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- Convenors:
-
Carlo Cubero
(Tallinn University)
Marje Ermel (Estonian Institute of Humanities, Tallinn University)
- Stream:
- Workshops, films and posters
- Location:
- Library conference hall
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 24 June, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Zagreb
Short Abstract:
This programme features sound works that, through their content and form, address utopian and dystopian affects and concepts. The session will explore authored sound works in order to consider how the author and listener simultaneously perceive and design new sonic places and temporalities.
Long Abstract:
This session features sound works that, through their content and form, engage with the dialectics of utopia and dystopia. Through the presentation of sound works and discussion with their authors, the session explores the nature of sound and the role of sound recordists in the process of articulating utopia and dystopia through sonic ethnographies.
The discussion will critique conceptualisations of sound as an object of nature that can be apprehended and reconstructed through value-free methodologies. The session is particularly interested in coming to terms with the different levels that are simultaneously elicited in practises of listening, designing, and presentation of sonic works.
The session will address sound recording and listening as skilled practises, which are simultaneously enacted in the apprehension of sonic experiences. The session will value the diverse methodologies, complex circumstances, and multiple mediations that result in the production of sound works. This renders the sonic-ethnography as an authored narrativisation of an empirical experience, in opposition to an articulation of transcendent principles, which ascribe conceptual causes to the unfolding of life. The session will also invite listeners to engage with the piece and immerse themselves in the sonic moment. In this context, the listener and designer are mutually implicated in the creation of the sonic experience.
We accept proposals of 15 minute (max.) sound works to be followed by a 5 minute discussion.
Proposals should consist of an abstract and, preferably, a link to the sound work.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 24 June, 2015, -Paper short abstract:
These recordings present a sonic narration of our encounter with the Quelccaya, the largest tropical glacier in the world, located in Peru. They are part of our collaborative project interested in establishing new approaches to questions of climate change; namely, one which is not dominated by visuality.
Paper long abstract:
In June 2014 the two of us—an anthropologist and an experimental musician- visited Quelccaya, the largest tropical glacier in the world, located in the community of Phinaya in Cuzco, Peru. The ethnographic field recordings that we include here were made with a variety of low- and hi-fi digital and analog recording devices, and present a sonic narration of our encounter with this glacier. Our recordings try to offer an alternative sensorial approach to climate change: namely, one which is not dominated by visuality. Accordingly, our work focuses on raising the complexity of the sonically dense environment of a retreating glacier: one in which several unique -micro and macro—events are occurring. Therefore, the crunches from massive ice blocks to millimetric ice crystals breaking; the splashes of water running from the glacier's base, which vary from a few drops to several cubic meters; and their reverberations with specific sections of the Quelccaya, play a central role narrating the histories of these events. As we argue, these adjacent and overlapping sonic forms, emphasized through the languages of ethnographic text and sound art, could provide new -theoretical and empirical— elements that complicate the question of scale, the limits of scientific representation, and the local and global politics of climate change. A sonic approach to glacier retreat, then, can contribute to overcome the discontinuity between the sensible and the intelligible, and enable both our understanding and experience of climate change to take on a whole new dimension.
Paper short abstract:
Two Weeks in Alert Bay and Schizophonie 8 are two very different pieces. The first is a soundscape composition focussing on presenting the contemporary culture of the Kwakwaka'wakw of Alert Bay, BC, the latter transcends geographic and cultural roots its source materials have once been linked to.
Paper long abstract:
Made almost entirely from field recordings, "Two Weeks in Alert Bay" and "Schizophonie 8" are two very different pieces. While the first focuses on presenting aspects of the contemporary culture of the Kwakwaka'wakw of Alert Bay, BC, in the form of a soundscape composition, the latter one transcends all geographic and cultural roots its source materials may once have been linked to.
This juxtaposition picks up a phenomenon identified as one central obstacle as defined by the Sounding Museum.
What happens to sounds that are taken away from their source? What effects occur when they are reassembled elsewhere, in a syncrisis that would have been impossible in the "real" world? When the original atmosphere gets lost, a new aura emerges between the sound and the listener, to supply her/him with the affects necessary to initiate reflection. But what if the source material is contextualised in a way that eludes the listener's analysis? Diverging sounds from all kinds of places, situations, and contexts, mostly unprocessed, then again some heavily altered, mostly field recorded found sounds, are shuffled into a potpourri of in-determination.
Both pieces ultimately play with listener expectations; familiar elements interchange with others that don't seem to make any sense at all. They demonstrate that the frame of reference, the knowledge about the elements of the system and their interrelations, determines not only aesthetic judgement, but may also trigger animosity. In that sense, it is the artful answer to the Sounding Museum's struggle with orientalism, coevalness, and other schizogenic challenges.
