Preemptive Listening is a work of non-fiction cinema which re-imagines sirens in order to forge a new understanding of present and long term emergency. The siren serves as a worldwide cipher of potential trauma, an emblem warning of climate catastrophe, a mouthpiece for sonic governance and crisis management. Many sirens are relics from WW2 and the Cold War, repurposed to communicate the threats of extreme weather, a collective commemorative pause, or resurrected to test disaster preparedness.

Through a soundtrack of new siren sounds composed by an array of experimental musicians, the film asks: Does an alarm have to be alarming? How can we counter alarm fatigue, both as a lived reality and as a metaphor for our current state? Can we envision sounds not only scored to immediacy, but signals set to a longer temporal frame, sounding the alarm for the distant future, the cries on the cusp of ecological catastrophe? Can we imagine sirens beyond the human? The soundtrack features the endlessly escalating sounds of planetary data; animal howls and the grief of extinction; soaring banshee-like warnings; defiant trumpets; intricate harp permutations; the sounds of the earth’s core. The film posits the siren’s loud glissando wail as a conditioned and learned signal, one that can potentially be rewired.

Aura Satz (b. 1974, Barcelona) is a London-based artist based who works with film, sound, performance and sculpture. Her works explore a distributed, expanded and shared notion of voice, and are made in conversation, using dialogue as both method and subject matter. Satz has made several film portraits of listening and compositional practices as well as works centred on sound technology and unusual notation systems. ‘Preemptive Listening’ is her first feature, with support from an artist’s residencies at Walker Arts Centre and EMPAC, and funded by an AHRC fellowship hosted at the Royal College of Art.

She has performed, exhibited and screened her work internationally, including Tate Modern, BFI Southbank, Hayward Gallery, Sydney Biennale, NTT InterCommunication Center Tokyo, High Line Art NY, the Rotterdam Film Festival, MoMA NY, Sharjah Art Foundation, Kadist San Francisco, Onassis Stegi, and Sonic Acts. She has presented solo exhibitions at the Wellcome Collection; the Hayward Gallery project space; John Hansard Gallery; George Eastman Museum; Dallas Contemporary; ARTIUM, Museo Vasco de Arte Contemporáneo; Kunstnernes Hus; as well as special screening programmes at the Rotterdam Film Festival, The New York Film Festival, Tate Britain, Whitechapel Gallery and more. Her films are distributed by LUX.

Camille Norment is an Oslo-based multimedia artist, who was born and educated in the U.S. She represented Norway at the Venice Biennale in 2015, and her work has been shown at a number of museums worldwide, including the San Francisco Museum of Art, the Pushkin Museum in Moscow and MoMA New York. Upcoming projects include a commission for the DIA Foundation and the San Francisco Symphony.

Aura Satz previously had a solo exhibition at Kunstnernes Hus titled Warnings in Waiting – a sound installation exploring the siren as symbol and warning system, through film footage from around the world and new musical interpretations of the siren's sound.

Read more about Aura Satz' exhibition which was shown in the lower hall at Kunstnernes Hus in the summer of 2023.

Installastion views: Tor S. Ulstein/Kunstdok