a Kaka's Soham Meditation — Brinkley Warren

A 17-minute binaural headphone piece: a guided Soham meditation led by a guru who is also a parrot — voiced by Warren, pitch-shifted into absurdity. The audience laughs. The parrot is funny. And the parrot is also guiding them, truly, through one of the most foundational of all mantras. Soham: I am that — the sound the breath already makes, so on the inhale, ham on the exhale.

Beneath the parrot-guru, three sonic geographies braided in binaural audio: kākā parrots in flight over Wellington's Prince of Wales Park, a Catholic festival in Puebla, and recordings from the United States. The binaural production is the conceptual engine, not a finish: heard on headphones, the three places occupy three-dimensional positions around the listener's head at once, an audio augmented reality laid over wherever the listener actually sits — a heterotopia, a space that occupies a location without being locatable. The instruction is to listen in your favorite meditation spot, undistracted: the listener's own most private geography becomes the fourth space, and the work completes only through that geolocative participation. The story it tells lives across three real places, a fictional guru, and the listener's own room — transmedia in the strict sense, distributed across channels that only the listener's attention unifies.

The Zen tradition has always used humor and paradox to short-circuit the rational mind. The hilarious parrot is the koan. The laugh and the breath are the same breath. The parrot laughs you into stillness.

Binaural recordings. Designed for headphones.

Headphones recommended · 17 minutes · find a quiet place to listen

a Kaka's Soham Meditation — the work itself.

Lineage — the binaural, headphone-delivered audio augmented reality of Janet Cardiff's audio walks, which install a fabricated world inside the listener's own perceptual space, and Teri Rueb's locative sound art (Trace, 1999), where the listener's position completes the work. Its braided three-country field recording belongs to the acoustic-ecology and soundscape tradition (R. Murray Schafer; Hildegard Westerkamp) and to Pauline Oliveros's Deep Listening, which made attention itself the medium. The distribution of one story across multiple places and channels is transmedia storytelling in Henry Jenkins's sense (Convergence Culture, 2006), while the comic guru descends from Fluxus humor and the Zen koan — the joke deployed to disable the analytic mind and produce a genuine shift in awareness.

Apparatus — binaural microphones, three-country field recordings (Wellington, Puebla, United States), Apple Soundtrack Pro, voice-changing technology, headphones (required).