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- Convenors:
-
Léone-Alix Mazaud
(Mines Paris, Université PSL, Centre de Sociologie de l’Innovation (CSI), i3 UMR CNRS)
Juan Gomez (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne, Geneva University of Arts Design)
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- Format:
- Combined Format Open Panel
- Location:
- Theater 5, NU building
- Sessions:
- Friday 19 July, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Amsterdam
Short Abstract:
This panel aims to bring together STS and Design research to engage in a cross-disciplinary exploration of and through sound. How to form a critical sonic practice that enables new forms of sensitivities to be part of the scientific process as legitimate ways of knowledge production?
Long Abstract:
This combined format open panel aims to bring together STS and Design research to engage in a cross-disciplinary exploration of and through sound.
Hooker and Farrell argue that design and science do not produce metaphysically distinct types of things (Farrell & Hooker, 2012). But design at its core is also concerned with aesthetics and modes of knowledge production that deal with sensibility to shapes and media. STS, conversely, integrate these concerns under the banner of "Art, Science, and Technology Studies" (Rogers & Al., 2021), seeing both art and science as products of human knowledge construction. Design and STS both recognize the agency of artifacts that make up our socio-technical worlds. Moreover, researchers are not the only ones who influence the analysis process; their artefacts open unexpected doors too (Savic, 2019). How to form a critical sonic practice that enables new forms of sensitivities to be part of the scientific process as legitimate ways of knowledge production?
We are welcoming contributions from STS researchers, artists, designers, and architects who incorporate sound into their practice-based research or employ it as a tool for conducting and conveying empirical investigations. We propose curating a sonic playground to engage with and discuss sonic propositions. We invite contributions that deal with sound in various ways: as a mediator for making sense of one's environment, including attention to sonic forms of data production and display; as a medium for crafting environments, through more-than-human intra-actions (Barad, 2007) enacted though sonic performances or installations, or as an additional dimension that integrates urban design and participation tools; as living agents that participate in post-industrial assemblages in which they gain autonomy, escaping the original categorization in which Schafer (1977) bound them to their sources.
We welcome experimentations, sound walks, sonic provocations, performances that engage with embodied dimensions of experimental knowledge production.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 19 July, 2024, -Paper short abstract:
"Resounding Transitions" explores urban Turkey's shift from natural landscapes to concrete through an acousmatic sound installation inspired by soundscape ecology. It uses processed sounds to promote new practices of critical listening and ecological sensitivities.
Paper long abstract:
"Resounding Transitions" is an acousmatic sound installation that delves into the evolving ecological landscapes of urban Turkey, focusing on Ankara's shift from natural riverscapes to concrete urbanity. Drawing inspiration from soundscape ecology (Pijanowski et al. 2011) methodologies, this project aims to establish a critical sonic practice. Building on the work of Hildegard Westerkamp, the proposed work theorizes sound as an ecological element and mediator of the construction of knowledge and experience. By utilizing recorded sound samples from various locations in Ankara—where once audible river murmurs are now overshadowed by concrete—this installation crafts an acousmatic soundscape. This soundscape challenges traditional categorizations of sound and its sources, urging participants to engage more deeply with the auditory experience, reconsider their environmental interactions, and promote new sensitivities towards the non-human agents within these environments.
"Resounding Transitions" constructs an immersive auditory experience highlighting the nuanced interplay between human and non-human agents in urban settings. Through juxtapositions of various sonic layers and sources, the reassembled sounds serve as a poignant reminder of the ecological shifts from lush riverscapes to urban expanses, underscoring the agency of the non-human in our environments. This installation not only functions as an artistic endeavor but also as a scientific provocation. It invites participants to adopt new sensitivities as legitimate ways of understanding ecosystems, fostering a space for reflection on urban development's ecological impacts.
Paper short abstract:
With a small electronic instrument floating in the middle, Nene del Solar creates a soundscape woven from rhythms and sounds captured from a land plundered by gold mining. The performance is an exploration of the elastic body, seeking to extract a radiant artifact from the very heart of the stage.
Paper long abstract:
Obtaining Gold requires both the elasticity of the human body and the extension of machines and tools. The auric metal, cause of invasions, has been utilized as a component in audio devices and digital-electronic apparatuses due to its exceptional conductive properties which ensure the efficient flow of electrical current. However, the pursuit of it, and elongating the human body to reach it, has come at a devastating cost, resulting in the loss of millions of lives and ecosystem imbalance. (Witzgall/Stakemeier, 2014)
The staging of a human trying to remove a golden electronic device that shines with its own light from the center of a dark space, hanging from transparent elastic threads, displays the dazzle and obsession of the human extractor for the electronic object. It also proposes possibilities for the elasticity of his body in synchrony or contrast with the elasticity of the seemingly invisible threads that create a suspension structure and hold the object as if it were levitating. Each time the human stretches and releases the threads, the object sways, the threads oscillate, and this trembling causes a catastrophic soundscape of landslides, mudslides, and avalanches to be heard in the distance. Meanwhile, the human sings and dances to the rhythm of the landslides, which become tragic music.
