After 3 years of workshops and talks, WITHIN/Infinite Ear was the first presentation of the inquiry Infinite Ear as a space. This article is composed of the exhibition text and of a presentation of the five collections on display.

YOU ARE IN SENTRALBADET, a swimming pool long frequented by the city of Bergen’s residents and visitors. You jump in the pool. When you float in the water your body is caught in its undulations. You feel the variation of these movements and your ears perceive sound trajectories in a different manner. Listening has long been an enigma and certain sages believed the ear housed an ocean. The ocean in your ear moves at the pace of your stride, your red blood cells vibrate at very high-pitched frequencies, your skeleton can conduct vibrations in each part of the body and if a hundred of you were to walk on a bridge at a particular speed you could make it collapse. Water enters your ears and it stays there when you leave the pool. The spiral of the cochlear that transforms air compressions into electric impulsion and enables us to perceive sound is obstructed by the water. You gradually loose your hearing. You feel off kilter and have difficulty making out speech. You search your memory for sonic events. You strain to concentrate. Your attention is focused on the vibrations your whole body perceives, then you understand that the movement around you gives some indication about the sound you can no longer perceive. You see the trajectories of the people around you, you see spaces and groups as sonic forms, sometimes harmonious, sometimes oppressive. You invent a corporeal language that expresses the timbre of your voice which you can no longer hear. You are suddenly more attentive to these sensations despite their having always been there. They alter the way you see and communicate. This leads you to realize that hearing is connected to the other senses and that the relationship between these senses changes from person to person. You use equipment that amplifies and indicates the presence of sound around you. They say a sonic world exists beyond perception, in black holes, photosynthesis, the decomposition of fungi, and that there is no such thing as silence. Now you negotiate all of these sensations to create a music beyond hearing, that undulates like water on the body and on the surface of buildings. Welcome to the Infinite Ear.

The exhibition WITHIN / Infinite Ear proposes spaces to explore, understand and represent the diversity of the hearing experience. Combining the scientific history of hearing with the history of sonic arts and Deaf culture, these sites seek to renew the ways we relate to sound perception. The exhibition consists of a number of collections:

— Musical instruments that have the potential to address both Deaf and hearing persons developed by acoustic instrument makers, speaker designers, software engineers, and musicians who have been working with Tarek Atoui for the past years.

— A series of sonic exercises inspired by somatic practices such as deep listening (Pauline Oliveros), sound massage (Thierry Madiot), silent walk (Myriam Lefkowitz) and fake therapy (Valentina Desideri).

— Recordings of rare and inaudible phenomena displayed in a sonic café called the White Cat. While ordering a drink, one can experience more than thirty different recordings, of such things as: plant decomposition, the snapping sound of pistol shrimps or the collision of two black holes.

— A display of artworks, facsimile and objects from cultural, natural, and history museums that have addressed diverse hearing experiences, including  an installation by Alison O’Daniel.

— A varied program of films and videos (documentaries, filmic essays, artists’ videos, and dance performance recordings).

Assembled into one exhibition, these collections create both a social space and a space of production offering diverse listening situations in the forms of a concert venue, a studio, a visual display, a café and a screening room. All together, WITHIN/ Infinite Ear is a para-institution devoted to the diversity of hearing.