Dr Aura Satz

Aura’s work encompasses film, sound, performance and sculpture, in order to conceptualise a distributed, expanded and shared notion of voice. Works are made in conversation and use dialogue as both method and subject matter. She has explored the history of sound technology, sound notation systems, code and encryption, and ways in which these might resist standardisation, generating new soundscapes, and in turn new forms of listening and attending to the other. She uses sound composition and film editing techniques to reflect and enact diverse expanded listening strategies.

Her documentary feature film ‘Preemptive Listening’ re-imagined the siren in order to ask: how can we address alarm fatigue, both as a lived reality and as metaphor for our current state? Does an alarm have to be alarming?

• AHRC Research, Development and Engagement Fellowship; Long-form cinema residency at Walker Arts Center; Artist post-production residency at EMPAC (2022–24)
• OKRE (Opening Knowledge across Research and Entertainment) R&D (2022)
• Science Gallery commission in collaboration with astrophysics department King’s College (2018–19)
• Arts Council England Awards (2011, 2012, 2015)
• Leverhulme Artist’s residency at the Institute of Sound and Vibration Research, the Department of Music, and the John Hansard Gallery/ University of Southampton (2015-16)
• Practitioner-in-residence at Chelsea College of Arts (2014–15)
• Artist-in-Residence at the Ear Institute, UCL, London (2009–10)
• Wellcome Trust Award (2009–10)
• Henry Moore Post-Doctoral Sculpture Fellowship, at the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL (2002–5).

Preemptive Listening – Winner of the CPH Dox NEW:VISION award and St. Moritz Art Film Festival Best Feature prize, 2024. Shortlisted for awards at Dokufest, Kosovo; Reykjavík International Film Festival; DMZ International Documentary Film Festival, South Korea; Porto/Post/Doc festival, Porto; Imagine Science Festival, NY; Central Scotland Documentary Festival, Stirling, 2024; InScience film festival, Nijmegen; Filmadrid, Madrid, 2025.

‘Making a Diagonal with Music’ shortlisted for awards at Oberhausen International Short Film Festival; EXis Experimental Film and Video Festival, Seoul; IndieLisboa International Film Festival, Lisbon, 2020

Preemptive Listening (part 1: the Fork in the Road – Shortlisted at Festival du Nouveau Cinema, Montreal, 2019

Chromatic Aberration – Winner of Best Vanguard Film Competition in Lima Independiente International Film Festival. Shortlisted for awards at New Horizons International Film Festival, Wroclaw; Filmadrid, Madrid; Curtas Vila do Conde International Film Festival; Festival du Nouveau Cinema, Montreal; Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival; International Film Festival Bratislava, 2015

Shortlisted for the Jarman Award, 2012

Shortlisted for the Samsung New Media Art+ Prize, 2012.

Exhibitions

Aura has performed, exhibited and screened including at Tate Modern, Tate Britain, the Hayward Gallery, Barbican Art Gallery, ICA, BFI Southbank, Whitechapel Gallery, Science Gallery London (London); Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art (Gateshead); InterCommunication Centre (Tokyo); Lentos Museum (Linz); IMMA (Dublin); Sydney Biennale (Sydney); High Line Art (New York); Gertrude Contemporary (Melbourne); De Appel Art Centre (Amsterdam); Kunsthal (Rotterdam); Walker Arts Center (Minneapolis); MOCA (Toronto); Sharjah Art Foundation; Kadist (San Francisco); Onassis Stegi (Athens); Amant Foundation (NY); Bangkok Kunsthalle (Bangkok); The Harvard College Observatory, Center for Astrophysics, Harvard & Smithsonian (Boston); Smithsonian National Portrait gallery (Washington DC); Ennova Art Biennale (Langfang).

