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- Convenors:
-
Carlo Cubero
(Tallinn University)
Pablo D Herrera Veitia (University of Toronto)
Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier (University of Victoria)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Location:
- 6 College Park (6CP), 0G/026
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 27 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This listening session features sound works that express the way in which listening generates experiences and indicate how the future may sound like. The programme will address how people experience continuities and frictions “in common” and how sounds play a role in imagining future socialites.
Long Abstract:
This programme will present sound works that, through their content or form, engage with notions of the “common” and the “uncommon” and reflect on what the future might sound like. The sound programme will consider how individuals and groups experience continuities, frictions, dissonances, and harmony in the process of developing narratives of hope and transformation. The listening session will explore these issues through the presentation of original sound works and discussion with their authors.
The session will focus on the relational character of sound, rather than understand sound as an object of nature, and discuss the different levels of experience that are elicited in practices of listening, designing, and presentation of sonic works. To “listen”, in this context, suggests an active process that generates transformative relationships in-sound. The programme will focus on sound works that have been generated through forms of active socializing and strive to reveal different textures and emotions about the world we live in and the world we ought to be part of.
We are looking for participants to share their original sound work during the panel. If interested in submitting a sound work (compositions, arrangements, storytelling, voice, etc.), please:
*use the proposal system to provide a short and longer description of your sound project/work;
*confirm in your description that you are the recorder/author of the recordings and/or own full rights of the work;
*provide a technical description: e.g. how many channels are needed for presentation, any visual accompaniments, etc. and other technical information about the clip.
*Finally, send your sound clip (in wav/mp3 format) - which should be no longer than 10-12 min - to pablo.herreraveitia(at)utoronton.ca
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 27 July, 2022, -Paper short abstract:
Every person is unique and has a story to tell. Nevertheless, many times individual stories are not heard, especially within the modern-day noise-filled busy urban lifestyle. Photography, sonic composition and oral accounts are the three main components of the Aural Postcards.
Paper long abstract:
Aural Postcards derived from my research into the idea that everyone is a migrant and has felt displacement at some point in their life. Even birth is inherently a process of forced migration. Every different way in which one might come into this world there is always a sense of being pushed from a place of comfort to the cold unknown. Displacement can often be associated with a desire for communication with distant meaningful people, evoking memories and feelings of belonging that have either been lost or transformed.
With the Aural Postcards, I focused on the uniqueness of every person and how they allow for powerful stories to arise from each individual's experience. These processes of dislocation, being more or less forced upon individuals, shape the way in which they perceive their surroundings as familiar territories. In this respect, it could be argued that all stories share a certain common core, particularly manifested in people's need for connection to others through space and sound.
For this project, I sought to combine the sense of lifelike spatial awareness promoted by the binaural recordings of the locations suggested by the subjects with a surreal approach to the visual element. The photographic composition assisted in the creation of the inner universe created by the subject of the Aural Postcard. The verbal message was either an original composition by the subject or another textual reference spoken in English and/or in their native tongue.
Paper short abstract:
Shanghainese deaf and blind people, their embodiments and socialities, are bound to invisibility. This clip takes us to real encounters with blind and deaf people in parks around the city. It allows us to imagine the spaces that we (should) share and the relationships that we (could) foster.
Paper long abstract:
In China, people with disabilities are absent from the urban landscape. As part of my work with blind and deaf persons in Shanghai, I experienced difficulty having encounters with them in public spaces. Elder deaf and blind people, their particular embodiments and socialities, are bound to the interstitial. That is the privacy of their homes or public spaces but apart from the rest. They, of course, relate with many other beings and materialities but their sensory predicaments restrict them to particular corners of the urban universe. This sound clip is a window to my research project based on over a year of ethnographic work with blind and deaf groups and their encounters in several parks in Shanghai, China. To challenge invisibility, sound invites us to imagine. Sound brings us together with the song of the blind and the utterances of the deaf. Sound bridges our apparent separation. Pondering through the sound of their presence in places where they supposedly do not exist, we may rethink how we care about them. And we could also challenge the notion of absence to ask who is absent from these possible encounters. (The submitter owns full rights to the work)
Technical description:
Sound clip, 05:58, LIBMP3LAME, 2 CH. 44100 HZ, 128 kbps
Paper short abstract:
Drawing from a research-based exhibition of Portuguese soldiers’ photographs of wartime in Angola, Guinea Bissau and Mozambique (1961-74), we propose to listen to a photo-story told by a veteran and to discuss the challenges of rendering public the ambiguity that surrounds violent colonial pasts.
