Workshop: Covert Acoustics

This workshop is free to attend but spaces are limited. Book your space via Urban Room here.

Covert Acoustics is a half-day workshop that explores urban sounds in the context of surveillance and surveillance technologies. Located in London’s Olympic Park, a site of heightened control and covert surveillance, we will reflect on acoustic ‘ways of knowing’ the city. 

During the first half of the workshop, participants will be introduced to key themes and practicalities of surveillant modes of listening, and take part in an interactive listening exercise along the East Bank. After critically attuning our ears to the environment, we will then acoustically monitor specific locations using sound recorders, drawing and text annotation. 

In the second half of the workshop, in the exhibition space of UCL’s Urban Room, we will collectively construct a soundscape using material gathered on site, drawings, printed photographs and annotation.  Exploring how we can be both a voyeur of the city, and a surveilled citizen at ground level. 

>> This workshop is designed by SONCITIES researchers Ruth Bernatek and Matilde Meireles, delivered as a response to the audio-visual exhibition Testing Ground: Tracing threads of aerial seeing by Henrietta Williams and Merijn Royaards, which runs at UCL Urban Room 31st May - 21st July.  

It draws inspiration from Constructing a Soundscape, an attentive listening methodology and remapping exercise developed by Matilde Miereles, and which can be explored further here.