Sections
Neven Lochhead (NL): Neil, I want to start our conversation with a bit of a wide-angle topic - the question of ‘the open’ - before we zoom in on some of the more specific projects, processes, and interests in your practice.
The concept of ‘openness’ relates to the Sound + Synthesis resource, in which this interview also appears, on a couple of registers. The first register relates to the circulation of the course itself as an open educational resource (OER). Through using this vehicle, the course is trying to have a certain ‘porous’ condition, attempting to position itself more openly in relation to individuals and groups within and beyond the infrastructures of higher education, where the original course was first designed. In this way, the OER and its components are meant to be taken up and ‘versioned’ by different users, operating at differing scales, from individual learners, to informal groups, to classrooms, etc. An instance of this happened in 2025 when I worked with Dr. Malini Guha at Carleton University to co-design a graduate workshop around work on ciné-geography. We repurposed and altered prompt structures from Sound + Synthesis dealing with listening and description, creating new forks in an OER called Cinéscription which **builds from the grammars of subtitling.
Students at Queen’s University working through the prompt The Timekeepers, as part of the Sound + Synthesis course, delivered in Winter 2023.
The second register of ‘openness’ has to do with the phenomena of sound and listening itself.
The relation of sound to notions of the ‘open’ is something that I discuss with the artist and writer Amanda Beech (CalArts) in her own interview, also included as part of the OER. We look at a prevalent habit in sound studies and contemporary artistic production, where the aural is often taken up as the more ‘open’ sense. Hearing gets elevated and often set antagonistically against a perceived cold linearity of vision and the image. Through making this contrast, sound can assert its more open qualities, and hearing will claim a special status among the senses. Through these binary oppositions, sound then becomes a carrier for an aesthetic experience of openness, as a carrier of sheer, flux, porosity, ambiguity, indeterminacy, and responsiveness.
So, for me and my own work, the question of ‘the open,’ and how this concept drives specific approaches to both educational practice and artistic production, is something that weaves itself into Sound + Synthesis in significant ways, and I was hoping we could untangle it as a concept together.
I want to note here that I’ve become interested in thinking about openness in relation to my educational, artistic, and curatorial projects very much through engaging with your own practice and writings. I first encountered your workshop-design practice when I was Director of Programming at SAW Video / Knot Project Space in Ottawa, where you ran a modified workshop score from Shift/Work, in 2019. Throughout the workshop, I experienced the ways in which its organizational structure disassembled and redistributed itself through a deliberate exposure to openness. The prompts built a reflexive awareness for those participating in the workshop environment, allowing them to approach what they were doing as a site that was open to their own active co-construction and calibration of the workshop system. They would become architects of their learning environment, rather than just players in it.