“Listening In” is a column dedicated to sound, music, and listening practices in contemporary art and its spaces. This section focuses on how listening practices are being investigated and reconfigured by artists working across disciplines in the twenty-second century. This year the column is curated by Barbara London and explores how artists continue to investigate sound by incorporating up-to-the-minute software and electronic apparatuses to their practice. The best sound artwork takes its audience on an inspiring journey, one that offers fresh insight into what it means to be in the world, construing something animate and distinct by means of inorganic tools. It is through the tension between the haptic and the neutral that artists and observers discover new experiences.

Born in Spain in 1974 and now based in London, Aura Satz works with moving images and sonic sculptural forms to create what may appear to be minimal acoustic artworks but in fact are packed with metaphor and original ideas. She engages with performance, film, photography, and sound installation. With work that is a delightful mix of archaic technologies, she explores the complex marriage of human and machine and the uncertainty it engenders in bodily awareness and human agency. What follows is a re-elaboration of our conversation from season 2.0, episode 11, of “Barbara London Calling.”