(All sessions take place at 155 Walnut Avenue, Toronto)
Please register in advance at https://www.eventbrite.com/e/tuning-speculation-vii-non-tickets-73703953509
Friday (15 November 2019)
8:45 – Doors open
9:30 – 11:00 — Keynote 1
M. Beatrice Fazi — The Incommensurable: Explainability and the Autonomy of Computational AutomationExplainability and the Autonomy of Computational AutomationThis talk addresses some of the philosophical implications of a computer program being no longer constrained by the limits of human knowledge. I will understand this freedom from human knowledge as a form of autonomy from human abstraction. My case study will be contemporary artificial intelligence research in deep learning. Because of their successful results, deep learning techniques are today very popular. These techniques, however, operate in computational ways that are opaque and often illegible. Such a black-box character of deep learning, I will argue, is a technical condition that asks us to reconsider the abstractive nature of these technologies. In this talk I will do so by entering debates about explainability in artificial intelligence, and thus considering the ways in which technoscience and technoculture are addressing the possibility to re-present algorithmic procedures of generalization and conceptualization to the human mind. I will then mobilize the notion of incommensurability (originally developed within debates in philosophy of science) in order to engage with the onto-epistemic discrepancy between the abstractive choices of humans and those of computing machines.
11:15 – 12:45 — Panel 1
- Tobias Ewé — No'es ∅n n0nsound 'n' the nØnheardNo'es ∅n n0nsound 'n' the nØnheardNo! The non in 'nonheard' is the negation of unheard. Not that any of you would no anyway. NONtheless, it is about time that the unsound (Goodman 2009 + Goodman & Heys & Ikoniadou 2019) received its auscultatory complementary; the nonheard. Although the 0point of sound was infamously Caged off as an imperceptible impossibility, research (Plant 2001, Deleuze 19567) has revealed that the 0 is not 1's opposite but the grounding of (n)one. Similarly the heard is not the nonheard's opposite, but created from it. Through a grounding of perception in the uncertainty of the nonheard, the stability of rationality and humanist enlightenment starts to crack at the edges. The nonheard will take an earshot at the epistemology of hearing! But not in any way that makes sense to anyone but the NonPulsed Man. Hearing is not just a passive reception of sound as vibrations and phenomena, but the active production of sound in a cocreative transduction. If this is the case, the purpose of nonhearing is not just the production of nonsense, but making the ear thoroughly nonproductive.
In this presentation, I will share the most recent discoveries by the 'ewe institute' regarding their research into xenophonia particularly with reference to epistemological grounding in Deleuze, cybernetics (most recently in the work of Cecile Malaspina), and Canguilhem's 'normativity of reason'. In an experimental talk where the line between form and content become blurred, n01 won't be on shaky ground. - Sean Smith — Non: A Listening with Ears all Over my Eyes and Down my ThroatNon: A Listening with Ears all Over my Eyes and Down my ThroatAn aural performative theory-essay or textual experiment based on a poetic vibratology or earthy decompostisition of the conference theme into an atomospheric consistency or latticework constellation of subject areas. #ororor #dodotodoto #djaquarius
- Adriana Knouf — in-cantare: xenology and incantationin-cantare: xenology and incantationXenology is the study, analysis, and development of the alien, the strange, the other. Xenology incants. It intensifies the power of song and the voice to conjure the occult into our realm of existence. It molds gaseous matter into modulating pressure waves that causes bodies to gyrate, dance, fall down, get up, befriend, intertwine, fail, defecate, arise, orgasm, collapse. Incantations function as mixings of the Word and matter, a queering of the masculinist attempt to constrain language to the realm of thought. Femme and non-binary people the world over have known for thousands of years that the Voice has a power of its own, hence the repression of so many of us in institutions as "hysterical" or the sacrifice of us on the stake as witches.
Incantations summon other realms into being, including those that didn't exist but should have or those that will exist but don't as of yet. As such, xenology as incantation draws inspiration from hyperstitional projects such as those of AUDINT, Drexciya, or Black Quantum Futurism. Such works can act as re-memberings of traumas and death inflicted on bodies marked as xeno, as well as invocations of moments of strength, resilience, and survival that need to exist. Xenological incantations scream into the cosmos, twisting the streams of future, past, and present and thereby suturing the not-yet into the now-past. To incant is to harness the power to yank the realm of the non-existent into the real.
