Sometimes a thought experiment, phrase, or idea presses to be realised beyond the mind. In the time it took to listen (see video above) began in 2022 as a few words scribbled on a post-it note: “a room where the live soundscapes of the last remaining quiet places on Earth can be heard.” From this seed grew more than thirty live audio transmission experiments throughout 2023, each one probing the limits of technology, testing conditions, and exploring the practice of listening itself.

Returning again and again to the same place, the process began to feel less like visiting a site and more like coming back to someone, not something or somewhere. Each encounter carried the familiarity of catching up with a friend. What I began to hear was a polyphony of voices ( birds, wind, distant engines, unseen presences ) calling out in overlapping chorus, asking, in their own ways, to be afforded attention.

Study No. 19 documents one such experiment: a real-time transmission from Wurundjeri Woiwurrung Country in the Eastern Highlands of Victoria into an auditorium in Naarm/Melbourne. Here, geography folds; the auditorium becomes a portal, pierced by lyrebirds, currawongs, passing vehicles. Within this collapsed space, biophony, geophony and anthropophony collide in tense simultaneity.

Broadcast through speakers placed centre stage, the transmission became more than a technical relay. It was an act of recognition. A way to bring their voices into a public space, to say: I see you, I hear you, I am listening to you and let us explore how others might listen too. What began as a private practice of attention transformed into a collective one, extending an invitation for an audience to attune, to offer the same presence I felt I had been asked to give.

Now entering a new phase, in collaboration with technologists and acoustic ecologists, the project seeks to carry this original thought experiment from language and imagination into physical form.

For most of Earth’s history, the living world was silent. No animal sang, cried or called; only the sounds of wind, water and shifting stone. Then, around 270 million years ago, in the Upper Permian of what is now France, a cricket-like insect (Permostridulus brongniarti) rubbed its wings together, producing what biologist David George Haskell has described as “the first known earthly voice.” Fossil evidence of a stridulatory file along its wing veins suggests that this tiny being was among the earliest to communicate through sound, marking a profound evolutionary turning point.

Fast-forward across geological ages to 1987, in the high forests of the Alaka‘i Plateau on Kaua‘i, Hawai‘i. The last surviving male of the Kaua‘i ʻōʻō (Moho braccatus) called out for a mate who would never come. His voice, recorded by ornithologists, was the final echo of a species whose song had once been woven into the island’s dawn chorus. Habitat destruction, invasive species and avian malaria had silenced it forever.

First Voice, Last Voice collapses the immense temporal gulf between these two moments. At its centre are two prints: a hard-etching of the fossilised wing of P. brongniarti, carrying the physical trace of the earliest known animal voice; and a spectrogram pigment print of the ʻōʻō’s final recorded call, translating its song into visual form. The prints rest side by side on a hollow plinth in a darkened octagonal chamber, illuminated by a single beam of light falling from an oculus above. From within the plinth, a soundscape emerges, interweaving reconstructed cricket chirps with the ʻōʻō’s haunting final notes. In this space, the earliest known breath of animal song and its silencing meet, inviting visitors to stand in the shared presence of emergence and ending.

Now Showing / Coming Soon transforms the cinema marquee, a device for announcing the next spectacle, into an instrument for countering tempus nullius: the illusion that the future belongs to no one. Borrowing the rolling texts, luminous façades and typography of movie theatres, the work replaces film titles with phrases that challenge the cultural habit of imagining the future as an empty frontier and unclaimed territory.

It was developed through experiments in colour, format and display, eventually taking form as a lightbox marquee. By adopting the scale, glow, and graphic language of popular entertainment, the work carries messages rarely seen in that context. One reads “we are all ancestors” : an adaptation of architect, designer, and writer Richard Buckminster Fuller’s 1969 observation in Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth that “we are all astronauts on a little spaceship called Earth.” Here, the focus shifts from space to time, reframing Fuller’s metaphor to underline the work’s call to recognise our role in shaping what lies ahead.

As philosopher Roman Krznaric observes, “humankind has colonised the future.” The same colonial logic that once denied and erased the presence of peoples from land and place also extends to time and the future — yet this, too, is an illusion. By reappropriating a familiar public medium, Now Showing / Coming Soon collapses the distance between now and the yet-to-come. It insists that the future is not a void, but already inhabited (by generations who will come after us, human and more-than-human alike) and is continually shaped by the choices we make today.