Book of Receivings was initiated as a way of testing how information might move through matter, bodies and place without relying on language. Transmission is treated here as attunement rather than signal exchange.

The project began around 2014 alongside my clay recording research, through an investigation into how affect, intention and sensory information might be imparted into material and later retrieved. Early work took the form of prototypes and exploratory experiments, approached as provisional research rather than performance.

Judith Hamann is a cellist, I asked her to collaborate because of her prior work with flocking and proprioceptive sensing. This included learning how groups interpret one another’s movement through non-verbal coordination, shared timing and embodied attention. At the time, my own practice was focused on navigating sensory excess and tending to latent or unrecognised modes of reception in the body.

I was developing early transmission devices to test whether sensory information might be recorded into material and later received. Proprioception was not widely spoken about then, and it became a point of shared understanding rather than a shared method. Judith brought embodied knowledge of relational sensing and group attunement. I brought an inquiry into sensory overload, latency and material transcription. These parallel practices met within the project and shaped its reciprocal structure.

Prototype transmission devices were developed during this early phase, testing how material assemblies might hold, transmit or modulate sensory information. These experiments informed the final devices, which were fabricated and refined in 2018.

The final devices were built from rocks gathered from shared sites. Each rock was wrapped with string soaked in mixtures of bodily fluids and place-based materials. Water, residue, sediment and remnants from Country were incorporated. These wrapped stones functioned as sending and receiving bodies rather than symbolic objects.

At the outset, string was stretched between paired rocks across sites, threaded through plants, trees, ground and stone. It was treated as a connective line rather than a conduit, a way of establishing rhythm and mutual orientation. After several cycles, the string was cut. Sending and receiving continued without physical linkage, once a shared cadence had been established. Each participant tended their device separately, spending time sensing place before any act of sending.

Each night, both collaborators sent. Each morning, both received. Messages were not decided in advance. They arose from bodily awareness, environmental conditions and situational listening. Receivings were translated into abstract imagery rather than words, using inks and quills made from site materials. Notes were kept separately. Comparisons were made only after both sending and receiving had taken place, so that no overlap could influence the process.

The project drew on the myth of King Midas and the whispering reeds. A secret spoken into the ground, carried by plants, and released later through wind. This story operated as as structural guide. The earth as witness. Plants as translators. Time as carrier.

“When Apollo punished King Midas by giving him donkey ears, only the king and his barber knew. Unable to keep the secret, the barber whispered it into the earth. ‘King Midas has Donkey’s ears!’ Reeds grew from the ground, and when the wind passed through them, the secret was heard.”

From the myth of King Midas, quote referenced from research on earthquake studies, seismic listening and ground transmission

As the project progressed, distance increased. Participants moved interstate and overseas. The protocol held. Messages continued to be sent and received. At times we referred to ourselves, and to the world more broadly, as sentient cavities: resonant chambers through which what was already moving could pass and be received.

Over time, we began referring to this field as the GSB, the Greater Sensory Being. Not as belief, but as a working term for the condition in which bodies, materials, weather and place appeared to participate together.

Book of Receivings was shared through talks and a small presentation, but much of the work remains unexhibited. Its primary output is not an object, but an archive of receivings: marks, clues and records of sensory understanding. The project resists proof and does not seek validation. Its value lies in what it trained our bodies to notice.

Across the work, matter is treated as an active participant rather than a passive carrier. Sending and receiving are understood as relational acts that move through bodies, landscapes and time. The project asks whether we are operators of systems, or whether we are already signals moving within a larger sensory ecology.

Book of Receivings remains unfinished. It is a living archive of attempts to listen differently, to receive without capture, and to stay with uncertainty as a condition of relation.