SONIC SPECTRAL SUMMONING (a how-to)
with Dr Johanna Linsley
Course Structure: 3 weeks engagement
Course Venue: Correspondence
Course Dates: March 2021
Course Fee: Pay what you can (suggsted minimum £10)
This course is aimed at equipping participants with the tools necessary to identify, isolate and summon your own ghostly spectre from the acoustic atmosphere of your choice. Every ring tone, white noise machine, laptop fan or refrigerator buzz has the potential to contain a latent haunting. Every inside joke, gossip circuit and open secret might, if you listen the right way, have the capacity to raise the dead.
Do you have what it takes to break open the world as you currently know it? Drawing on common affects like revenge, melancholy and ecstatic force to tune your senses, you will develop a sensitivity to wraiths, apparitions, and lingering presences. Who knows what alternate worlds might emerge?
This course is for:
LGBTQIA+ individuals or allies interested in sound, ghosts, email.
LGBTQIA+ individuals or allies who have a capacity with sound, ghosts, email.
By signing up for SONIC SPECTRAL SUMMONING, you will receive a series of specially designed materials in your email inbox over the course of three weeks. These will include text, audio and images as well as prompts for how to build your own haunted skillset. Engage these materials fully and you may find yourself equipped to commune with the fabulously disembodied. You will receive instructions on how to listen for and document your local spectres, and how to share your results with a wider community of sonic summoners.
The module will be delivered via email newsletter. There will be five emails total – a welcome email, three themed emails (on revenge, melancholy and ecstatic force) and a follow up email with instructions on how to submit documentation of your own haunting to be shared online via Queer Extension and I’m With You.
Johanna Linsley is an artist, writer and researcher working across performance, text and sound. A founding producer of I'm With You, she is now based in Scotland working as a Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Dundee. She had a decade-long collaboration with the late artist Rebecca Collins exploring the idea of 'sonic detection' as a method for site-responsive creative practice. Their album Stolen Voices001 (2021) was shortlisted for a Scottish Award for New Music. Their book Sonic Detection: Necessary Notes for Art and Performance is forthcoming from punctum press in the summer of 2025. Johanna currently has a grant from the Royal Society of Edinburgh for a project titled Listening to Scotland's Performance Archives where she is charting an alternative sonic history of experimental performance and Live Art.
Images:
1) Lead Image: Sand, Ignat Gorazd
2) Bio Image: Christa Holka