Low Listening: Artistic Speculation, Practice, and Poetics of Infrasound in Coastal Environments, Minji Kim

This practice-based research develops Low Listening as an artistic and methodological approach to engaging with infrasound and low-frequency vibration in coastal environments. Positioned within sound art, acoustic ecology, and decolonial epistemologies, the project critically examines pre-existing listening practices that privilege technological neutrality and extractive modes of knowledge production. In response, it proposes listening as a situated vibrational practice grounded in embodied participation and multispecies co-presence.

The research unfolds through a series of site-specific artistic works developed across coastal infrastructures in the Netherlands and South Korea, including ports, tidal landscapes, reclaimed islands, and industrial shorelines. These works combine custom-built sensing instruments, participatory listening practices, field-based interventions, and speculative narrative forms. Rather than stabilising meaning or producing representational sound archives, the projects remain responsive to the material, political, and ecological conditions of each site, engaging infrastructures, nonhuman agents, and local histories as active participants.

By articulating Low Listening as an artistic and ecological methodology, the research contributes to contemporary debates on epistemology and environmental ethics in listening practice and sound art. It proposes listening as an ethical mode of dwelling within planetary infrastructures, cultivating sensitivity to the vibrational conditions that shape multispecies life under conditions of ecological crisis.