Open air vault, chamber without walls –– Listening Booth arises out of an abiding interest in the brightening effect of being listened to, even for a brief period of time. Listening Booth is enclosed not by a structure but by regard. Mostly we’ve offered Listening Booth in Dolores Park in San Francisco so far. Anyone who happens to come by is welcome to sit down in “the booth.”

The materials are simple: blue painting tape, two chairs, a small table, a small ceramic duck, undivided attention. The basic form is that an attentive listener listens to participants for up to five minutes, then bows and says Thank You.
Participants can choose the level of listenership they’d like:
a. silence
b. yes, mm hmm’s, nodding etc (non-lexical backchannel responses)
c. I hear you, etc; (verbal, neutral responses)
d. offering a story, example, or analogous situation;
e. offering advice, questions, comments, etc.
f. freestyle

As a poet, I always have my ear cocked, and this formalizes this process, letting the listening be the actual piece itself, taking the emphasis off the product. I am not documenting their actual speech; rather my emphasis is on creating a context for heightened attention. Attention itself is the medium. People can talk about whatever they’d like, something preoccupying them, a problem they’re trying to solve, a personal narrative, something they need to tell someone else, but can’t (yet), etc.

Listening in this way provides an opportunity for face-to-face conversation when much public conversation now happens with either an absent listener, i.e. on a cell phone, or an absent speaker, i.e. with an Ipod. I’m curious about the effect of how direct listening slightly shifts the general brisk forward momentum of traffic in public spaces, allowing a small temporal dilation, a softening and widening of attention. I did this project as part of Southern Exposure’s Day of Public Art for the first time in December. It was extremely instructive to see how much could happen in 5 minutes, how a line of blue masking tape on the sidewalk created an enclosure, and how someone’s bearing would would lighten.

One person wrote in the journal: “I set the booth to freestyle and pretty soon it was calling me on my stuff. These are beautiful days.” Other people talked about how they were surprised at having so much to say, and that having a neutral listener had a catalytic effect. Many commented on walking away with a heightened sense of being heard and a finer attunement to listening to others. So many people asked if they could be listeners that I would like to offer a series of writing workshops with an emphasis on listening. In doing so, I’d like to help create a seamless social resource not dependent on real estate, but depending only on one person paying attention to another person. A larger intention is to create a corps of listeners who can set up in public spaces and listen to pedestrians in their daily rounds.

Just as we can walk away from a sculpture with a heightened sense of some aspect of form in space, participants walked away from these 5-minute interactions with a sense of the different “weights” of interaction, for example, the quality of silent attention, vs. advice.