Senem Pirler and Monica Duncan: On Deep Listening and Improvisation
“To be able to improvise well, I think will be the way to adapt. To be able to reflect on what is happening and continuously take it in.” – Senem Pirler
OFM sat down with artist collaborative duo and couple Monica Duncan (she/her) and Senem Pirler (she/her) during their artist residency at Signal Culture. Senem and Monica are New York-based artists and creative practitioners who research and engage with a variety of research questions. Their questions are often inquisitive, exploratory, and creative. They approach their practice through both “Deep Listening ®” and queerness.
Can you briefly describe your work as individual artists and as a duo?
Senem Pirler (SP): We create audiovisual improvisations. Monica comes from video and printmaking, whereas I come from sounds, music, and improvisation. Our common languages that we’ve discovered over the years are improvisation, performance, and listening.
Monica Duncan (MD): Another core part of our collaborations is queerness. Our first collaboration was a residency through Signal Culture in 2008. In that collaboration, we explored the question, “What does queering mean as a verb?” So we came up with a performance methodology that was based on exploring how queering can happen in the studio environment that we work in. We called the piece Surface Connection.
You have been collaborating since 2008. Can you tell us about how you met and how you decided to collaborate with one another?
SP: We met during the production of Pauline Oliveros’ and Ione’s opera “The Nubian Word for Flowers”. Pauline Oliveros is one of the greatest composers of the 20th century. She was my mentor. She also developed the practice of “Deep Listening ®.” I was hired onto Pauline’s team as a sound designer, and Monica was hired on as the video designer.
MD: Through conversations, we realized that we both had things in common in the way we think about sound and image, and we decided to play around with these concepts at the Signal Culture residency. We are collaborators in art and in life as well.
In your first collaboration together, you explored queerness as a verb. What were some ways that you began to understand queerness as an action that can be engaged with in your studio practice?
SP: During that time, I was deep in my own academic research, which was asking questions about queerness. I was interested in Sara Ahmed’s research. She basically talks about how our capacities expand at the moments of disorientation. I was thinking about how disoriented moments actually open up possibilities in relation to queerness. We were asking, “How does queering work in space? With objects? What does that mean? How do we relate to more-than-human bodies and surroundings in those moments of disorientation?”
MD: In Surface Connection, we were working with vibration as a way to create disoriented moments. We vibrated and shook mylar with vibrators, a unicorn horn dildo, balloons, and a milk frother. We wondered, what if these objects get to be what they are and do what they do in space when they are not controlled by human bodies?
SP: Part of our goal was to develop non-hierarchical systems in our improvisation practice. We were also creating a non-hierarchical way of thinking about agency, disrupting objects from their normative presentations, which was another way of queering.
There is also something a bit absurd within the idea of utilizing a milk frother and unicorn horn vibrator simply as objects that vibrate within your artistic practice. Can you talk about how you utilize humor and camp in your artwork?
SP: Humor can be utilized as a kind of research methodology.
MD: Humor can help us play and help us to develop gestures to approach our more-than-human collaborators. That kind of playfulness is expansive and generative.
Can you talk a little bit more about play, risk taking, and improvisation in your practices?
SP: Play and improvisation are really synonymous for me. Improvised practices can be very playful, and playfulness can also be serious. If there were deeper elements of playfulness embedded within disciplines like engineering and researchers, the world would be very fun and wild. People wouldn’t stop learning. Within invention, there has to be a play element. We cannot imagine something new easily without play–people have to play around to generate new ideas.
MD: Play creates a space for taking risks and accepting change. There is adaptation in play and improvisation, which inherently makes change okay.
SP: I think improvisation is the most important skill that I have. I think everyone should practice improvisation because it’s the only practice that really begins with listening, then responding to it with an offering, then constantly adapting those decisions, based on the responses that you receive.
MD: Being comfortable with changes through adaptability is the only way to survive. Especially in the world that we are living in right now where there is a lot of uncertainty and a lot of things that are getting thrown at us.
