LISTENING ROOM:
Cassia Streb and Tim Feeney
Saturday, January 24, 2026 8pm

Automata’s Experimental Sound Series TAPETAIL presents an evening-length live listening event, a work by Cassia Streb and Tim Feeney, built from field recordings gathered in southwestern Utah and Zion National Park last November, combined with subtle live interventions in the space. Rather than treating these recordings as fixed documents, the artists approach them as materials—sounds shaped by circumstance, duration, and attention.

This piece is an extension of the duo’s existing body of work with what they describe as “hybrid” installations and actions, creating situations in which sound is placed alongside the existing conditions of a site. Their practice is grounded in close listening and an awareness of how sound operates in daily life, particularly within environments shaped by both human activity and natural processes. For Listening Room, they are interested in the particular intensity that field recordings can take on: the feeling that every incidental detail—a passing airplane, a bird call, a distant human presence—becomes charged once it has been framed by the act of recording.

A recent area of interest for Cassia and Tim has focused on what happens at the edges of sound: the moments after a sound has ended, and the residue left behind once a sequence of sounds has passed. This “after” might be an echo, but it might also be perceptual—how listening accumulates over time, how attention drifts and returns, and how experience subtly shifts without a clear point of transition.

Listening Room unfolds slowly and deliberately, inviting listeners to stay with the process as it develops. The emphasis is not on immediacy or spectacle, but on duration, accumulation, and the changing conditions of listening itself.