Spanning the Len Lye Centre, Aotearoa New Zealand and international artists and collectives examine sonic relationalities and the politics of sound through a range of approaches. These include acoustic ecologies, where sound becomes a speculative tool for sensing and indexing biodiversity and climate volatility; practices of ‘ear witnessing’, where audio material acts as legal evidence towards truth-telling and social justice; and the deployment of sound as a decolonial force, where musical composition unsettles acoustic histories of field recording and the archive, while affirming Indigenous ways of being and knowing.

Staging sonic encounters, artists harness more-than-human co-composers, such as the wind, decomposing fruit, and native birdsong, to amplify the voices of weather systems, sonify carbon flows, and attune with the dawn chorus. Others compose warning sirens as harbingers of ecological feedback loops, or turn up the volume on ancestral rhythms to live by.

Through sound installations and sculptural assemblages, field recordings and experimental films, musical composition and archival interventions, lecture performances and deep-listening experiences, the work in Sound, Signal, Feedback asks, What does a healthy ecosystem sound like? How can sound act as a decolonial gesture? What are the techno-politics of machine listening? What sirens and warnings are needed to survive the future?

If sound can enter the body as waves in ways that other artforms cannot, what kinds of world-making potentialities does vibration have to shift matter and change our social realities? What, can sound do?

Direct Bodily Empathy is a two-part exhibition curated by Anna Briers to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Len Lye Centre. The exhibition’s title pays homage to Len Lye’s notion of ‘bodily empathy’, a term that signals sensory attunement, and the transfer of elemental energies. While part one, Sensing Sound, amplified artists’ intentions through sonic structures, resonant objects, and shared vibration, Sound, Signal, Feedback asks us to consider material sound as a transmitter of meaning and an input for action.