Solo exhibitions include the Wellcome Collection (London, 2010–11); the Hayward Project Space (London, 2013); Paradise Row gallery (London, 2013); Gallery 44 (Toronto, 2014); The Gallery, Tyneside Cinema (Newcastle, 2014); George Eastman Museum (Rochester NY, 2015); John Hansard Gallery (Southampton, 2015–16); Dallas Contemporary (2016); Fridman Gallery (NY, 2016 and 2018); ARTIUM, Museo Vasco de Arte Contemporáneo (Basque Country, 2022), Kunstnernes Hus (Oslo, 2023); Te Uru Waitakere Contemporary Gallery (Auckland, 2023); Museu de la Música de Barcelona, with LOOP festival (2023); WEST (the Hague, 2025); as well as special screening programmes at the Rotterdam Film Festival (2013), The New York Film Festival (2013), The Cinematheque Vancouver (2015), Tate Britain (with Lis Rhodes 2014); Whitechapel Gallery (2016); HOME (2017, Manchester); Rewire festival (2022).

Her films are distributed by LUX.

Publications and interviews

• Preemptive Listening: The Sonic Politics of Emergency - conversations, essays and performances extending from the film by Aura Satz. (2025). Guest-edited issue of Disclaimer. Cavallo F, Garcia-Velazco B, Revell I, Satz A, Stern, J, Umansky (eds.) https://disclaimer.org.au/contents/preemptive-listening/
• ‘Film as Warning, Film as Score: Aura Satz and Lis Rhodes'. (Feb 2025). Available at the Walker Reader
• ‘From Emergency to Emergence: Aura Satz’s Preemptive Listening’ in conversation with Sophie Cavoulacos. (Feb 2024). Available at MoMA magazine
• ‘Aura Satz Invites Us to Reimagine the Siren: In Conversation with Tendai John Mutambu'. (Feb 2024). Available at Ocula Magazine
• ‘Symphony of sirens: an interview with Aura Satz, David Toop, Elaine Mitchener, Evelyn Glennie and Raven Chacon'. (April 2024). Available at The Wire Magazine
• ‘Aura Satz's ‘Preemptive Listening’ Investigates the Power of Sirens’, interview with Xenia Benivolski. (April 2024). Available at Frieze Magazine
• ‘Aura Satz in conversation with Quinn Latimer.' (Summer 2024). Available at Mousse Magazine 88
• ‘Fostering Practices of Gathering, Listening, Negotiating, and Speaking Up: Hassan Khan, Emily Pethick and Aura Satz in conversation with Barbara Casavecchia and Leonardo Bigazzi', (2024). In Bigazzi, L. (ed.) VISIO – Moving Images in Europe since the 2010s. Milan: Lenz Press, pp. 44-65.
• ‘A conversation with Kodwo Eshun, Anjalika Sagar, Sukhdev Sandhu, Aura Satz, and Deborah Stratman', (2024). In Sandhu, S. and Stratman, D. (eds.) Geologic Listening. NY: Union Docs.
• ‘Preemptive Listening’ (2024) in Siren (some poetics). Latimer, Q. and Demeuse, S. (eds) NY: Dancing Foxes Press/Amant. [Exhibition catalogue]
• ‘Lis Rhodes and Aura Satz in conversation’ (2021) in Payne, S. and Vallance, A. (eds.) Film in Conversation: Contemporary Perspectives on Experimental Cinema. London: Contact Press.
• ‘The Institute of Signals and Noise and the Wail That Was Warning’: a Conversation Between Aura Satz and David Toop’ in Listen, Recalibrate. (2018). NY: Fridman Gallery. [Exhibition catalogue]
• ‘A conversation between Stephanie Rosenthal, Neha Choksi, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Lee Mingwei and Aura Satz,’ (2016) in Rosenthal, S. (ed.) The future is already here - it’s just not evenly distributed - Sydney Biennale. Common Editions. [Exhibition catalogue]
• Satz, A. and Parikka, J. (2016). 'Impulsive Synchronisation: A Conversation on Military Technologies and Audiovisual Arts,' in Beck, J. and Bishop, R. (eds.) Cold War Legacies: Systems, Theory, Aesthetics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 70-82.
• Satz, A. and Gardner, T. (2016). ‘A Rhythm that Marches’, in Gardner, T. and Voegelin, S. Music - Sound Art: Historical Continuum and Mimetic Fissures. London: Zero Books, pp. 109-120.
• Satz, A. (2014). ‘Tableaux Vivants: Inside the Statue’, in Hudek, A. (ed.) The Object, Documents of Contemporary Art series. Whitechapel Art Gallery, MIT.
• Satz, A. (2013) ‘Typewriter, Pianola, Slate, Phonograph: Recording Technologies and Automisation,’ in Mays, S. and Matheson, N. (eds) The Machine and the Ghost: Technology and Spiritualism in 19th to 21st Century Art and Culture. Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp.37-56.
• Satz, A. (2010) 'The Conviction of its Existence:' Silas Weir Mitchell, Phantom Limbs and Phantom Bodies in Neurology and Spiritualism', Salisbury, L. and Shail, A. (eds) Neurology and Modernity: A Cultural History of Nervous Systems, 1800-1950. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp.113-129.
• Satz, A. and Wood, J. (eds.) (2009) Articulate Objects: Voicing and Listening to Sculpture and Performance. Lausanne: Peter Lange publishers.

