When we talk about the difference between hearing and listening, or between looking and seeing, what is that actual difference? Is it about recognising, and matching something with what you already know, or starting clean and building a picture?

Is it possible to move from recognition to reimagining?

Meet Roger. He lives his life surrounded by a beguiling sprawl of shapes and patterns; an assemblage of repetitions and broken pieces. For this story, he explores the internal resonances of these objects – with the help of contact microphones and various agitators. How does Roger’s unseen world resonate with us?

In some modern societies, the economy has achieved the status of a living, breathing human being. Often it is afforded greater protection and rights than the communities it is supposed to support. Although all-knowing and all-powerful, the economy still struggles, fails and sometimes, even ‘hurts’. To some, these conditions make it even more holy.

As our society’s most powerful contemporary deity, don’t we owe it to the economy to not only sacrifice our time, our loyalty and our children’s future, but our very spirit? This guided economic meditation will harness your conscious experience, allowing you to finally become one with the most supreme being of our times.

What do actor Brad Pitt, neuroscientist Oliver Sacks and science commentator Dr Karl Kruszelnicki have in common? Let’s just say: you might not know it if you saw it. Sonja Dechian looks into what’s really in the eye, or the mind, of the beholder.

By some estimates, there are as many as 150 ‘big things’ strewn across Australia. There’s the Big Banana, the Big Merino and even the Big Magic Mushroom. In this story, Ballina’s Big Prawn casts a long shadow over the imagination of a young girl, as she hits the road in search of the mythical crustacean of her childhood.

Surviving a trip to the shopping centre at Christmas time is enough to test the patience of a saint. Imagine, then, the annual suffering of your local Santa Claus. Take a trip behind the tinsel to hear a true account of what it takes to be a gifted man in red. There’s much more to the jolly man than a ho ho ho and a snow-white beard.

Forget minimalism. There’s a new kid on the block: hypotheticalism.

Grounded in complex ideas and elegant concepts, it’s a movement that’s challenging the way we think about visual art and what, exactly, constitutes an artwork. But is it more style than substance?

The second part of this special feature focuses on two leading local exponents of hypotheticalism – Anna Barclay and Damien Lee. Barclay talks to us about her contentious sculpture, ‘The Role of Sight in the Age of its Metaphysical Reproducibility’, while Lee details his reappropriation of colonial imagery for ‘Untended Meadow’.

In a time of repetition and assertion, repetition and assertion, questions have become rhetorical and answers unrelated. The pioneers of this practice? The residents of the fourth estate – and yes, Australian politics. At the end of a microphone, hesitation takes on the quality of uncertainty. But the power of rhetoric is far more insidious.

Once the home of the ubiquitous KEEP QUIET sign and the archetypal shushers, libraries now serve as repurposed meeting places, infotech zones, and speakeasies. The contemporary hum of incidental noise we make in libraries is considered acceptable, unavoidable, and sometimes even outwardly encouraged – the paper rustle, the machine whirr, the echoing cough.

In the midst of all these sounds, Jon Tjhia and Oslo Davis ask: how can we still think of libraries as ‘quiet’?

A day spa isn’t the first place you’d expect to find a think tank, and yet it’s here that Toby Fehily finds himself stepping into a darkened capsule filled with warm, salty water. With the lid tightly shut, Toby comes to his senses – in a most senseless way.

In Me and Run Like A Dream, from Melbourne’s Elizabeth Reale, our protagonist gives us a candid first-hand account of the power of animal magnetism — reminding us that sometimes when you place all your bets on love, you can win big.

The third and final episode of Thomasin Sleigh’s Weather trilogy. In a world plagued by the sudden absence of its weather forecasters, these unexplained disappearances become absorbed into the minutiae of everyday life.

Listen to: Weather #1, Weather #2