Auraldiversities
A year-long programme addressing the ‘auraldiverse turn’ in Arts and Humanities research and theory, questioning how and what we hear, what we listen to and why, as situated within our contemporary milieu: that of ecological, existential, social, economic and epidemiological crises.
Entwined with sonically sensile organisms, sessions extend well beyond human worlds into speculative acoustic realms of future listening.
Sessions are virtual with some materials sent in advance.
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(image credit: Gerd Altmann | Pixabay)
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Future Listening
What is to become of vibration? What is its future receptacle? These two sessions extend tentacles into possible aural futures, via specially designed convivial, collaborative and multisensory activities.
How might the world sound if biology and technology meld? What does the weather and politics have to do with how we listen? What is the cityscape saying to us and how is its language encoded in material? What novel possibilities (will) allow us to be heard, to better communicate with (more than human) others?
These sessions will offer a speculative exploration of the future(s) of listening: entwined, networked and multimodal.
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SESSION FIVE
Elena Biserna | SoundBorderscapes
Today, borders are less and less linear and rather become pervasive and mobile, while acquiring an unprecedented significance in every field of our life. On a global scale, some of the most important cultural, social, economical and political issues rise exactly from the dynamics between border reinforcement and border struggles. In order to account for these transformations, border studies are elaborating new notions and theoretical frameworks introducing more complex, multiple and process-based understandings of borders. Borders are now thought as fluid spaces, continuously constructed, redefined, reinforced or transgressed by a multiplicity of discourses, practices and bodies and manifesting themselves in multiple forms and places, as apparatuses of selection, control and surveillance. The sanitary crisis has dramatically reinforced these processes, introducing new kinds of borders and reinforcing existing ones.
Combining a theoretical introduction, examples of explorations of borders in the sound arts, readings and listening exercises and dérives, this session proposes listening as a situated and relational methodology to problematize the linear, fixed image of borders conveyed by maps, to explore their temporal, dynamic and performative character as well as the (new) ways they manifest themselves in our everyday spaces and practices.
Elena Biserna is a scholar and independent curator based in Marseille. She is an associate researcher at PRISM (AMU /CNRS) and TEAMeD (Université Paris 8). Her interests are focused on listening, and contextual, time-based art practices in relationship with urban dynamics, socio-cultural processes, the public and political sphere.
She has taught at ESAAix-École Supérieure d'Art d'Aix-en-Provence, Aix-Marseille University and the Academy of fine art of Bologna and has given talks at different conferences, festivals and events. Her articles and interviews have appeared in journals and several international publications (Les Presses du Réel, Mimesis, Le Mot et le Reste, Errant Bodies, Amsterdam University Press, Cambridge Scholar, Castelvecchi, etc.).
Elena co-curates the series La Membrane, the seminar Pratiques de l’écoute, écoute de pratiques at IMéRA Marseille and co-edits the column wi watt'heure of Revue & Corrigée with Carole Rieussec. As a curator, she worked with several organizations such as Locus Sonus (Aix-en-Provence), soundpocket (Hong Kong), Sant'Andrea degli Amplificatori (Bologna), Cona Zavod (Ljubljana), Xing (Bologna), Saout Radio, Sound Threshold (London).
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Alex De Little | Decentered Listening: Collaboration with the More-Than-Human
“Who are we? What are we? Who and what are ‘we’ that is not only human?” – Donna Haraway
In the last years, multiple critical voices (Tsing, Harraway, Latour, Pickering) have argued that in a present framed by climate and ecological crises, we must develop techniques for future survival that are grounded in a sense of the earthly, the material, or the more-than-human.
Following the potential of the vibratory for ‘collaboration’ with the more-than-human (Tsing), this workshop pursues Andrew Pickering’s notion of a dance of agency as a method of ‘going on in the world at the ground level’ (Pickering) — or ‘becoming terrestrial’ (Latour) — by developing performative practices of sounding and listening that bear out formative struggles (or intra-actions - Barad) between people and things. Through these struggles, conditions of decentredness are engaged, where ‘the non-human world enters constitutively into the becoming of the human world and vice versa’.
A Deep Listening study circle will form the basis to engage a group of listener-practitioners in investigating how the ‘dance of agency’ may be situated performatively using techniques of scoring and improvisation. We will create recursive open-form sonic improvisations where decisions in-the-moment can be the responsibility of the human OR the material/environment. In this situation, material contingency and agency are the basic presuppositions of sonic thinking.
Alex De Little is a sonic artist and researcher with bases in Leeds and London, UK. His practice encompasses installation, composition, performance and workshops; it is concerned with the interrogation of listening as a practice of world-making -a way of thinking into and through environments, notions of self, and social relations. Alex’s work and collaborations have been featured at the Royal Academy of Arts, Venice Architecture Biennale, Tate Modern, Somerset House, Palais de Tokyo (Paris) and London Contemporary Music Festival. Alex completed a practice-based PhD with Scott Mc Laughlin and Martin Iddon at the University of Leeds, and is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at the Universities of Leeds and Nottingham. He is a member of CAVE (Centre for Audio-Visual Experimentation), and an honorary research fellow at Goldsmiths Centre for Sound Practice Research. Alex recently completed his Deep Listening certification with the Centre for Deep Listening.
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Milena Droumeva | The future sound of cities: sound is not a waste product
Emerging alongside the amplification of civic inequities and the corporate cannibalization of cities, livability has suffered from lack of engagement with the sensory aspects of urban life. Although much has been written about the negative effects of declining air quality, light pollution, as well as noise on the health and well-being of people in cities, little attention has been invested in the way of conscious urban soundscape design at infrastructural levels. Whether intentional or unintentional, urban soundscapes are byproducts of both active design strategies and discourses of livability in the city. They are microcosms of social relations and reflect shifting negotiations of public/private space (Arkette, 2004; Barns, 2013). With the concept of livability shifting from general notions of “quality of life” to objective measures towards urban utopia (Kaal, 2011), urban soundscapes are both symptoms of economic and political balance (Schafer, 1977), and sites for potential intervention to redefine livability in more humanistic terms. Listening to the city can be an intervention into both the narratives of livability and the processes by which community is formed in terms of sensory design. In this session, Milena will present some key concepts from the history of sound design for cities, and three case studies that will be discussed in groups, where sonic interventions can both increase the acoustic ecology and sonic character of place.
Milena Droumeva is an Assistant Professor of Communication and Glenfraser Professor of Sound Studies at Simon Fraser University specializing in mobile technologies, sound studies and multimodal ethnography. They have a background in acoustic ecology and work across the fields of urban soundscape research, sonification for public engagement, as well as gender and sound in video games. Milena’s current research combines livability with urban soundscapes research, including sonification of socially significant data.
https://www.sfu.ca/communication/team/faculty/milena-droumeva.html
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Session Contact/Queries:
Helen Frosi | SoundFjord
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With thanks to:
Those facilitating, leading, and chairing sessions.
Department of Music, Goldsmiths, University of London.
Sussex Humanities Lab, University of Sussex.
Curated by: John Drever, Alice Eldridge, and Helen Frosi.
Cover image: Gerd Altmann | Pixabay
All activities are supported with CHASE cohort development funding.