Peer Reviewed Journal articles

• Cavallo, F., Dorfman, P. ,Edworthy, J., Lavia L., Ouzounian, G., Revell, I., Satz, A., Stern, J. (2024) ‘Preemptive Listening: A Roundtable Discussion about Sirens', Sound Studies 10:2, pp. 313–332.
• Cox C. and Satz, A. (2017). ‘Aura Satz and Christoph Cox in conversation'. The Moving Image Review & Art Journal (MIRAJ), issue 7:2, pp. p. 134-146.
• Clark, M.H., Kogut, S., Lane, P., Satz, A., Stults, C., & Yue, G. (2017). ‘Wild Sounds: Roundtable with Mary Helena Clarke, Sandra Kogut, Penny Lane, Aura Satz, Chris Stults and Genevieve Yue', Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture 39:3, Documentary Audibilities, pp. 338-355.
• Satz, A. (2013) ‘Touching Sound: An Interview with Jayne Parker by Aura Satz', The International Journal of Screendance, 3, ‘After Deren’ (Spring), pp. 120-127.
• Satz, A. (2010). ‘Music of its own Accord', Leonardo Music Journal, 20 (December), pp. 73–78.

Aura has lectured in art schools across the UK at BA, MA and PhD level. This has included posts at the London Consortium (2005–13), University of Kent, Goldsmith’s College, University of London, Chelsea College of Art & Design, Camberwell College of Arts, Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design, the Slade School of Fine Art, London College of Communication, the Royal Academy of Arts, amongst others.

Internationally she has been invited to give public lectures, coordinate workshops, tutorials, and crits for students on the MA in Media Design & Communication at the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam (Netherlands), the MA course at the Bergen Academy of Art and Design (Norway), School of Arts in Ghent (Ghent), the Pratt Institute, School of Visual Arts, Gallatin School of Individualised Study at NYU, Columbia University, the New School (New York), Monash University (Melbourne), Aalto University (Helsinki), Harvard Centre for Astrophysics (Boston), FHNW Academy of Art and Design (Basel) and more.

In 2021 she was Visiting Artist in Residence at the Sound Art MA, School of Arts Institute of Chicago, where she was invited again in 2022 and 2025.

Her AHRC-funded film Preemptive Listening premiered at Tate Modern, with a screening, performances, talks and a symposium over three days in April 2024, later published in a guest-edited issue of Disclaimer, a journal for new thinking and writing on listening and sound published by Melbourne-based organisation Liquid Architecture. The project involved numerous collaborations, partnerships and consultations, including the Warning Research Centre at UCL; the Noise Abatement Society; the Nuclear Consulting Group; the Crisis and Disaster Management course, Portsmouth University; the Energy Demand Research Centre (EDRC), University of Sussex; the Walker Arts Centre Minneapolis; Sonic Acts; Kunstnernes Hus Oslo; RIVER (Revitalising Indigenous Values for Earth’s Regeneration); Stop Sizewell C; 3-sided Cube app developers. Additional support and funding included OKRE, Creative New Zealand, Sonic Acts, Tyneside Cinema, EMPAC Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer, AVEK, CPH:FORUM, Ji.hlava New Visions Forum, Kodak, Abandon Normal Devices festival, Culture Warrington.

Between 2015 and 2016 she collaborated with composer Tim Watts and historian Ulinka Rublack at Cambridge University centred on Kepler and the Witch, culminating in a film and opera.

Between 2012 and 2015 she was on the advisory board of the artist-run organisation and film lab no.w.here, in Bethnal Green.