Unraveling Knowledge Systems: On the Use of Deep Listening in Art and Education

Abstract: In this article, we explore slowness through our engagement with Deep Listening exercises and Sonic Meditations, as developed by Pauline Oliveros. However, arriving to slowness as artist-educators was not a straightforward process and we will intermittently in this article reflect on our journey through an educational system based on competition, over-work and hyper-individualism. In the first part of the article, we elaborate on Deep Listening as a technique and how we encounter it as practitioners. We also briefly reflect on the Slow movement and particularly how it manifests in academic contexts. In the second part, we reflect on how we adopted Deep Listening methods in our university teaching practice (in the US and the UK) and then focus on a post-graduate level workshop we co-delivered for Transart Institute at Liverpool John Moores University in September 2022. We argue for a process of unlearning and unraveling existing knowledge systems that bound the current delivery of art education, in order to germinate new ways of exercising creativity, more conducive to a degrowth philosophy. Throughout the article we share segments of Sonic Meditations and Deep Listening scores that we each developed as meditations on Slow scholarship and theory-building. Our collaboration embraces principles of mutual care and the slow passing of time: we position our work for the long haul, sustaining practices and relationships rather than succumbing to capitalist expectations of hyperproduction. Finally, we offer recommendations for other practitioners and educators to use when practicing Slow art with their students.