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?

Working with voice, the open, extended voice, taken to the scream. Before and after the word, in such a way  that its possibility of saying is in turn linked to the reflection of the unsaid. Starting from the voice then dealing with silence…what a body can do in the gesturally of speech, before speech, or, what it can say when it has been impossible to speak. Sometimes my work has been devoted to illness, to the sick voice, the affected, deceased voice, the voice of the abnormality and to the voice that is not allowed to speak, the silenced. An exploration that is far from musical, rather sonorous and in this sense explicitly physical and a game of bridges between spatial and corporeal resonances. 

In the voice resides capacity both to say in urgency  where the cry fits ad is demanded, as well as to say in the pause, at the moment of remembering, of beginning to regain strength, to begin to articulate a new word.

Bárbara Lázara

Artist whose work is dedicated to amplifying subjugated languages, archives of the body, and stolen memories. Her work spans across various media, including performance, music, writing, and video, and has been exhibited in solo and group shows in Mexico, the US, and the EU. She is a member of the DAAD Berliner Künstlerprogramm 2022/23 and belonged to the Sistema de Creadores de Arte de México from 2019 to 2022. Lázara is currently working on archival materials for the exhibition Sonora en el Silencio, which will showcase the artistic legacy of her great-grandmother, writer Olivia Zuñiga, and take place at the Museo Cabañas in 2023.

Listening, relation, community

Experiences of listening may be understood to weaken us, making us vulnerable to the intensities of worldly contact and each other. As such, listening may act as the basis for gestures of compassion and care, enabling forms of mutuality and empathy. Yet, listening may also lead to fragmentation, rupture, ecstasy. What can be drawn from such intensities listening evokes? And what forms of practice might be found by way of listening’s relational capacities Exploring questions of listening and relationality, I’ll reflect upon methods of social engagement, emphasizing the second cultures that emerge by way of sonic materiality and expression. From such perspectives, a notion of more-than-social art will be posed that may allow for other understandings and imaginaries of community life and what it means to find partnership.

brandonlabelle.net/

Prof. Brandon LaBelle is an artist, writer and theorist living in Berlin. His work focuses on questions of agency, community, pirate culture, and poetics, which results in a range of collaborative and extra-institutional initiatives, including: The Listening Biennial and Academy (2021-), Communities in Movement (2019-), The Living School (with South London Gallery, 2014–16), Oficina de Autonomia (2017), The Imaginary Republic (2014–19), Dirty Ear Forum (2013-), Surface Tension (2003–2008), and Beyond Music Sound Festival (1998–2002). In 1995 he founded Errant Bodies Press, an independent publishing project supporting work in sound art and studies, performance and poetics, artistic research and contemporary political thought. His publications include: The Other Citizen (2020), Sonic Agency (2018), Lexicon of the Mouth (2014), Acoustic Territories (2010, 2019), and Background Noise (2006, 2015). His latest book, Acoustic Justice (2021), argues for an acoustic model by which to engage questions of social equality. LaBelle is also a member of Errant Sound, Berlin.

Under the title “Sounding the Quintessential,” media artist Nandita Kumar from India/New Zealand will spoke about her work. She is currently in Berlin on a DAAD Fellowship and works at the intersection of art, science, technology and community, creating interactive installations. She explores the elemental process by which people construct meaning from their experiences by developing sensory narratives through sound, video/animation and performance, smartphone apps, custom motherboards, and solar and microwave sensors.

https://nanditakumar.com

Nandita Kumar (w) is a Media artist from India/New Zealand and currently holds a DAAD stipend in Berlin, Germany. She works at the intersection of art, science, technology and community to create interactive installations. She explores the elemental process through which human beings construct meaning from their experiences, by creating sensory narratives through sound, video/animation and performance, smartphone apps, customized motherboards, and solar/microwave sensors.

In this talk Chagas presents his research on phenomenology of sound and music focused on the notions of truth and paradigm. It begins with Heidegger’s view of art as a tool for achieving truth, followed by Kuhn’s ideas on advances in science by way of paradigms and revolutions. The notion of paradigm as a disciplinary matrix leads to a comparative approach between science and art, aiming to observe similarities and differences. With a brief look at Wittgenstein’s concept of the language game, Chagas will examine the notions of paradigm and signature in Agamben’s philosophical archeology. Three cultural paradigms within the history of Western music are explored: vocal, instrumental, and electroacoustic. Delving into the notion of apparatus as a process of subjectivation, we will investigate how the electroacoustic paradigm builds capacity for apparatuses to expand consciousness of sound phenomena. A paradigm shift has occurred from a subjective hermeneutic view of the world, to a thinking shaped by cybernetics and information theory. The automaticity of music apparatuses is viewed through several lenses, including the way that the electroacoustic paradigm inaugurated the era of music as a torture apparatus. Flusser’s notion of the telematic paradigm highlights the communicative complexity of modern society and the idea of chamber music as a model for dialogic telematic communication. As illustration on my artistic output, Chagas will present Sound Imaginations, a recent work that explores the concepts of listening cultures and audiovisual immersion.

Paulo C. Chagas is professor of composition at the University of California, Riverside. He created more than 190 works for orchestra, chamber music, electroacoustic, audiovisual and multimedia. His works resulted from numerous commissions and have been acclaimed in the United States, Europe, Russia, Asia and Brazil. Chagas develops extensive research in music semiotics, philosophy, electroacoustics, audiovisual composition, and telematic music. His book Unsayable Music (Leuven University Press, 2014) presents theoretical, critical and analytical reflections on key themes of contemporary music. He recently edited the book Sounds from Within: Phenomenology and Practice (Springer, 2021) and published the book Zwischen Klängen und Apparaten: zur Theorie und Praxis der elektronischen Musik [Between sounds and apparatuses: theory and practice of electronic music] (Rediroma, 2021) Chagas has received several international awards, including recently the prestigious Fulbright Research Award for a research project at the TU Berlin.