How can listening function as a form of visual knowledge and reshape creative thinking in art and design education? This presentation examines Acoustic Images, a pedagogical framework developed over fourteen years through nineteen Sound Seminar gatherings with students from Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, each involving approximately 70 - 100 participants.

The framework draws on Pauline Oliveros’s Deep Listening as expanded attention; John Cage’s understanding of silence as an opening toward environmental sound; David Toop’s writing on sound, absence, and auditory imagination; and Janet Cardiff’s exploration of embodied listening and the relationship between heard and visible space. Each seminar explores a single theme through sustained collective listening, often in darkness, interspersed with still and moving images. These encounters evoke internal imagery and an experience akin to collective dreaming.

We ask whether these experiences become resources for students’ subsequent creative practice. Our approach is practice-based, drawing on our own creative practice, fourteen years of teaching the Sound Seminar, informal participant feedback, and observations during the seminars and in subsequent design classes. We observe students using sound as a starting point alongside visual references, and moving back and forth between sound and image to develop richer and more complex visual ideas.

We propose that the distinctive potential of Acoustic Images lies in this recurring movement between sound and image. The presentation examines this movement as a creative and pedagogical method: a way of thinking and making that extends beyond the listening experience itself.

Authors:
Yael Burstein, Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Israel
Guy Saggee, Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Israel

About the Presenter(s)
Yael Brustein is an artist and Senior Lecturer at Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design. Her interests include sound, listening, and pedagogy. She is currently developing the Sound Seminar, a project exploring Acoustic Images.

See this presentation on the full schedule – Tuesday Schedule

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