12:45 – 2:00 — Lunch (provided)
2:00 – 3:30 — Panel 2
- Nikki Cesare-Schotzko — ‘What a way to make a living’: Revisiting 9 to 5 as a Feminist Intervention into 24/7 Labour Culture‘What a way to make a living’In 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, Jonathan Crary describes the neoliberal drive toward increasing productivity and consumption as not only having moved beyond mere ethos and toward actual manipulated work and natural environments, but also as predicated upon a dynamic of anti-social posthumanism beyond (rational) human time. “24/7 announces a time without time, a time extracted from any material or identifiable demarcations, a time without sequence or recurrence,” Crary writes. “In its peremptory reductiveness, it celebrates a hallucination of presence, of an unalterable permanence composed of incessant, frictionless operations” (2013: 29). Considered within the immediately contemporary context of the “gig economy”—which in 2017 comprised “about 34% of the workplace and expected to be at 43% by the year 2020” (Smith in Forbes 2019)—wherein corporate risk is transferred to the individual without any ensuing benefit (or, literally, benefits), and coupled with the growth of a “shut-in economy,” a dystopic realization of that already dystopic 1995 Sandra Bullock film, The Net, living a 24/7 life is, in effect, living no life at all: a non-life spent in non-time.
Resisting the urge to contemplate a world after the doctrine of 24/7, I instead cast back to a 9-to-5 world, specifically that within the 1980 blockbuster comedy 9 to 5. Featuring Jane Fonda (as Judy) and Lily Tomlin (Violet), and introducing Dolly Parton (Doralee) in her film debut, 9 to 5 is, as its description on IMDB reads, the story of “three female employees of a sexist, egotistical, lying, hypocritical bigot [who] find a way to turn the tables on him.” But it is also a modern fable of how feminine sociality might overturn inequitable labour practices in the corporate workplace. This paper engages how Judy, Violet, and Doralee form an unlikely feminist collective that subverts stereotypes of women and power while also cultivating tropes of feminine domesticity and sexuality toward a more ethical economic labour place. Taking into account the overt whiteness of the film, and its flippant portrayal of assault, sexual and otherwise, I argue that 9 to 5 is not only a counter to the non-time of the 24/7 life, but also to a neoliberal, postfeminist, Jordan Peterson-esque cult of the individual where we’re all just “barely gettin’ by” with all this “takin’ and no giving” (Parton 1980). - Geraldine Finn — Working the Speculative Ear. An Invo Advo Provo Convo Equivo PreVeriCationWorking the Speculative Ear.TBA!
- Sarah Hayden — UnvoicedUnvoicedThis intervention will investigate interactions between (strident-though-inaudible) inner voices and (unhearing-though-straining) internal ears. It intends to explicate the soundless interjections of textual unvoices in artists’ moving image works of the past five years.
The analysis will centre on Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa’s 2015 film, Promised Lands: in which performances of ventriloquism, illegibility and indecipherability, inter- and sub-titling, litanies of negation, linguistic opacity, vocal expressivity and anti-colonial fictioning are marshalled to trouble a history of displacements and dislocations between the European and African continents. In Promised Lands, over twenty minutes and seven chapters, voice and textual unvoice move in and out of synchronisation. As what is audible and what is legible variously peel apart, generate friction, and fall into mutual supplementarity, Promised Lands unsettles expectations about the testimonial capacities of the ‘living voice’, and, too, the dynamic potentiality of the word-as-read.
Much will be made of pre-emptive muting. Punctuation may prove surprisingly significant within/ to a new grammar of artists’ film-making. Along the way, recourse will be had to recent videos by Laure Prouvost, Patrick Staff and Christopher Kulendran Thomas and, too, to the relation between TED-talks and cheap ads. This presentation heralds the incipience of a new form of non-audible address to the reader-viewer-listener’s internal non-hearing system.
3:45 – 5:15 — Panel 3
- Colin Campbell — Siren Song of the CetaceansSiren Song of the CetaceansIn the time he spent with John C. Lilly in the mid-60s, Gregory Bateson developed an illuminating theory for the interpretation of Cetacean vocalizations, one that speaks also to questions of communication, both pragmatic and aesthetic, among humans.
