Projection - Preemptive Listening

Show & Culture

Preemptive Listening is a nonfiction film that reinvents sirens in order to create a new understanding of urgency, in the short and long term. The siren functions as a universal code for potential trauma, an emblem warning of climate disasters, a loudspeaker for sonic governance and crisis management. Many sirens are remnants of the Second World War and the Cold War, repurposed to communicate threats linked to extreme weather events, as a collective commemorative pause, or reactivated to test disaster preparedness. Through a soundtrack composed of new sirens by various experimental musicians, the film asks: must an alarm necessarily alarm? How can we counter alert fatigue, both a lived reality and a metaphor for our current state? Can we envision sounds intended not only for immediate emergency, but as signals designed across a longer time horizon, warning for the distant future, for the cries at the dawn of an ecological catastrophe? Can we imagine sirens beyond the human? The soundtrack includes planetary sounds in infinite escalation; animal howls and the mourning of extinction; haunting warnings resembling banshees; defiant trumpets; complex permutations of harp; the sounds of the Earth’s core. The film presents the siren’s sliding, piercing cry as a conditioned and learned signal, potentially reconfigurable.