Paper short abstract:
The Closing Ceremony is a two-part audio work composed of sounds captured during the closing concert of a city-wide mega-event. This piece explores celebration and surveillance, the city and its subjects, reflecting ultimately on the activity of recording as a process of self-positioning.
Paper long abstract:
The Closing Ceremony is a two-part audio work composed of sounds captured during the closing concert of a city-wide mega-event. As it played out across the sky and across media, the closing ceremony colonized the city. City-space and residents were produced as both 'subject of' and 'audience to' a globally-sponsored celebration. Through sound recording and composition, my intention was to engage with the spatial effect of the event (concert, media broadcast), and with the position of the subject(s) constituted by it.
'How... do you make a semblance of a situation?'1
Field recordings from streets surrounding the stadium collapse into squashed mono phone-capture from inside the concert venue. Lo-res audience uploads combine with fragments of broadcast footage. Found applause meets 'real' applause meets built-in compression.
I try to explore the closing ceremony through these audio recordings, to fix the event, and gain critical distance. I assemble it to dismantle it. Open it to close it. Spasm and burnout.
In time, this activity begins to close in on itself. My position, my distance, and the act of recording become the object of study.
The proposed workshop includes the playback of pt1. The Closing Ceremony and pt2. Eternal Gratitude, as context for a brief discussion on 'Field recording as auto-ethnography of solitude'.
Links to downloadable (unmixed) early drafts of both sections below.
The Closing Ceremony - http://bit.ly/1JE2aPf
Eternal Gratitude - http://bit.ly/1w3RjSZ
-
1. Massumi, B. Semblance and Event, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2011, p. 52
Paper short abstract:
Political Entertainment: The Communicative but Remove Yourself Show is a prototype of a playback device for sonic or visual material. In this software-like interactive installation, sounds drive the images and the images compose the sonic experience.
Paper long abstract:
Political Entertainment: The Communicative but Remove Yourself Show (PE) is a playback device for sonic or visual material. This version contains two trailers and database footage of a documentary about homelessness in Edinburgh, UK. In this interactive installation, sounds drive the images and the images compose the sonic experience.
PE attempts to challenge the theoretical methodologies concerned with using sound and visual technologies to unfold 'real life' in new media databases and interactive environments (Manovich 2001). This project examines software use, user driven narratives and user intentionality in the articulation of the sonic/video narratives that derive from the experiences recorded in the field.
This player was built on MAX/MSP, and contains videos about utopian housing and homelessness in Edinburgh, and 'left-over' clippings of interviews I did with both homeless persons in Edinburgh and administrative staff of one Edinburgh's Salvation Army shelters. The interviews deal with some illustrative points about homelessness, and with the potential benefits of creating a website which the homeless of Edinburgh could use to communicate with each other. This project tries to understand how 'real' content like homelessness could inhabit a virtual space built in new media.
The sounds on this piece are the stories I recorded whilst carrying out the interviews; and sounds from the streets of Edinburgh, mixed live with randomly triggered FM synthesis sounds
Paper short abstract:
The installation documents speculative ritual performed in interaction of human and technology has developed from “binaural tunes” - sound loops that are claimed to induce desirable mental states. We concentrate on these elements of ritual, which can be interpreted as embodiement (Csordas).
Paper long abstract:
Following montage represents in miniature the installation presented at the exhibition "Liquid forms" at the Institute of Ethnology and Culture Anthropology, University of Warsaw and Gallery Nowogrodzka 18A. The exhibition compiled methodologies of contemporary art and ethnology.
Three parts of montage represent three sources of sound from the material installation.
The installation documents speculative fieldwork on the future digital church. It is record of one of its rites. The ritual performed in interaction of human and technology has developed from "binaural tunes" - digitally processed sound loops that are claimed to induce desirable mental states by their direct physical stimuli. It is presently used for meditation as theta or beta sounds, alternative medicine, rausch (Benjamin) as digital drug or scientific research and has illegal status in countries like Saudi Arabia and Oman.
We concentrate on these elements of ritual, which can be interpreted with the concept of embodiement (Csordas). However, it also relates to the question of engagement of digital technologies in process of co-defining imagination, identity and practice of everyday life as described by T. Boellstorf and S. Turtle.
The most appropiate way of presentation of work is installation itself, which is easy to set up and requires an empty room, two monitors and headphones.
Paper short abstract:
This is a work-in-progress field recording composition collaboratively produced during a prolonged participation in the lives of migrant traders, sellers and beggars of a semi-formal, open-air market in Moscow.