The primary issue in “Some Problems in Cetacean and Other Mammalian Communication” is the analog-digital-split that has evolved with human language and culture. Mammals generally, unlike bees, communicate with their peers and other animals in analog terms. There is no code of discrete, arbitrary signs that could indicate a specific meaning outside of immediate relationship of one-to-another or one-to-environment. Human evolution, uniquely, appears have layered a digital communication system (the rules of syntax and definitions of words) over top of the analog ‘base’ of pre-existing primate-mammalian communication. This split, Bateson says, has led to many problems in human communication, opening up wide avenues for mythic or ideological deception to which other animals are not vulnerable.
Cetaceans are different because their evolutionary return to aquatic life obsolesced most of their mammalian-visual-analog ‘base’ – bared teeth, eye movements, tail wagging, etc. Bateson proposes that they were evolutionarily forced to fully integrate and holistically ‘upload’ their analog signaling relations into digital forms of song patterns, and it is for this reason that their language lacks the split that has caused humans to have our unique problems.
It turns out, however, that for Bateson the work of analog-digital integration, though difficult, is not unknown to humans – ‘it’ is the work of both scientists and mathematicians, as well as of artists, musicians and poets. - Einar Engström — Our Waterbed Model is Purely Conceptual, or Hearing the World Hallucinate ItselfOur Waterbed Model is Purely ConceptualPitch, rhythm, form....or squids and prisms and pink noise storms? Structure, intervals, harmony...or neurons and odradeks and basketballs in gravity? Esoteric circuits and weird algorithms, often modeled on models of nature, are a common feature in modular synthesis techniques. The modular ear may listen to reality at manifold scales, seeking novel affectivity from within a world dominated by cyborg discourse and control. This open attachment to ineffability, the horizons of the predictable, and technologies of the decentered self can be understood as a curiosity for the unknowable: a disposition that reveals synthesis as a kind of “ontological theatre” (Pickering 2011) where body and mind are not tools for representing the world, but organs that perform together with it. Thus listening to such audio experimentation reveals a close affinity with the nomad sciences of cybernetic and neurochemical experimentation, as it is characterized both by highly diverse intellectual and conceptual rigor and by minor flights from paradigmatic uses of science and technology. Here are cybertrance devices (Triclot 2018) desired for their capacity to modulate one’s interiority—a process of appropriating the immutable from scientific thought, and rendering it mutable. Following calls for synthesized sound to direct our attention to other strands of cultural history (Rodgers 2011) and to shape unconventional metaphysics and subjectivities (Oram 1972), this paper considers historical, material, embodied, and virtual points of exchange between hyperstitional circuits, rational speculation, and countercultural contingency.
- Jacqueline Chia — Guided Meditations for the Restless MachineGuided Meditations for the Restless MachineListening makes the invisible present in a way similar to the presence of the mute in vision.”
—Don Ihde
Melissa Gregg describes the use of mindfulness apps such as Aura and Headspace as delegating the mode of self-reflexivity to a device. The goal is to drive the user into being more productive, doing more but not better, while purporting to enrich the quality of well-being through self-care. Practising mindfulness—the digital opiate of consciousness—in today’s labour economy is thus a regime of (self-)discipline designed to regulate a worker’s emotional landscape so they can meet “otherwise unsustainable work demands.”
Guided Meditations for the Restless Machine are sound pieces generated by playing with relations of care and being within mindfulness technologies, making the omniscient agents themselves recipients of such applications, which are, Gregg writes, “trusted to scan the body’s functions [and produce] data that expose a self that is otherwise hidden and oblivious.” Following M. Beatrice Fazi’s question concerning digital computational ontology and digital aesthetics, my guided meditations thus “extend the field of ontological enquiry from the sensible to the intelligible.” Can there be a practice of digital mindfulness? What is it for a machine to listen, or even to represent relations of technical care, aesthetics, and ontology through sound?
Keeping in mind the aesthetic-ontological nature of the technical object, these guided meditations for the machine are fashioned through digital computation in order to question notions of productivity and neoliberal progress through technological abeyance, as well as to meditate on resting within an aesthetics of the digital.
