A figure in the San Francisco experimental music scene in the 1950s and 1960s, Pauline Oliveros later taught at the University of California, San Diego, collaborating with the physicist Lester Ingber. Developed in the late 1960s amid the anti-war movement, her Sonic Meditations evolved into Deep Listening, a multi-faceted sonic practice oriented towards healing and consciousness. Her text scores invited unmaking the division between performance and listening, often abandoning the idea of the “audience”. In her later years, Oliveros returned to the language of theoretical physics to express the “perception at the edge of the new”.
The Deep Listening Station presented in the Biennale Arte 2026 comprises a selection of Oliveros’s recordings, reproductions of individual and group scores, and performance ephemera, with relaxed seating. In Quantum Listening (published posthumously in 2022), Oliveros likens the practice of attention to the behaviour of an atom that, in jumping from one orbit to another, “occupies both spaces at once”. In her scores, a dot represents “focal attention” and a circle around it represents “global attention”. To access both modes at once, she proposed, could form the “foundation for a radically transformed social matrix”. She once wrote: “People sitting together in a circle are a living symbol of unity as well as a unified reality”.
—Irene Revell and Sarah Shin
