The Nomadic Listener

The Nomadic Listener is an augmented book project developed between 2012 and 2019. Based on the author’s artistic research on migration, contemporary urban experience, and sonic alienation, the book is composed of a series of texts stemming from psychogeographic explorations of contemporary cities, including Copenhagen, Berlin, Brussels, London, Kolkata, Vienna, Delhi, Hong Kong, Mumbai, Amsterdam, New York, Paris, among others. Each text is an act of listening, where the author records his surrounding environment and attempts to attune to the sonic fluctuations of movement and the passing of events. What surfaces is a collection of meditations on the minutiae of life movingly interwoven with the author’s own memories, associations, desires and reflections. As readers we are brought inside a tender map of contemporary urban experience, and the often lonely, surprising, and random interactions found in traveling. The Nomadic Listener integrates a parallel set of drawings based on the original field recordings, and appear as ghostly renderings of the corresponding experiences and places. The recordings are published by Gruenrekorder and accessed through a QR code included in the book. - Budhaditya Chattopadhyay is a media artist, researcher, and writer. Incorporating diverse media, such as sound, text, and moving image, Chattopadhyay produces works for large-scale installation and live performance addressing contemporary issues of climate crisis, human intervention in the environment and ecology, urbanity, migration, race and decolonization. Chattopadhyay has received numerous fellowships, residencies and international awards. His works have been widely exhibited, performed or presented across the globe, and published by Gruenrekorder (Germany) and Touch (UK). His writings on various issues around sound and listening regularly appear on peer-reviewed journals, magazines, and other publications internationally, with two books forthcoming. Chattopadhyay holds a PhD in artistic research and sound studies from the Academy of Creative and Performing Arts, Leiden University; he recently completed a one-year postdoctoral fellowship.