Saturday (16 November)
9:00 – Doors open
9:30 – 11 — Panel 4
- Paul Hegarty — Sound as monoculturalism, or the ear of the sameSound as monoculturalism, or the ear of the sameAs sound studies spreads virally through arts, art practice and the humanities, it also radiates a certain degree of parochialism. It universalizes English-language cultures’ experience, unthinkingly replicating a monolithic globalism. Material cultural readings, psycho- and neuro- pseudosciences, music as shared cultural experience all risk a return to a simplistic and assertive set of assumptions about ‘our’ shared ears. But we do not share an ear. Even recent modes of framing that acknowledge contextual, identity, gender and ability differences in sound encounters, have failed to hear outside of English. In this paper, I will think about the issue of ‘we’ in sound studies and the exclusion of non-English language terrains as being transparent (transaudient) to (Anglo) sonic research. In other words, the study of sonic culture makes massive claims that do not necessarily hold in straightforward ways, and I want to develop an archeology of French sound cultures as a nested parallel to the Anglocentric framing of sound. I choose French not just for linguistic convenience but because of its global reach via France’s imperial past and present. This is not a paper looking to present French as a defence against monolithic Angloglobalism but a way of broadening how we hear globalism; this is also not a paper about language, or even music, but about encultured spaces that feed into a hybrid, distributed and mutational globalism.
- Doug Barrett — The Catastrophe of Technology: Posthuman Automata and Nam June Paik’s Robot K-456The Catastrophe of TechnologyThis paper analyzes Paik’s Robot K-456 (1964) in the context of postwar cybernetics while it grounds Paik’s robotics work in a longer history of musical automata, or the kinds of self-playing musical robots that began to mature in Europe during the late-eighteenth century. Central to the emergence of the modern liberal subject, these “Enlightenment androids” establish an early link between music, machines, and humanism’s construction of the human. Paik’s K-456 points to these eighteenth-century automata, and related musical artifacts, through specific signifiers as well as through the robot’s construction: Paik’s reluctance to model sensory organs, K-456’s lack of sensors or feedback mechanisms, and its consequent reliance on human assistance make the robot seem, functionally speaking, closer to its Enlightenment-era ancestors. What it shares with cybernetic robotics is an interest in simulating the human, loosely in terms of its skeletal anatomy or its ability to “speak” certain phrases, but more importantly in its apparent capacity to perform, even to labor. Simulation, in N. Katherine Hayles’s periodization, belongs to the final phase of cybernetics, “virtuality,” and pertains to the field of artificial life. For others such as Jessica Riskin, simulation appears as early as Vaucanson’s experimental piano- and flute-playing robots of the eighteenth century, which played a significant role along with the philosophy and science of the time in negotiating the boundaries between humans, animals, and machines. Just as Enlightenment began to articulate the human, it had already been superseded by its mechanical double. Indeed, the birth of the human occurred alongside its posthuman twin, the musical automaton.
As much as historical musical automata are central to K-456 and its meanings, Paik used his robot to engage with cultural and technological themes of his day, including cybernetics. Paik conceived of cybernetics as a technoscientific equivalent to the kinds of boundary crossings that occurred in the postwar arts, of which K-456 can be considered exemplary, and describes a broader relevance to technoculture through his oft-cited intent to “humanize technology.” In addition to his vision of a fully automated robot economy, Paik considered cybernetics as a kind of homeopathic treatment for what he called “cybernated life,” which reciprocally called for moments of shock and catharsis. In this sense, Paik’s robotics work thematizes not only the posthuman birth of the human, but also its technological crisis and imminent death. Following an exhibition of K-456 in 1982 at the Whitney Museum in New York, and Paik’s staged collision between the robot and a car on Madison Avenue, Paik prophesied that K-456 represented the “catastrophe of technology in the twenty-first century.” Challenging the modernist investment in technological mastery—recall that in addition to its humanization, Paik also sought to make technology “ridiculous”—his eschatological vision turns on the figures of disaster and failure. In addition to an analysis of Robot Opera (1964), this paper considers Paik’s work in light of a contemporary posthuman era of global economic crisis catalyzed by automation and roboticization. - Marcus Boon — Vibration-In-Itself: Modal ApproachesVibration-In-Itself: Modal ApproachesThere has been a modal turn in a number of quite different recent philosophical texts, including Bruno Latour's An Inquiry into Modes of Existence (2012), his response to those who argue that his work lacks an ontology; Alain Badiou's Logics of Worlds (2006), the second volume of Being and Event, and his modification, via Grothendieck's work on toposes, of the first volume of that book's claim that set theory provides a fundamental ontology; Giorgio Agamben's The Use of Bodies (2014) in which the problem of "bare life"s elaboration as social and political form is worked through via the idea of modes as "forms of life". While each of these texts uses sound as an analogy at certain points (Latour reflects on "tonality" (375); Agamben on "originary echos" (149); Badiou on serial music (79-89)), none of them consider sound and music in any depth in their elaboration of modal ontologies.In this paper, I wish to look at the difficult topic of a vibrational ontology, and how one can think of vibration from the site of "being qua being". And to ask what does it mean to think about "vibration-in-itself" -- are there generalized models of periodicity, of oscillation between the non and the not-non that apply across media, models and experiences? Are these models modal? And what does our understanding of modality in music tell us about the broader issues here?
