a transformative imaginary. Kreider + O'Leary have recently completed a large-scale project and related monograph, Ungovernable Spaces: Community Formation and the Poetics of Resistance (Bloomsbury, 2025), exploring four situations globally where communities have formed amidst social and political turbulence. Other books include Poetics and Place: The Architecture of Sign, Subjects and Site (IB Tauris, 2014), Falling (Copy Press, 2015) and Field Poetics (Ma Bibliothèque, 2018). Having previously held Professorships at Goldsmiths College and University of Oxford, Kristen is now Professor of Fine Art and Director of the Doctoral Programme at the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL.
Image: Sonic Detection Book Cover, punctum books
Event venue & nearby stays
UCL Urban Room, 1 Pool Street, London, United Kingdom
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