This performance delves on the repercussions of gold’s extraction used for electronics, elaborating on the elasticity of the communities and the bodies that mine it.
Paper long abstract:
Dirty listening refers to intentionally exploring and embracing the non-linear and unconventional aspects of sound. It involves actively seeking out and engaging with sounds that may be considered undesirable, disruptive, or "dirty" in the traditional sense. Instead of avoiding or dismissing these sounds, dirty listening encourages individuals to embrace them as valuable and meaningful sonic experiences.
Dirty listening challenges the idea of what is considered "clean" or "pure" in sound and encourages a reevaluation of our auditory perception. It prompts us to question our preconceived notions of what is pleasing or acceptable in soundscapes and opens the door to reconsider what we see or listen as nature. Dirty listening is to pay attention to this dark ecologies and embrace them as part of nature too.
By embracing the "dirty" elements of sound, and other sonic imperfections, dirty listening encourages a deeper exploration of the complexity and diversity of auditory experiences. It invites us to listen beyond the surface and discover hidden layers such as new textures, narratives, and emotional responses that may not be immediately apparent in a pristine or controlled sonic environment, enabling us to discover beauty and significance in unexpected places.
Paper short abstract:
Part of a larger ASTS project, Curves & Reverbs is a real-time data-informed participatory performance that aims to communicate my experience of migration and exile through transforming biosensor data into sound and data-responsive images to create an atmosphere of affect contagion.
Paper long abstract:
Curves & Reverbs is a real-time data-informed participatory performance that grapples with biosensors as data generating techno-extensions, processing of such data as a normative technoscientific practice, and its radical subversion by turning the results into sound and data-responsive images. The performance is part of a larger ASTS project that examines different possibilities for creating atmospheric events based on a range of strategies to integrate biosensor data into a techno-performative practice—from longitudinal personal data collection to live and freeform ways of treating biosensor data. Drawing on several years of experiments with wearable biosensors and the use of sound as a sensory medium, Curves & Reverbs thus builds an atmosphere for affect contagion to communicate my experience of migration and exile to audiences. In doing so, it leverages biosensors to activate body, software, hardware, bio and acoustic signals to go beyond the crisis of imagination to speculate other-than-personal lived realities and spaces of existence. Sensor-to-sound reconfiguration draws the data close to body for sensemaking using "data visceralization" as a strategy, while acknowledging its reductive nature particularly when capturing complexity of bodily processes. Using strategies of interaction and participation, the performance builds on exchanging biosensors in a sequential and rhythmic interval across the audience without a distinct division between the performer and the audience. Such an experience aims to create a shared exploration of affective responses centered on migration and exile while illuminating the reciprocal influence between individual and collective expression through intermingling the physiological with the affective in co-creation.
Paper short abstract:
In this performance lecture, I present advances of my ongoing artistic research, with sound compositions created for attuning to a polyphonic soundscape found in the hybrid intersection across technology, atmospheric dynamics, and our embodied positionality as listeners.
Paper long abstract:
Atmospheric Listening: Attuning to a polyphony of environmental voices.
This ongoing artistic research intends to bring forth a hybrid listening to atmospheric phenomena to foster a deeper empathy with our natural environments. The atmosphere is a complex system of geophonic soundscapes that requires an interdisciplinary engagement to reveal its audition. This kind of augmented perception is possible with technoscientific instruments to attune to the natural environment, sourcing electromagnetic signals and weather data sonification. Hence, I aim to explore the possibility of a nonhuman voice of the atmosphere, that emerges from a resonance with the atmospheric medium, custom-made instruments, and listener’s positionality.
Psychologist Jaime Berenguer promotes a profound shift in perspective to nurture a deeper empathy for the natural environment. This transformative change involves moving away from an anthropocentric outlook, centered on self-preservation and altruism for humans, and embracing an ecocentric viewpoint that perceives the environment as a self-contained entity.
Delving into ecocentrism, I look into Listening after Nature by Mark Peter Wright, as a shift from perceiving nature as a distant object or idyll. Wright emphasizes attending to natural environments' invisible and unsounding aspects to counteract the human-centered intentionality often prevalent in field recordings. In harmony with this idea, my research aims for a critical exploration of the nonhuman voice of nature.
In this performance lecture, I present advances of my ongoing artistic research, with sound compositions created for attuning to a polyphonic soundscape found in the hybrid intersection across technology, atmospheric dynamics, and our embodied positionality as listeners.