Over-hearing in the Anthropocene

To listen in the Anthropocene is an act of acknowledgement. It is a complicity with and responsibility to the more than human world. As poets, artists, writers and publishers how do we make what is overheard – signals of loss and extinction, moments between presence and absence, languages of inanimate and animate – heard?
Paying attention to the quixotic, irreversible moments that have become signals in the register of the Anthropocene, this essay addresses the question ‘What is listening in the Anthropocene?’ by exploring the relationship between listening, hearing, publishing and being heard. The collaborative creative practice I share with Justy Phillips (under the name A Published Event) pivots on the act of making public, where publishing is understood as a form of art practice. One technique we explore through speculative publishing, we call ‘language-ing’, a bringing into language a lived experience of listening-with. Throughout this speculative essay, an accumulating lexicon turns the body towards hard to detect signals, sometimes registered as absences – as genocide, as gaps in the geological record, habitat extinctions, retreating glaciers, mineral and emotional exhaustion or sensory loss. Recent work from A Published Event and collaborations with other artists frame the essay, including Lost Rocks (2017-21) and Erratic Ecologies (2019-20), both of which are included in the Listening in The Anthropocene online exhibition.