Remembering Rebecca Collins
A series of events to celebrate and continue the legacy of our colleague Dr Rebecca Collins, with contributions from many of her collaborators and a chance to hear one of her last works.
Sound/Science/Art: Unexpected encounters
Workshop | 2pm | Atrium, Alison House
Johanna Linsley | Sonic detection: Echoes from the future
Lecture-performance | 5:30pm | West Court
Stolen voices and parameters for uncertainty
Concert | 7pm | West Court

Sound/Science/Art:
Unexpected encounters
Workshop | 2pm | Atrium, Alison House
Open to Edinburgh University staff including PG students
How can artistic research and practice expand the imaginary possibilities of scientific research?
What is the artistic potential of scientific data?
If we can listen to dark matter, what else might be possible?
If we can play music with fish, what else might be possible?
Rebecca Collins was, in her own words, “interested in para-institutional practices and the instigation of invisible yet generous infrastructures for holding thought, sharing knowledge”. Her work explored “the creative and critical potential of composing unexpected encounters between artists, scholars, experts, and individuals who might share curiosity for being in process together”. Particularly in her most recent work, Rebecca recognised that creative practice and artistic research could offer different and distinctive ways of approaching, imagining and communicating scientific problems; and that reciprocally, ways of knowing and thinking that characterise different scientific disciplines could inform and inspire artistic work as well. In this spirit, and in tribute, we are inviting researchers, artists and thinkers from across the University of Edinburgh’s three colleges and whose work deals in any way with sound and/or listening to meet for an afternoon of exploration and conversation.
Please register via Eventbrite here, giving some information in your field of research and your reason for attending.
Johanna Linsley
‘Sonic detection: Echoes from the future’
Lecture-performance | 5:30pm | West Court
Book your space (free) via Eventbrite
Sonic detection is a framework for open-ended, collaborative intellectual and creative practice situated between sound studies, performance studies, and interdisciplinary writing, emerging from a decade-long collaboration between Rebecca Collins and Johanna Linsley. What began as a slowly evolving series of eavesdropping incursions on the east coast of the UK became an ongoing practice of aural attention modulated through text, performance and sound. The work was the product of exchange with multiple interlocutors, some formal and structured, some incidental and overheard. None of these meetings or conversations were thought of as separate or casual, but were instead incorporated into the developing investigation, as somehow informing what we shaped as it took shape — this is the performative apparatus we brought into being. In this performance lecture, I share artefacts, clues and a school of sustainable red herrings as I reckon with the echoes and resonances this work carries forward into the future.
Johanna Linsley is an artist, writer and researcher working across performance, text and sound. She worked for ten years with the late artist Rebecca Collins exploring the idea of ‘sonic detection’ as a method for site-responsive creative practice. Their album Stolen Voices001 (2021) was shortlisted for a Scottish Award for New Music. Their book Sonic Detection: Necessary Notes for Art and Performance is forthcoming from punctum press in the summer of 2025. Johanna currently has a grant from the Royal Society of Edinburgh for a project titled Listening to Scotland’s Performance Archives where she is charting an alternative sonic history of experimental performance and Live Art. She is a Lecturer in Creative Practice at the University of Dundee
Stolen voices and parameters for uncertainty
Concert | 7pm | West Court
A concert of electroacoustic music and sound art from projects by Rebecca Collins.
- Stolen Voices (Johanna Linsley and Rebecca Collins) with Jan Mertens, Postcards from the ongoing investigation (2019)
- Pete Stollery, Stolen voices (2017)
- Ode Aseguinolaza, An acoustic balade (2017)
- Rebecca Collins and Adam Matschulat, Energy, not forms, not figures (2023)
