Video showcase of the Listening Field Experience.
There are probably easier ways to spend a weekend than filling the basement of a museum with projection screens, flowers, dirt, lights, motion-tracking cameras, and about a hundred other things that suddenly become very important when people are about to walk through the door. We did not choose one of those easier ways.
On August 1, The Listening Field took part in Digital Bloom, a festival in Houghton, Michigan, celebrating art, technology, and human creativity. For the event, we transformed part of the Carnegie Museum of the Keweenaw into an immersive journey built around one very simple object: a sunflower seed.
Around 150 people moved through the installation during the day, following a path through film, sound, projection, physical materials, interactive technology, and guided reflection. At the center of it was a question we have been exploring through The Listening Field: What happens when the physical and digital worlds work together to help us slow down, pay attention, and participate?
It Started With a Seed
When participants entered, they were greeted by a facilitator who placed a single sunflower seed in their hand and asked them to hold onto it. That seed stayed with them throughout the experience, giving them something small and physical to carry as they moved through each space.
From there, they entered a seated area facing a large projection screen. A short film guided them through a practice designed to create a moment of quiet before moving deeper into the installation.
Digital Bloom was a busy festival filled with people, music, art, and movement. We wanted this first space to offer a transition—a moment to arrive, notice what was happening around and within them, and spend a little time with the seed sitting in their hand.
Entering the Field
The next room was the heart of the installation. Participants entered a large circular space surrounded by fencing filled with sunflowers and other flowers. Lights passed through the plants, casting large floral shadows across the room.
At the center was a pile of earth, a place for one person to stand, and a large projection screen. Working with the team at Ayahi Create, we used a Kinect camera to create an environment that responded to the participant’s movement, building on an approach we previously explored with Pause 9 in Egypt.
Participants stepped into the circle with their sunflower seed and began another guided practice. At one point, they were invited to drop their physical seed into the earth. A digital seed then appeared on the screen in front of them.
Following the instructions, participants slowly raised their arms. As they moved, the image responded and the seed began to grow before their eyes.
This became the highlight of the experience for many people. For a moment, they were no longer simply watching something happen on a screen. Their body had become part of what was happening.
Technology was there—quite a lot of it, actually—but ideally, people stopped thinking about it. We are interested in digital tools not because we want people staring at more screens, but because of what those tools might help us notice: our bodies, our surroundings, the land, another person, or something happening within ourselves. Sometimes the best use of technology might be helping us forget that we are using technology at all.
From Seed to Flower
After leaving the interactive field, participants entered the final room. A short film played across another projection, combining visuals from The Listening Field’s online experience with original imagery created by our artist Ella Shaw.
After the more interactive experience in the previous room, this became a place to simply watch and take in what had happened. When participants emerged, a facilitator welcomed them back, thanked them for taking part, and handed them a sunflower.
They had entered carrying a seed and left carrying a flower. It was a small gesture, but one that completed the experience beautifully.
For those who wanted to stay longer, Mahala Berry also led an optional community art space outside the installation. People could create spin art with liquid paints, ask questions, talk about the project, or simply keep making something together.
Participation remained an invitation throughout the experience. Some people wanted to talk, some wanted to quietly leave, and some, quite reasonably, just wanted to play with paint.
The Night Before
Digital Bloom actually began for us the evening before the festival. Ella worked with the team from Fresh Coast Yoga to create an experimental yoga session using projected imagery throughout the space.
As participants moved through the practice, changing visuals surrounded the instructor and transformed the room around them. It became another experiment with the same idea: How can digital media change the feeling of a physical practice without taking it over?
The yoga was still the center, the instructor was still the guide, and the projection simply helped create a different environment around them.
What Happened When We Opened the Doors
About 150 people came through the installation during the festival, and we did not really know what to expect.
Immersive art is difficult to explain beforehand. Telling someone, “We’re going to hand you a sunflower seed, put you in a glowing room full of flowers and dirt, and then ask you to grow a digital plant with your arms” tends to create more questions than answers. Fair enough.
But once people entered, they understood. Some moved through quietly, while others stayed longer than expected or came out wanting to talk about what they had experienced. Many told us it was their favorite installation at the festival, and a large number signed up to stay connected with The Listening Field afterward.
We were grateful for the numbers, but what mattered most was seeing people actually enter the experience rather than simply look at it. That distinction is important to The Listening Field.
A Preview of What Is Growing
The Listening Field is a participatory art project exploring collective care, story, and regeneration, with much of the work centered around creating space for people impacted by sexual abuse.
Digital Bloom was not the full Listening Field. It was one interpretation of the ideas behind it and a chance to explore what happens when land, physical participation, art, and digital technology meet.
The larger project continues to grow in Wisconsin and online. Participants will be able to move through a guided practice, anonymously share something they are ready to release, and receive a unique sound signature created from their offering. Those sounds become part of the collective Field Radio, and for every submission, a sunflower seed is planted in the physical field.
Over time, those individual acts become something collective. Digital Bloom gave us a chance to bring a small part of that relationship to life through a seed placed into someone’s hand, a moment of attention, a physical act, a digital response, and eventually a flower carried back into the world.
For one day in Houghton, we got to watch that idea bloom.
