Sounding the posthuman attitude — a historico-aesthetical analysis of onto-epistemological perspectives in contemporary sonic arts

In the recent years works of sonic art have increasingly engaged with the notion of the posthuman: Environmental sound art; artificial intelligence in musical composition; infra- and ultrasound in electronic music and sound installations; posthuman theory in sound art conceptualisation. However, the present proposal claims, that we have always been posthuman. This has manifested in various ways throughout history, and must therefore to be understood as an attitude. The posthuman attitude engages with and seeks beyond limits of human perception, cognition and knowledge. This attitude, I suggest, is to be found in contemporary as well as in historical works of sonic arts. The original contribution to knowledge of this project is to bring new perspectives into the research fields of posthuman theory and sound studies by asking: How does the posthuman attitude manifest in the sonic arts? How do we foster an adequate theory of the posthuman in the sonic arts? And what knowledge can be derived from a specifically sonic artistic attitude towards the posthuman?

IDA HAVUKAINEN

PhD candidate | University of Eastern Finland

Ida Havukainen is a PhD student in Social and Cultural Encounters doctoral programme in University of Eastern Finland. Graduated with a Master of Arts in Cultural studies in 2016, majoring in ethnomusicology. Graduated with a BA in music pedagogy in 2017. Forthcoming article in December 2019: “Kehon positiot laulunopetuksen käytännöissä” (“Positions of the body in singing teaching”). 

ANTTI IKONEN
Lecturer | Aalto University

Antti Ikonen started his career in the early 1980s without any formal education. He obtained skills in sound design and applied music through practice in numerous artistic and commercial productions: contemporary dance, theatre, short films, radio plays, art installations, and new media. Since 2001, he has been working as a lecturer of sound design and music in Media Lab Helsinki (Aalto University). His current research handles audible interior design, focusing in questions of listening.

Designing sounds for a children’s hospital

Contemplative listening is the most crucial skill and fundamental method when designing sounds for specific environments. It is essential to know the ingredients and understand the behaviour of the soundscape in question, and especially when using generative methods in (re)constructing or (re)creating a soundscape this cannot be fully achieved without listening for an extended period of time. Furthermore, soundscapes and aural interiors can be listened to in a reduced way as they were ambient music.

In this talk I will introduce an actual large-scale interior sound design project in order to delineate the characteristics of sound as an element, material and subject of discussion in a bigger planning context. A new hospital for children in Helsinki, Finland was completed and taken into use in 2018. Aside from patient rooms and facilities for medical operations, large areas of this hospital are being equipped with loudspeakers. The loudspeakers are used to play a generative ambient soundscape specially designed and tailored for the hospital. While going through the project, I will concentrate on the importance of listening within the design process and evaluation of the outcomes rather than going deeply into technical details or administrative issues.

HETA KAISTO
Doctor of Art candidate | Aalto University

Heta Kaisto (MA) is a doctoral student in visual culture at Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture, and currently working as a director of Rauma Art Museum, Finland. She has a background in art
history, comparative literature and philosophy, and she takes a deep interest in music and sound. In her practice-based research she explores writing as a mode of thinking in texts, images and sounds in the context of post-war theory and art. As a part of her artistic research, she has co-written and directed a radio play “A Hundred-year-old Night” based on archival materials of the Finnish Civil War in 1918. She is about to start to work on her second project under a title “songs of disaster”.

Siren and the Imperfect Songs of Disaster

I am a writer, curator and singer-songwriter from Helsinki, Finland. In my research, “in Resonance, for — Writing towards the Disaster” I explore through the concept of disaster and resonance the boundaries of writing and thinking in philosophy. How to deal with an experience that is outside the possibilities of rational meaning-making?

With the help of writers that have pushed the boundaries of fact and fiction such as Maurice Blanchot and PJ Harvey, I try to write towards a limit experience of a disaster. My position is one of a theorist/artist: at the same time exploring the poiesis of making and the poetics of it. In my research sound acts as a material, a relation and a method. This includes for example archival interview material on Finnish civil war, listening as a method, and a voice as singularity disrupting the unity and neutral tone of the ideal discourse of philosophy. In the seminar I will focus on the latter: the possibilities of a voice to convey thinking of a disaster and what it could mean for me as a theorist/artist. I will base my talk on the essay “The Song of the Sirens” by Maurice Blanchot.

