Book Launch: Sonic Detection

Sonic Detection, published by punctum books propels you up and down the UK coast and offers overheard fragments from a faded seaside resort, a container shipping port, a former coal-mining town, and the Scottish headquarters for North Sea oil. Part sonic noir, part performance document and part critical investigation of listening at the margins,Sonic Detection is for readers interested in prospecting the boundaries of performance, sound, and text.

Emerging from a decade-long collaboration between artists Rebecca Collins and Johanna Linsley, the book uses eavesdropping as an expanded creative methodology. Here, sonic detectives hold open a collective sonorous space. They are the embodiment of the phenomenophile, lingering longer in listening.

This launch event will include a performance lecture, sounds from the ongoing investigation, and a conversation between Linsley and writer Anna Fleming, as well as a brief response by artist Federica Cologna.

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).

Johanna Linsley 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 presented throughout the UK and the USA, and in Brussels, Copenhagen, Zagreb, Bogotà, and elsewhere, at institutions including the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, and in London at the Hayward Gallery, the Barbican Centre, the Wellcome Collection, and the Victoria & Albert Museum. jhlinsley.co