Thursday 10 December | 10:00 – 18:00 | Online Event
Listening in the Present Tense
A focus on the particular moment of listening now, inside a pandemic. What do we hear and why do we listen? What are we listening for and what might we be missing? Can we listen with collective ears – together apart? How is listening useful – early warning system, or diagnostic tool?
Session Two
Ella Finer
with Yorgos Samantas and Urok Shirhan
in the light of distant stars
Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.
– Arundhati Roy, The Pandemic is a Portal, April 2020
Pandemic data are like the light of distant stars, recording past events instead of present ones.
– Ed Yong, America is Trapped in a Pandemic Spiral, September 2020
A talk-in-transit, as we move “between one world and the next”, in the “light of distant stars”, I invite us to consider what the present-tense in perpetual motion sounds like. With “call-ins” from artist Urok Shirhan and sound anthropologist Yorgos Samantas – correspondents from other time-zones and other cities – we will open into a collective discussion. This session will hold a space and time to think through different conceptions of/investments in composing History now and what we want and need from doing so. What are the ways we can both imagine and make our world anew on our way, as we go, in this shared and singular present-tense? And how might we attune to such a tense – a temporality Gertrude Stein named the ‘continuous present’ – by ear: as a sonorous tense, honouring time-travel and listening across/to difference?
Ella Finer’s work in sound and performance spans writing, composing, and curating with a particular interest in how women’s voices take up space; how bodies acoustically disrupt, challenge, or change the order of who is allowed to occupy–command–space. Her research continuously queries the ownership of cultural expression through sound, informing lectures, performances, and events, including current projects: her moon is a captured object, an experiment in “orbital translation” for The City Talks Back (Theatrum Mundi and Onassis Stegi); Burning House/Burning Horse, a bonfire night sound essay for Almanac Projects and Wave Studies, three co-authored interconnecting essays for Infrasonica.org. Recent writing includes Feminism and Sound (CUP, 2020) and Listening in Common in Uncommon Times (Kenyon Review Online, 2020). Her first book Acoustic Commons and the Wild Life of Sound (Errant Bodies, Berlin) is forthcoming. www.ellafiner.com
Yorgos Samantas is engaged in urban anthropology and the environment, sound, voice and contemporary art, and has worked as a sound designer, field-recordist, scientific editor for the radio, art mediator and educator, and a dj. His work with sound, walking and locative media aims in the production of anthropological knowledge “beyond text”. He is participating in TWIXTlab, in akoo-o transdisciplinary group, and has taken part in research projects between art and social sciences such as “learning from documenta” & “Fones”.
Working at the intersection of performance, visual arts and critical theory, Urok Shirhan’s practice explores the politics of image, sound and speech in relation to (national) identity. Manifesting mainly through performance and writing, her projects are often entangled with found materials and narratives informed by her family history of political migrations. As an Iraqi-born, once asylum-seeker turned “new” Dutch citizen, issues surrounding displacement and belonging are of particular interest. Shirhan is currently a Research Fellow at BAK basis voor actuele kunst in Utrecht, The Netherlands. https://urokshirhan.com
Charlie Fox
Charming Foxes – listening in and with a non-human ear
As cities emptied – hollowed out in lockdown – by night, a skulk of urban foxes leaves their comfortable earths to set out on a hunt for food and entertainment, listening and tracking their territories for rival scavengers and ‘wildlife’. In this session, we will be exploring what was heard, what sensed, witnessed and experienced precisely in this period of interregnum; of the other, walking the city, and of our co-existence with other inhabitants, other species and ways of hearing.
Charlie Fox is the artistic director of counterproductions. counterproductions promotes socially and politically engaged artistic practices: collaborating with different publics on live art, education, and experimental art projects both in the UK and Internationally. Recent projects, “Itinerary” and FoodFace/FaceFood, Smile More Please and The Comm(o)nist Gallery have taken place within art spaces, and without, in parks, public squares, shops. In 2007 counterproductions produced and co-curated a large-scale exhibition, SHIBBOLETH (Dilston Grove, CGP London) and in 2008 international project exchange PAVILION (Art Caucasus, Tbilisi). counterproductions also produced a twenty-four month programme with decentrederspace (Decentrederspace – Marseille-Provence 2013/14, France/UK). Since 2015 he has been Director of the collective artist-led project InspiralLondon, producing and curating an array of artistic performances, interventions, festivals and expositions across London. He is currently exploring live sound, and the intersection of art and urban ecology, particularly aspects of our Watery Commons. https://www.inspirallondon.com . https://charliefox.org
Ingrid Plum
Still Life
Towards a new language of qualifying descriptors of listening states.