DR. HARRI LAAKSO
Associate Professor | Aalto Univeristy

Dr. Harri Laakso is Associate Professor of Photography Research in the Department of Media at Aalto University, Finland. He also works in the Department of Art and in the Department of Film, Television and Scenography. Laakso is an artist, researcher and curator interested in photographic images and theory, artistic research, word/image relations and audio plays. He has led and participated in many research projects and artistic projects and published texts and curated exhibitions especially related to photography and contemporary art.

BERNHARD RIETBROCK
Research Associate | Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK)

Bernhard Rietbrock is a musician, producer and research associate at the institute for music research at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK). He is a member of the D‑A-CH research project “Hearing the Other — an Aesthetic of the Real in Experimental Music and Sound Art” and artistic director of the Ever Present Orchestra, which is dedicated to the presentation of the exceptional work of Alvin Lucier. Based on his examination of current philosophical theories on the real in the light of Lacanian conceptualization and American experimental music with a focus on Alvin Lucier’s phenomenological aesthetics, he intensively works on questions about the future perspectives of such contextualized aesthetic positions, strategies and concepts. 

PROF. DR. HABIL. SABINE SANIO
Lecturer | Sound Studies and Sonic Arts (M.A.)

Sabine Sanio is lecturer in theory at the Master’s program Sound Studies and Sonic Arts, University of the Arts Berlin; studied german literature and philosophy, doctorate in German Studies, habilitation in musicology and member of the D‑A-CH research project “Hearing the Other — an Aesthetic of the Real in Experimental Music and Sound Art”; numerous articles about actual aesthetics, media aesthetics and media history, Sonic Arts, New and Experimental Music and about the relationship between the arts — as books: Alternativen zur Werkästhetik: Cage und Heißenbüttel (Saarbrücken 1999), 1968 und die Avantgarde (Sinzig 2008), as editor: Sound als Zeitmodell: Zeit als Klang denken (Berlin 2014), Borderlines/Auf der Grenze: Georg Klein (Heidelberg/Berlin 2014). In English (in print): Auditory Mirrors: About the Politics of Hearing, contribution to The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Imagination, ed. M. Grimshaw, M. Walther-Hansen, and M. Knakkergaard. Oxford UP, to appear 2019.

GABRIEL SANTANDER

Gabriel Santander graduated in Composition from the Real Conservatorio Superior de Música de Madrid, after which he won the composition competitions Flora Prieto 2010 in Madrid and the Clang Cut Book 2013, organised by KNM Berlin. He has attended Composition courses with Karlheinz Stockhausen, Brian Ferneyhough, Michael Jarrell and José María Sánchez Verdú, as well as Sound Studies seminars at the UdK Berlin. He studied in Berlin with Peter Ablinger and has researched on his work since 2010. He is currently Interim Professor in Composition at the Conservatorio Profesional de Música Joaquín Turina in Madrid and Professor in the Musicology Faculty of the International University Valencia – VIU. He has given numerous lectures on musical analysis and compositional processes at conservatoires and festivals in Madrid, Seville and Krakow. Together with Marija Pendeva he has translated into Spanish 3 books of Plays by Macedonian Playwright Goran Stefanovski, published by the Asociación de Directores de Escena de España – ADE Teatro and funded by the European Commission’s Creative Europe programme.

VOLKER STRAEBEL
Head of department | Sound Studies and Sonic Arts (M.A.)

Volker Straebel (1969) is a musicologist focusing on experimental and electro-acoustic music, sound art, intermedia, performance and concept art. Since 2015, he has been director of the Sound Studies Master program at the Berlin University of the Arts, after having served as director of the Electronic Music Studio at the Technical University Berlin. He has realized and performed electronic music and indeterminate works by John Cage and others. His publications include pieces on sound art, media-specific music, John Cage, Alvin Lucier, and Phill Niblock.