Lesser Arcadia is an audio work in four episodes. This weird sonic fiction takes the form of a picaresque about ordinary secret knowledge and a park that is turning into a Zone. The narrative relates a protagonist's semi- or alter-rational route through a city park in counterpoint with the story of a starving seagull who finds itself in the Scottish Highlands surviving on roadkill. Lesser Arcadia occupies pockets and margins where alternative possibilities are conceivable but also struggle to be realized – where nothing is hidden but everything is obscure. The project is conceived and written by Johanna Linsley with composition and sound design by Jan Mertens.

The work was commissioned for Sentient Matter at D21 in Leipzig
https://www.d21-leipzig.de/

Lesser Arcadia

The Learning Tapes are three-part audio work for voice, text and electronics. Made to accompany The Catalogue for the Public Library of Private Acts, an interactive performance/installation commissioned by the Wellcome Collection, London, for the exhibition Institute of Sexology

The Learning Tapes

Selected episodes from a radio series created by UnionDocs (www.uniondocs.org) for WKCR 89.9fm, the Columbia University Radio Station in New York. The series was broadcast in 2004.

Commons Radio

Lesser Arcadia Episode 1

Lesser Arcadia Episode 2

Lesser Arcadia Episode 3

Lesser Arcadia Episode 4

Lesser Arcadia - Full Work

This learning experience is aimed at equipping participants with the tools necessary to identify, isolate and summon your own ghostly spectre from the acoustic atmosphere of your choice. Every ringtone, white noise machine, laptop fan or refrigerator buzz has the potential to contain a latent haunting. Every inside joke, gossip circuit and open secret might, if you listen the right way, have the capacity to raise the dead. Drawing on common affects like revenge, melancholy and ecstatic force to tune your senses, you will develop a sensitivity to wraiths, apparitions, and lingering presences.

Sound design by Jan Mertens

Commissioned by Queer Extension: https://www.queerextension.org/

Sonic Spectral Summoning

Episode 10 of Commons Radio, a series created by UnionDocs (www.uniondocs.org). This episode is a collage of texts, interviews and sounds made by members of UnionDocs, and features interviews with the artist Krzysztof Wodiczko, legendary theatre director Anne Bogart, and psychic Birdie Lawson.

The episode was produced and edited by Johanna Linsley

Commons Radio 10

Episode 11 of Commons Radio, a series created by UnionDocs (www.uniondocs.org) for WKCR 89.9fm, the radio station of Columbia University in New York. This episode is an experimental response to the theatre production Tragedia Endogonedia by the Italian company Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio. The episode includes interviews with the company's director, Romeo Castelluci, recorded at Montclair State University in 2005, and music by the composer Scott Gibbon.

This episode was produced and edited by Christopher Allen and Johanna Linsley

Commons Radio 11

Collaboration with sound artist Jan Mertens for the Catalogue for the Public Library of Private Acts, commissioned by the Wellcome Collection for the Institute of Sexology exhibition.

jhlinsley

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