An online interactive AV work where viewers observe, engage with and participate in creating a foundation of new language for describing the various listening states and the attributes of these different states.
Attendees will be asked to sign up in advance and peruse a series of questions and prompts. The audio and visuals of the work focus on content that extends listening states, within the existing canon of: deep listening (Oliveros); reduced listening (Schaeffer); Critical Listening & Analytical Listening (Moylan); and, Listening-In-Search (Truax).
Together attendees will focus on developing a new language, or terms, for listening states that are pertinent to our current existence within both the pandemic and further developments in listening and sound production, and will investigate the impact online compression, choice of listening hardware and surrounding environments have for the viewer inengaging with these sounds and videos.
Ingrid Plum (UK/DK) is a singer and composer who uses her voice with extended technique, improvisation, field recordings, percussion and electronics. Described by The Guardian as “gorgeously atmospheric vocal techniques woven around field recordings & electronics” she has performed and exhibited internationally since 2002, creating work that combines Folk Music, Contemporary Classical Music and Sound Art.
Incorporating her research into folk traditions with field recordings, and studying directly with Meredith Monk, her recent performances have been described as “succinct and nourishing… a luxuriant space between almost excessive precision and looser improvisation” by The Wire. Her work has been featured in The Quietus, reviewed by The Wire, played by Late Junction, BBC Radio 3, and performed live in session at Maida Vale Studios. Plum was commissioned for International Women’s Day 2019 by The Verb, BBC Radio 3. Recently, her self-soothing sculpture, sound and scenes series ‘Dulme’ featured on Radio 3’s Unclassified.
Dawn Scarfe
Navigating Remote Soundscapes
Given that there is no ‘land’ in soundscape (Schafer 1967), how do we orient ourselves when we listen to sounds from remote, unseen places? This listening session and workshop explores live ‘open microphones’ from the ‘Acoustic Commons’ network. These audio streams are tuned to the ambience of particular places, and positioned as ‘intangible resources’ to be shared with listeners elsewhere. So what might we make of these resources, individually and collectively?
We will experiment with different ways of identifying and describing our personal responses to the sound of distant places. We will consider how the specific technical means of engagement might impact on our listening. And we will explore whether the practice of listening together to remote streams might, over time, become a route into new understandings of the environment.
NB. All attendees will need a pair of headphones.
Dawn Scarfe’s work involves tuning into things. She uses devices such as ‘bivvy broadcasts’ and ‘listening glasses’ to explore fragile connections between people and places. She co-curates SoundCamp: an annual international festival of sound and ecology with a base at Stave Hill in Rotherhithe, and Reveil: a live, crowd sourced, 24hr broadcast of daybreak sound. Other collaborations include remote exchanges with B-PLOT (NY) and Jiyeon Kim (SEL).
Her compositions have been aired on BBC Radio 3 and Resonance FM. She has shown work at Café Oto, Union Chapel, Tate Modern, Full of Noises, Q02, ZKM, La Casa Encendida, Museumquartier Vienna, and New Mart Seoul. Residencies include an ‘Embedded’ programme with Sound and Music and Forestry Commission England. She has contributed texts to Performance Research, Uniformbooks, Leonardo, Soundscape, and Environmental Sound Artists (Oxford University Press). She is a visiting lecturer at London College of Communication.
www.dawnscarfe.co.uk . www.soundtent.org
Session Contact/Queries:
Helen Frosi | SoundFjord
Auraldiversities: Future Listening (Session 5)
Thursday 13 May | 10:00 – 17:00 | Online Event
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.
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).
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.
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
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 radio spectrum have to do with how, where and what we listen to? 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.
SESSION SIX
Amina Abbas-Nazari
Speculative Listening
Amina explores poetic qualities of voice, through sounding and listening, as a material for research and artistic practises to critically investigate cutting edge technologies, while also speculating on new forms of communication mediated by technology. Her practise utilises sound, performance and objects with elements of interaction to allow public participation.
In this session, she will present her practise-based work including ‘Speculative Listening’ a participatory workshop and listening experience that explores machine and technology enabled listening. The work asks how we’d like to be heard by technology and how we want to listen with technology. Also exploring the future / alternative possibilities enabled for communication and understanding the world through speculative / emerging listening technology.
Amina Abbas-Nazari is a designer and researcher currently undertaking a Techne funded PhD in the School of Communication at the Royal College of Art, in partnership with IBM, around the themes of Artificial Intelligence and Voice.
She is also a trained singer, performing internationally with a number of choirs for over 20 years, as well as regularly for artists’ projects including at Zabludowicz Collection, Tate Britain, The Royal Academy of Arts, London and Kunstverein, Hamburg.
