Step into another world, lie down, close your eyes and listen to a starfish. Using field recordings from Newcastle’s shore and rock pools, this sensory sound installation will help you hear and feel our beloved coastline. This is immersive and moving environmental storytelling. By using underwater hydrophones, underground geophones, and precision microphones, the secret conversations between water, air and earth are transformed into something you can feel as much as hear.

Settle onto floating benches that pulse gently with seismic rhythms, letting the vibrations travel through your whole body. Watch as responsive projections dance on the wall, triggered by the very sounds surrounding you. Against one wall, translucent drums filled with sand create mesmerising patterns as they respond to the deep rumble of ocean waves. You’ll leave with a completely new appreciation for the landscape around us and the extraordinary sounds we usually miss, not only the sound of a starfish’s beating heart! Perfect for curious minds, sound lovers, and anyone ready to experience art that goes beyond what we can see.

Listen to a Starfish was funded by New Annual Festival 2025.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Diana Chester is an internationally recognised digital media artist, who uses sound to explore more-than-human dimensions of understanding existence in the time of the Anthropocene. Their work uses sound, animation, and photography in conversation with ethnographic and archival materials, to convey ideas of pasts, presents, and futures. Driven by an intense desire to re-presence story and memory, Chester uses personal narratives as a method to voice to the world around them. To do so they fluidly explore multilingual, inter-environmental, and data generated soundscapes, finding rhythmic cadences and synergies from the natural world, and placing them in conversation with visual materials to compose “listening stories” that compel humans to think more deeply about inclusive ideas of place and belonging.

Damien Ricketson is a composer and academic at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. Ricketson’s visceral and multisensory works explore the relationship between vibration and the body and listening beyond what is heard by the ears. Ricketson was the Co-Artistic Director of Ensemble Offspring (1995-2015), a unique arts company dedicated to adventurous new music, and the Program Leader of Composition and Music Technology at the Sydney Conservatorium (2015-2019). Ricketson has received numerous awards including the international Music Theatre Now Prize (2018); ‘Work of the Year’ in vocal/choral and instrumental categories in the Art Music Awards (2014 & 2019) in the Art Music Awards; and represented ‘Oceania’ in the Tokyo World Festival.

Fausto Brusamolino devises lighting and generative visuals for live performance and art installations. Brusamolino has lit productions in theatres, concert halls and art galleries, alongside less conventional spaces including outdoor installations and abandoned locations. In his work, lighting and video are dynamically manipulated in real time using custom software to create organic and engaging environments. Brusamolino has designed for Sydney Festival, Sydney Opera House, Adelaide Festival, Rising Melbourne Festival, MCA, Biennale of Sydney, Urban Theatre Projects, Teatro Stabile di Torino and more. Brusamolino recently won the APDG 2022 Award for Best Lighting Design for a Live Performance.