Paper long abstract:
Between 1961 and 1974, Portugal fought colonial/liberation wars in Angola, Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique. Roughly one million men were conscripted and trained by an authoritarian regime, and deployed in a three-front protracted conflict. The 1974 Carnation revolution overthrew the regime and paved the way for the independence of former colonies. Six decades later, the colonial/liberation wars are still territories of contested meanings and multiple silences.
The exhibition “A War Kept. Photography of Portuguese Soldiers in Angola, Guinea Bissau and Mozambique (1961-74)” ran for three months in Museu do Aljube, in Lisbon. Drawing from ethnographic research with 40 veterans and their photographic collections, the exhibition explored the circulation and uses of soldiers’ visual mementoes of wartime.
For the panel The Sounds That Bring Us Together, we propose to listen to a photo-story told by a veteran, which was part of the ‘Spoken Photographs’ section of the exhibition – visitors could listen to it on their mobile phones through a QR code. Recorded during an interview and backed by a consent form, this edited and mixed stereo audio clip is subtitled in English and coupled with two photographs in a mp4 file. What are the challenges associated with opening wartime personal voices and visions to the public? Does the human voice and affective storytelling add layers of meaning to stories of colonial violence?
Paper short abstract:
This sound work deals with less representational methods working with the human voice that stays on top of the hierarchies of sound. By re-enacting a recorded interview, I examine the interview format as an affective space beyond the data protection laws and translation of spoken words to text.
Paper long abstract:
In my PhD research, I follow the affective and material expressions appearing from human-nonhuman interaction of art and technology by concentrating on analogue filmmaking in a digital era. With a sensory ethnographic approach and a focus on the process of "art in the making", one of my research methods is to listen to and record the sounds in the artist-run film labs in Vienna and Berlin and repair shops in Istanbul. Sounds grant me a symbiotic understanding of the relationality between complex earthly, (non)human and (non)living energies that shape historical and contemporary media ecologies.
In this sound work, I experiment with the emotional interplay between the voices of two supposedly separated categories -the researcher and the researched- by bringing them together in my voice -the ethnographer as the interpreter.
Paper short abstract:
Boo Su is a fictional cog as part of a system that lives in a futuristic subterranean world of stuttered magnetic rhythms coalescing in a tapestry of harsh brutal noise and architecture. It is where dark cold machines conjure up resistance to bass and unwanted sounds.
Paper long abstract:
"Boo Su" (2021) - 5'10
Boo Su is a fictional cog as part of a system that lives in a futuristic subterranean world of stuttered magnetic rhythms coalescing in a tapestry of harsh brutal noise and architecture. It is where dark cold machines conjure up resistance to bass and unwanted sounds. The DIY glitch compass faces towards a place where aesthetics and operations of failure are embraced - North.
www.dushume.co.uk
instagram.com/dushume
Paper short abstract:
With the Wind is a radio transmission. This is an excerpt of two channels: the wind coming through the instrument that I created (seen above) using found ventilation pipes and sound clips from media on the last 40 years about Taksim Square (a charged site in Istanbul, Turkey).
Paper long abstract:
With the Wind is a radio transmission. Installed on SAHA Studio’s balcony and constructed from locally-derived materials, the repurposed wind-catcher is from where the transmission is made. The transmission has two channels: the first channel is the sound of the air passing through the wind-catcher and the second is the sound recordings collected from various media channels including TV and radio from Turkey in which sets of words are collated about Taksim and its surroundings. The sound recordings are realigned constantly. The wind is utilized as an element that carries, narrates, and collects; With the Wind is added onto the already-existing infrastructure of the air vents in the studio space, with which I search for the possibility of radio transmissions to be embedded in a place. Using the method of montage to expand language, I attempt to oblige the already-existing transmissions to be reconstructed.