Amina is interested in the social, cultural and ethical implications of emerging technology. She employs voice as a medium, exploiting vocal potential to devise stories about alternate arrangements for society via design, technology and politics. Amina has presented her work at the London Design Festival, Milan Furniture Fair, Venice Architecture Biennial, Critical Media Lab, Switzerland, Litost Gallery, Prague, Harvard University, America, Queen Mary University, Barbican Centre and V&A museum.
Sasha Engelmann (Royal Holloway University)
Planetary Radio
Like many other media, radio is not neutral. It is a carrier, a commons, a host, for political, exclusionary and asymmetrical practices. This hybrid talk and listening session will explore which environmental-climatic dynamics, intersectional modes of listening and sonic possible worlds travel around the planet through the radio spectrum. Using sounds from personal archives and recordings of feminist interventions in radio space, this talk will investigate how long-distance radio signals touch landscapes, bodies, and atmospheres, while imagining what a more equitable planetary radio might sound like.
NB. This information has been updated since the original ticket release. Planetary Radio will now be presented instead of Satellite Séance.
Sasha Engelmann is Lecturer in GeoHumanities at Royal Holloway University of London, where she co-directs the GeoHumanities Creative Commissions programme and teaches at the intersection of geography and the arts and humanities.
Sasha’s scholarship explores interdisciplinary, feminist and critical-creative approaches to environmental sensing. She collaborates with artists and activists to investigate different ways of tracing, monitoring and engaging with our environments that reach beyond models of capture and enumeration. Fascinated by cultural imaginaries of the atmosphere, Sasha examines the role of art in crafting new narratives of atmospheric politics and aerial life. She is an active member of the international Aerocene Community, and a co-founder (with Sophie Dyer) of the feminist weather sensing project open-weather.
www.sashaengelmann.com . www.open-weather.community . www.aerocene.org
Shirley Djukurnã Krenak with Nathaniel Mann
In this session the objective is to present aspects of the Krenak culture and its direct intersection with healing processes via indigenous ancestry. Listening is an extremely important skill for the indigenous peoples of Brazil, considering a broader meaning of the term. Listening is the possibility of expanding our conceptual capabilities and understanding the multiple relationships in which we are inserted. And this involves humans and other-than-humans in amerindian philosophies, which the session will try to demonstrate through Shirley’s experience of amerindian chants and sounds (all from the Krenak culture). However, one cannot fail to mention that all these amerindian experiences suffer varied interferences and we will be experiencing it in this session, highlighting the multiple (and sometimes negative) connections to western society. The ultimate goal, therefore, is to provide an experiment with possible worlds through listening, realising how amerindian peoples understand and practice their relationships with many entities.
For more information about the Krenak people, watch this recording (in portuguese – other language captions available) and visit this website.
João Vitor de Freitas Moreira provides textual translation for this session.
Live translation will be by Thiego Jesus.
Shirley Krenak is an indigenous woman of Brazil. She belongs to the Krenak people, a native group of the state of Minas Gerais. She has been working on many areas related to the native culture since she was 13 years old. Alongside her brothers, she fights for land rights, ancestry rights and against the violence of the State in opposition to indigenous people. She holds a degree in social communication and currently she develops projects relating to the practice of healing through ancestry and how the native culture of the Krenak people can help change the devastation against mother-earth. In times of the Anthropocene, what she has been stating is that we are in need of a collective way of thinking, acting and listening (including humans and other-than-humans in it). This is part of the philosophy of the indigenous peoples of Brazil and she is putting that into practice in schools around the native land and in the national scenario with Articulation of the Indigenous People of Brazil (APIB) and the Shirley Krenak Institute.
Nathaniel Mann is a singer, composer, broadcaster and sound artist, known for site specific performance, radio documentaries and music and tours with experimental folk trio Dead Rat Orchestra. In 2017 Nathaniel began collaborating with Indigenous Brazilian filmmaker Takumā Kuikuro, he has subsequently collaborated closely with traditional singer Akari Waura, filmmaker Piratá Waura and the entire Wauja Community of the Xingu in the restoration of the sacred cave of Kamukuwaká. During the Kamukuwaká project Nathaniel met Shirley Djukurnã Krenak, and their shared passion for sound set the scene for a future dialogue, which is now unfolding around this session.
João Vitor de Freitas Moreira is a PhD Candidate at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil. He holds a masters degree in legal anthropology and a BA in Law. Currently he conducts field research with indigenous people, and he is interested in legal anthropology, amerindian rights, ethnology, access to justice and conflict resolution concerning indigenous peoples. He works alongside Shirley Krenak in the Shirley Krenak Institute and collaborates with the development of projects regarding cultural rights, healing through ancestry and others.