Christopher Steenson is an artist based between the north and south of Ireland. With a background in psychology and the sonic environment, his work uses sound, analogue photography and writing to forge ways of ‘listening to the future’. 

Drawing upon the open methodologies of John Cage, and the idea of ‘correspondences’ proposed by anthropologist Tim Ingold, Steenson’s sound-based artworks attempt to operate as a collaborative process, emerging as a field of potentialities between listeners and (speculative) environments. Often taking the form of installations, public interventions and broadcasts, these artworks use the conventions of radio and transmission-based infrastructure to locate audiences within a ‘dreamtime’ – a space in which pasts, presents, and futures are negotiated on a continuum. 

Recent artworks, such as Soft Rains Will Come (2022), eschew the idea of a fixed artwork, by broadcasting live within the installation space; operating as an ever-changing set of relations, similar to a weather system. This work seeks to inhabit an imaginary landscape, where ideas of success and failure are erased; life continues and adapts. On Chorus (2020) used the PA system infrastructure of Ireland’s national train service to broadcast the sounds of the spring dawn chorus, recorded during the first Covid-19 lockdown, across Ireland. This artwork sought to encourage actions of collective listening, as a way of bringing people together during times of physical distancing, whilst also imagining new architectures of cohabitation between human and non-human species.