Paper long abstract:
This is a work-in-progress field recording composition made of a collection of sonic diaries, fieldwork aphorisms and interceptions of the security guards' communications that were produced from a prolonged participation in the lives of migrant traders, sellers and beggars of a semi-formal, open-air market in Moscow. The large, shabby market halls and bazaars are the remnants of the dystopian, post-socialist nineties that the official media continues to paint as "dark" places of crime and clandestine homes for illegalized, racialized workers. Even as the bazaars have become the city's "internal borders" and routine targets for raids, they are also Foucauldian heterotopic places combining utopian hopes and dystopian reality, points of departures or return, debt, survival and uplift. The project aims at documenting the soundscapes and sonic atmospheres of this place and the people at work or during recreation there. It also aims at presenting the sonic micro-practices pointing away towards other worlds elsewhere. Sometimes these can involve: the singing of the Bollywood love songs, making fun of the customers or passers by, listenings and falling asleep to the Quranic recitations of the Ya-Sin Surah or smoking hashish. The final version of the composition would involve the collaboratively edited pieces done by different workers of the market as well as the reflective discussions on the nature of sound in relation to their daily lives. An eight minute sample from the perspective of the ethnographer working and living as a seller is available:
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/acgwpbv3hxg0i0r/AACd6jptz8adpkOSio_uPw6ya?dl=0
Paper short abstract:
School’s Out explores soundscapes of our closed village school, unpicking the binaries of conference title, indicating more nuanced layers in contemporary notions of rural life and ‘rural idyll’ that are not fixed, but shifting & changing, depending on a variety of elements.
Paper long abstract:
School's Out is part of the series, Playing the Landscape, an ongoing sound project conceived by Dr. Hilary Ramsden and developed in collaboration with musician, Heather Summers. Playing the Landscape seeks to investigate, improvise and record sound in order to excavate meanings and notions of place, identity, belonging and memory. Playing the Landscape began in 2008 as a playing of outdoor sculptures using beaters and sticks in order to add audio dimensions to visual art pieces. This work developed into a wider concept of 'playing' other elements within the environment, integrating ambient and found sounds. In 2010 I moved from the city of Bristol to rural West Wales. I had moved to supposedly more 'peaceful' surroundings but became acutely aware of the soundscapes around me, with sheep bleating continuously through the nights and chainsaws singing through the days. Employing photography, video and audio, I began to document my transition from urban to rural through documented walks, talking to locals and searching out meanings and relevance of contemporary concepts of 'rural'. Asking questions about past and future, my research began to problematize myths and realities of a 'rural idyll', lived experiences, memories and identities, sheep and cows. Outputs from these include WalkinWales documented walks, a photo-essay chapter, a video Free Range Eggs & Chutney and Calling You, a soundscape created with Heather Summers in 2014 for MapSain - an audio-mapping of our local area - funded by the Arts Council of Wales.
Paper short abstract:
Soundwork mp3 file and other analysis: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/n0lruqgwthqlpdw/AADj8Evi0CqNB08AJAuiZ1HKa?dl=0 In the TUM studio URBAN RADICALS, our task was to find an answer to the question: Is it possible to urban design by using sound? Our "field" of experiments were situated near Munich.
Paper long abstract:
Nowadays urban planning has focused on visual perception, all other perceptional aspects would follow that in later progress. Our hypothesis was to switch this objectified visual planning with definitive borders into flowing perceptual planning, by using sound.
Our task was to go from Utopian idea of planning, back to Radicalism: to combine in a harmonious and sensible way both types of communication (from sound to visual), to make architecture back to liquid experience. Through or analysis of the area near Munich, we created 7 soundscapes, inspired by case studies from sound artists in 20th century (check the link and pdf file named Collection of Atmospheres). The submitted soundpiece is an mixtape of our created soundscapes.
Inspired by the Collection of Atmopsheres case studies, we created a soundscapes according to each case study and applied these into our field. The soundcapes were created using the recording from our field mixed with soundscapes from Munich. Creating a path where the performative walking individual can take a synesteshiac soundwalk by using radio aporee mobile for miniatures app (http://aporee.org/mfm/tracker.php?id=183) the idea was to devise a task for which hearing-motion synesthesia would confer a performance advantage, as this would be strong objective evidence for the perceptual experience. The temporal structure of visual information turned into an auditory representation in order to improve the temporal judgments of visual input.
For deeper understanding of our work please check the link: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/n0lruqgwthqlpdw/AADj8Evi0CqNB08AJAuiZ1HKa?dl=0
and open the pdf file named Booklet