14:30 Doors
15:00 Bojana Cvejić – Listening, transindividually
15:30 Gabriel Paiuk – Listening Technicities
16:15 Giulia Rae – “Immersive” in the Context of sound and Listening
16:45 Rim Irscheid – Embracing Uncertainty and Failure in Experimental Music and Curatorial Activism
17:30 Tim Ingold – The Fountain
18:00 Round Table
The discourse program brings together five talks providing different perspectives of the topic of the festival, with contributions concerning immersion, technology, cultural conventions, and transindividuality. The afternoon will finish with a round table with all the speakers. The discourse program is sold out.
Bojana Cvejić: Listening, transindividually
In the context of neoliberal society, one is trained to perform themself as an individual through a variety of relations and truthgames. Thus, the self is considered a matter of property and possession, production of one’s unicity, or experience of one’s own truth through embodiment where art and culture provide golden opportunities for individuals to ‘self-express’. And yet we could turn this predicament, and its Western cultural legacy, on its head and push for a different claim. What if the source of individuation of all subjects is social and preindividual? What makes a sensorimotor experience transindividual, and more specifically, what would it mean to listen transindividually, where individuals and a group co-evolve in mutual relations? This talk will offer a few cues and suggestions on the import of transindividuality in performance.
Gabriel Paiuk: Listening Technicities
This talk will address technologies of sound production and mediation not as a collection of instruments and prostheses but as a condition of making and perceiving. Listening, understood as a performative aspect of the ways we participate in the world, comes to be informed by the technical circuits in which it unfolds. These not only enable different ways of producing sound, but also shape how perception and imagination become possible. Paiuk will address music performances, as well as other forms of artistic practice engaged with sound, as possible sites in which the articulation of technology, listening, and imagination are produced.
Giulia Rae: “Immersive” in the context of sound and listening
In today’s realm of technology-driven media consumption, the term “immersive” is ubiquitous, often used rather superficially. It’s commonly associated with the quality of an experience facilitated by a particular technology as if the mere complexity of the setup (like the number of speakers) directly equates to a heightened sense of immersion. This mindset can be also found in art fields that heavily rely on technology. From this landscape, there emerges the necessity to investigate the term from a critical stance. When contemplating the experience of listening, “immersion” emerges as a distinctive quality. This leads to a dichotomy between immersion and distance, as if, through the act of listening, the self oscillates between in and out of ‘the other’, in and out of itself.
Rim Irscheid: Embracing Uncertainty and Failure in Experimental Music and Curatorial Activism
This talk will highlight the importance of the notions of ‘uncertainty’ and ‘failure’ as productive tools in experimental music making and ethical listening practices. Drawing on ethnographic findings from Lebanon and Lebanese diaspora communities in Germany, Rim will speak about artist-led institutions in Germany that challenge (neo)colonial power dynamics between curator and musician and tired curatorial narratives of ‘Arab resistance’ in transcultural productions. Drawing on examples of curatorial activism of Lebanese experimental musicians in Berlin Kreuzberg, Rim will present how new forms of curatorial concepts, sonic tools, and affective responses to sound can become the breeding ground for practicing mindful, engaged, hyper-listening practices.
Tim Ingold: The Fountain
Using the example of a fountain, Ingold reflects on the nature of sound in relation to falling water. What does it mean to say that the sound of the fountain is diffuse rather than compact? What do we mean by sound, that terms like diffusion and compaction might apply to it? Comparing the plop when a single drop falls into water with the tinkle of the fountain, Ingold will show that to speak not of the diffusion of sound, but of sound itself as diffuse, is to understand sound as the stretch of auditory attention as it participates in the milieu. Only in this sense are sound and water interchangeable.
BIO’S
Bojana Cvejić‘s work spans philosophy, performance practice and theory and dance. Her areas of interest include expressionism in Western (continental) philosophy, social choreography, critique of individualism, rhythms of intensified work, and contemporary performance poetics.
https://khio.no/en/staff/bojana-cvejic
Gabriel Paiuk is a composer, sound artist, and researcher exploring the ways in which listening occurs. His work has been performed and presented across Europe, North- and South America and consists of sound installations, works for instruments and electronic devices, and collaborations with other disciplines. He teaches at the Institute of Sonology in The Hague.
Giulia Rae is a composer and sound researcher currently based in Brussels. Grounded in the field of creative coding, Rae’s careful touch on sonic space embraces the potential of human-machine interaction to craft digital/organic sonic environments. She presents acousmatic works, performs live internationally, and releases music on various labels.
Rim Irscheid is a postdoctoral researcher and curator working on the intersection of curatorial activism, diaspora music-making, and cultural policy across Lebanon and Germany. She is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow on the UKRI/ERC project Beyond1932: Rethinking Musical Modernity in the Middle East and North Africa at King’s College London.
Tim Ingold is Professor Emeritus of Social Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen. His research has ranged from human ecology and evolutionary theory to environmental perception and skilled practice. His current interests lie on the interface between anthropology, archaeology, art, and architecture. Ingold is a Fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Society of Edinburgh. In 2022 Ingold was made a CBE for services to Anthropology.
Leonie Persyn is an affiliated researcher at S:PAM – Studies in Performing Arts and Media, Ghent University. She was trained as a visual artist and as an art historian. Over the last years she has developed her own research practice incorporating both academic and artistic strategies. Her research project titled The Sound of a Shared Intimacy focuses on sound and listening in performance practices.