11:15 – 12:45 — Panel 5
- Chris Shambaugh — Sonic Negativity: On the Ideality of SoundSonic Negativity: On the Ideality of SoundContemporary philosophical accounts of the nature of sounds are typically realist, construing sounds as mind-independent objects or properties of objects in the material world. A sound is hereby depicted as an event coextensive with mechanical waves propagating in a medium, understood in complete abstraction from the minds that actually perceive them. In a sharp contrast to this picture, Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature – Part Two of the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences – offers an inimitably rich and romantic, bizarre and underexplored account of sound as an ideal phenomenon, rather than a real one.
In this context, sound takes shape at the center of Hegel’s genealogical deduction of the organic from the mechanical and the physical – or of animal life from space and time – as the truth of gravity and cohesion and as a necessary condition for the possibility of heat, shape, light and chemistry. Here Hegel presents sound multifariously as “the ideality or subjectivity which vibration is,” “the soul of matter,” “the inner oscillation of the body within itself” and “the transition of materialized space into materialized time.” What ultimately distinguishes a sound from noise for Hegel is its negativity, its capacity to give form to itself by negating both the formlessness of the mechanical actuality from which it emerges and inevitably its own reverberation.
In critique of the inert sonic realism and representationalism currently dominating the philosophy of sound, which Hegel would undoubtedly and disdainfully attribute to the formalist and positivist hegemony of what he called “Understanding,” in this presentation, I hope to bring Hegel’s absolute idealist philosophy of sound as “mechanical light” to life, while also situating this theory in terms of his broader aesthetic, social and political concerns. - Jessie Beier & Tegan Moore — Notes from the Energetic QuietusNotes from the Energetic QuietusOften heard in the “energy humanities”1 is the claim that the work of (energy) transition must be directed towards making sensible — that is, making visible, making audible — those social, material and affective attachments that have fuelled both our “carboniferous love” and the collective sense of “cruel optimism” that has seemingly left us revving in circles within “an impasse like no other in history.” Within this common refrain, “the impasse” — that foreclosure of possibility marked by blockages at every turn — is detected not only the as cause for our collective inertia and despair, but also modulated into a site for production and generation, an optimistic situation of “radical indeterminacy” wherein new energy imaginaries might be articulated, augmented and amplified. While this aspirational modulation may provide a hopeful melody (for some), particularly amidst the noise of today’s discordant convergence of crises, it may also work to limit the very threshold of what is considered (in)sensible, (im)perceptible, and thus (in)audible, in the first place. Attuned to this threshold of (in)audibility, we direct our active, if habituated, (non)ears towards the (seemingly) non-productive, the imperceptible and the exhausted dimensions of the energy impasse. That is, amidst the promissory echoes and affirmative mantras that territorialize much energy transition discourse today, we attune to the impasse as a potential expression of negation, as a situation wherein further development is, indeed, impossible, perhaps even impassable. In our own energetic experimentations, this impo/assibility is not treated as cause for further “petromelancholic” lament, nor is it the fuel for imagining brighter energy imaginaries, but rather repositioned as a fulcrum for experimenting with forces of subtraction, negation, and, ultimately, the non.
In this performative talk, we will share a series of recent experiments in energetic sonification that reverberate under the banner of a project titled “Notes from the Energetic Quietus”. Drawing on recent developments in (cosmic)pessimism, radical refusal, speculative heresy, and non- philosophy, this experimental talk will bring together theoretical notes and proposals with live sampling and mixing so as to attune to that which has become muffled, hushed, and drowned out by dominant themes within the energy humanities. - Sebastian Roberts — Controlled Burn
12:45 – 2:00 — Lunch (provided)
2:00 – 3:30 — Panel 6 (The Occulture): Hexegesis
- David Cecchetto — Non-Thinking Thoughts I Can’t Help But Think (Thinking After Lorazepam)Non-Thinking Thoughts I Can’t Help But ThinkI) {[H(OW]L)}
I can't help but think a vexing thought.
