The Sensation Gap - what is it like to perceive the world anew through artificial means?
This installation takes you into a sonic space about hearing lost and found - feel free to move about in it. More and more of us are going to require a sensory aid at some point in our life. But few people think about that journey until it happens to them. And as we master the art of repairing impaired senses (through ever better miniatures microphones and deep learning assisted sound isolation), we are inadvertently opening the door to something far more radical: sensory expansion. Three streams play concurrently recreating different aspects of our journeys with hearing aids and the reawakening to nature’s soundscape that ensued.

Karina and Caitlin’s personal hearing impairment narratives

The sounds that came back to them both after leaving the hospital with hearing aids

Livestreamed non-human sensory data from around St Leonard’s (inc. ultrasonic frequencies, hydrophones and sub-terranean sounds)
Karina and Caitlin are both sonic explorers, both hearing aid wearers and both absolutely fascinated by where the future of hearing is going

Caitlin Kennedy is a creative audio maker, writer and bonafide science nerd. She weaves together human stories with the sounds of the natural world, incorporating field recording, long-form interviews and a heck of a lot of research. Ironically it was losing her high frequency hearing in her 20s that precipitated a deep interest in sound and the sensory information that we're missing as humans, something that only deepened after getting hearing aids. In the vast majority of her work she hopes to shed light on the fragile connections of habitats and all the cycles and symbioses they contain.
http://caitlinkennedy.co.uk

Karina Townsend is a creative technologist & intrepid sonic adventurer). Both ‘Embodied Therapy’ and meditative ‘Deep Listening’, her practice explores acquired hearing loss through the lens of multisensory synchresis. Karina works with materials from conventional recording tools to sound making devices improvised from life’s offcuts. The work focuses on technology based creative strategies that allow Karina to fully and actively engage with her environment in rich, meaningful ways raising the question of why we talk of ‘hearing loss’ but not ‘listening loss’.

FESTIVAL PASS HOLDERS ONLY