SP: Improvisation requires you to be there at that moment. It requires your presence. Presence requires your attention. I think that’s something that nowadays is very easy to skip.
I keep going back to the word integration. Improvisation can pull you back into the integration of the present moment, integration of the senses, perceptions, and feelings. Presence and embodiment can feel unreachable or threatening to some. Do you have any recommendations on where someone would start if they wanted to cultivate imagination, improvisation, play, and embodiment into their daily lives?
SP: We both are deep listeners. We practice deep listening regularly. We were influenced by Pauline in this way. That, for me, was the beginning of really thinking about improvisation as a life practice. Her instructions are extremely simple. She asks that you listen as humanly as possible. When you are not listening, remind yourself to listen. Of course, you can go deeper than that, but that’s a great way to begin to put your attention on one particular sense.
When you listen to something with attention, you cannot jump to a past and a future because you would miss that particular sound because sound is ephemeral. There is a physical phenomenon with sound, you never hear the same sound again after it passes you. I think “Deep Listening ®” is a great practice for actually getting back into the moment.
MD: To expand on this practice, you can listen to the whole sound continuum, globally, noticing the whole sound world around you. If you start focusing on a particular sound—It could be a siren or like your breath. You can follow that particular sound until it comes back to the whole sound world that you are part of.
If someone were to practice “Deep Listening ®” regularly, what do you think the benefits of that could be? And what was the reward of this practice for you at first?
SP: At first, practice was very difficult for me. Pauline mentions not to judge the sounds that you are taking in. As a sound engineer and a sound person, when I’m listening, not judging a sound is basically like putting all my training on a shelf so I could take it in. It is a challenging practice.
The reward is amazing. It made me embrace the unknown. It made me a way better collaborator. I think it also makes you more relational to the world. It makes you more attentive to, not just to yourself, but to your surroundings.
MD: I definitely agree with that. I feel like there are things that you recognize that you would not know were there, if you actually have the time to listen and not filter things out. It allows you to de-filter what you’re taking in and what you’re hearing.
I agree that it also helps in collaboration. The goal is not to become one unit, but actually two people in companionship. We’re still individuals and we still have our own desires and wishes.
What project are you working on now? How have “Deep Listening ®” improvisation, play, and queerness informed your current residency?
MD: The project that we are working on is called Tears for Lost Frequencies. It is an investigation on how we carry microplastics in our most intimate moments. They are everywhere. They are our uninvited collaborators.
SP: We are critical of the categories of “natural and unnatural” and the separation between those two things. It hurts human beings to make those divisions. Maybe this is the time to actually get away from those divisive and binary practices.
MD: We started to collect microplastics from the water around New York. As we were collecting them and observing them, we realized that we were not practicing the relationality that we intended to. We wanted to get closer to how microplastics entangled with our own bodies. So instead of finding them outside of us, we started looking for them from inside ourselves. We began looking for microplastics in our sweat and tears.
SP: Tears came to us through a particular moment. We were going through moments of collective grief in the world and also individual grief together.
MD: I was also losing hearing in my left ear and grieving that loss. I feel like in these tears there’s an emotion; there’s a story; there’s a response. There is a lot of grief. How can we think of microplastics as our companions in this grief? We started with our own samples, and then we asked folks that were interested if they wanted to give tears of grief and a few words that we could build into a score.
SP: We brought the microscopic video recordings of the tears into the studio. We created improvisation scores based on the words participants wrote down about their grieving moments. We utilized Signal Culture’s audiovisual real-time processing tools and improvised together to create the audiovisual material for our installation at Harvestworks.
Tears for Lost Frequencies is on view at Harvestworks on Governors Island, NY. It is on view through October 27, 2024, located in the Harvestworks Art and Technology Program Building 10a, Nolan Park, Governors Island. The exhibition is open to the public from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Friday through Sunday.
You can find more of Senem’s work at senempirler.com and more of Monica’s work at monicaduncan.net. You can read about another recent Signal Culture Resident Artist here.
