Despite the vast growth of diversity in music/arts practices, the general bodies of knowledge tend to neglect how diverse our hearing-listening profiles are, which affects how people generally think about music/arts and how artists and arts stakeholders do their practices. Through this talk, Jay Afrisando invites the audience to rethink and unlearn what we call “music” and share some best practices to tackle ableism in music/arts practices.

Jay Afrisando is a composer and multimedia artist working on aural diversity, disability, accessibility, and decolonizing arts practices, manifested in multisensory and antidisciplinary practices ranging from music-theater to installation, filmmaking, participatory performance, and listening walk.

He is a DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Fellow 2024 and an Assistant Professor of Music at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

@jay_afrisando

Black holes and tectonic plates — Hawthorn’s work looks at the unseen and unheard in the natural world as a potent space for artistic expression.  Through a process of research and iteration, they dilate these “un-sensed” objects and develop them into sound-forward works of installation and performance.  This talk presents a selection of their recent works and, through these works, discusses art’s singular potential to find the emotional hook in scientific research.

Alex Hawthorn is an artist, composer, and technologist whose work flows between performance, installation, object-making, and sound-making.  They use their work as a lens through which to investigate the natural world, specifically focusing on time: how we experience it, how we have codified it, and what exists beyond our comprehension. Their work in theatrical sound design has garnered them an Obie award, LA Ovation Awards, and has been heard around the world. They hold a BFA in theater from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and an MFA in Art and Technology & Composition and Experimental Sound Practices from the California Institute of the Arts. 

@afhawthorn 
www.AlexHawthorn.com

In his talk, Marcus Maeder describes interactions, overlaps and potential for innovation at the interfaces of art and science that deal with environmental issues. Maeder will show examples from his own projects and provide an insight into the relatively young research discipline of Acoustic Ecology. Research projects in the Amazon, in the Swiss Alps and in Ireland are reflected in Maeder’s media art works, which have attracted international attention and open up new, sonic perspectives on the environment.

The talk emerges from Chattopadhyay’s expansive practice with situated listening and psychogeography, manifested in their various projects over the years. The talk investigates how a sense of place is re-constructed in sound and audiovisual media works through the recording and mediation of site-specific sonic elements, such as environmental sounds. How engaging the mediated presence of a place becomes depends on the sensitivity and care with which artists and practitioners listen to the site by a psychogeographic approach, defying the cartographic quantification of place. Chattopadhyay discusses several sound-works, including a number of their own artworks to explore various positions of human agency and affordances in re-producing space and place in audiovisual media, and the artistic sensibilities for self-critic.

https://budhaditya.org

For the past few years, Åsa Stjerna has been following two scientific research teams’ use of underwater acoustic technologies — that is, methods that use sound in various ways — in their research on the fragile Arctic environment. Over time, as much as investigating what the technologies actually generate in terms of information, she has become interested in the limitations of the technologies, and the gaps that arise between what the technologies are able or unable to measure and the final outcome the researchers produce. How does science deal with these gaps? What do these gaps tell us? What is the artistic potential of these gaps?