Can conscious listening spark radical change?

 

Listening as activism. Cooperation. Multispecies research. Anthropocene. Mutations. Climate crisis. Eco-grief. Wisdom keepers. Taking turns with Earth.

Each year, The Witness brings together several transdisciplinary groups of artists, scientists, and activists from different parts of the world who are collaborating with their local communities to listen to our imperiled planet. As the year unfolds, the groups meet regularly to share their ongoing fieldwork and to deepen their own connections and collaborative potential with the communities they are working with. They also post photo, audio, video, and text fragments on The Witness’s multimedia platform that give voice to these local communities and the skills and wisdom they impart in living in harmony with the Earth. The projects featured by The Witness implore us to witness what may disappear forever, as well as to build, with urgency, greater caregiving for our non-human kin.

Latest
Fragments

Discover the latest audio, video, photo, and text fragments of field research that are shared monthly by transdisciplinary groups of artists, researchers and their communities around the world.

Music
Social studies
Wisdom Keepers
Essay
Poetry, myths and legends
Worldviews
Archive of the future
Field recording
Worldviews
Archive of the future
Soundscape studies
Wisdom Keepers

I am interested in music expanding consciousness. By expanding consciousness, I mean that old patterns can be replaced with new ones.
— Pauline Oliveros

At the height of great unrest in the 1960s, legendary composer Pauline Oliveros retreated from public performing and dove into sound experiments meant to soothe and heal. She later coined Deep Listening®, an embodied practice in which we intentionally and actively tune into, versus tune out, the sounds around and within us.

In 1989, Oliveros composed The Witness, three open strategies for listening, attuning, and responding to ourselves and to one another. The score, along with Oliveros’s philosophies of community and collaboration and the practice and process of Deep Listening®, have inspired a vast constellation of projects over the decades. The Witness score is both the seed of The Witness and the guiding principle around which its research projects are organized.

 
From the
archive
Documenting the Chopi people's connection to nature
Archive of the future
Anthropology
Colonialism
Archive of the future
Anthropology
Climate crisis
Archive of the future
Deep listening practices
Listening as activism
Archive of the future
Anthropology
Listening as activism
Archive of the future
Anthropology
Listening as activism
Archive of the future
Anthropology
Healing

Latest Instagram post @thewitness.earth

[2023 - third project] 🇨🇳💦

The Lisu, an ethnic minority in the remote mountains of China’s Yunnan province, align their activities to nature with slash-and-burn cultivation. Yet contact with the modern world is shifting their way of life. For The Witness, writer/filmmaker Hongyu Chen and musician Jian Cui are focusing on traditional songs that narrate personal and community stories in hopes of understanding the Lisu’s relationship to their environment and how their songs are changing.