II) Anoriginal Hexegesis
Does hexegesis casts misunderstandings as interpretations? Interpretations that will always be anoriginal, otherwise, and more-than to themselves? Could, perhaps, the first interpretation of the term hexegesis be another term altogether?
III) Vexegetic Computations
Incoherences have their own geometries, weights, and tendencies, and these change according to times, places, pressures, and intensities. - Marc Couroux — TBATBATBA!
- Ted Hiebert — TBATBATBA!
- Eldritch Priest — TBATBATBA!
- Rebekah Sheldon — TBATBATBA!
3:45 – 5:15 — Panel 7
- Aliza Shvarts — The Donkey’s NoiseThe Donkey’s NoiseIn How to Do Things with Words, one of the foundational texts of speech act theory, linguistic philosopher J.L. Austin draws on a strange hypothetical scenario: the shooting a female donkey. He uses this example’s authorizing utterance—“Shoot!”— to parse what he defines as the two main types of performativity: illocution, which is language’s immediate action (when to say something is to do something), and perlocution, which is its enduring consequence. Austin’s analysis is primarily concerned with the audible utterances that compose speech, which includes an unrestricted succession perlocutionary consequences that extend beyond the semantic and sonic utterance into a chain of what he calls “minimum physical actions”: the flows of breath, the circulations of blood, the pulsing of the nervous system—the background noise of life’s maintenance, of ongoing reproductive labor. Noise can refer not just to sound but to other kinds of interference: to the visual static that disrupts an image (salt-and-pepper noise, Gaussian noise, etc.), to irrelevant content or nonsense (“mere noise”). It can even refer to the status of certain bodies—those “loud,” “shrill,” or otherwise unwieldly bodies that disrupt the historical imagination of the citizen-subject. Modelled on artist Martha Rosler’s 1975 short film Semiotics of the Kitchen, which presents a parodic taxonomy of the tools of feminine reproductive labor confined to the commodities of the kitchen, this performative lecture will offer a queer feminist analysis of the donkey’s noise, and how it inform the sonic capacity the female load-bearing animal in general.
- Katherine Behar — A GAN. Again. A Nonce. Anon. ... and a GPUA GAN. Again. A Nonce. Anon. ... and a GPUTBA!
- Yvette Granata — TBATBATBA!
5:15 – 7:30 — Dinner break
7:30 – 9:00 — Keynote II
Sarah Sharma — A Broken Record in Outer Space
A Broken Record in Outer Space
This talk offers a techno-feminist alternative to the dreams of exiting, escaping, and geo-engineering our way out of these so-called end-times. Rather than demanding inclusion or representation within a masculinist escape fantasy, this talk posits a resounding NON and outlines a feminist politics by way of the broken machine.
9:00 – 12:00 — Occultural Soiree featuring Gaping Orbits and DJ |end|
Sunday (17 November)
9:30 — Doors open
10:00 – 11:30 — Panel 8
- Joshua Dittrich — Beet’s by J: The Non-Sound of Creativity in the 21st CenturyBeet’s by J: The Non-Sound of Creativity in the 21st CenturyThe focus of the paper is “Beet’s by J,” a next-gen line of noise-cancelling headphones designed not merely to mask or cancel environmental sounds, but rather to actively simulate hearing loss in the wearer/listener as a means of promoting or enhancing creativity. In a bid to counter the market dominance of Apple-owned Beats by Dre, the Google subsidiary HeadSculpt acquired the rights to the physical remains of composer Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) in 2017 and initiated an unprecedented series of experiments in forensic audiology and auralization. The aim was to reconstruct, using previously unavailable physiological and genetic material, the etiology of Beethoven’s famous hearing loss, while simultaneously developing algorithms that would process ambient sounds to sound “like” the late Beethoven may well have heard them. The efforts resulted in the “Beet’s by J” headphones, which would provide listeners with an array of customizable options not just to tune out the noise of their environments, but to turn (simulated) hearing loss into creative gain, tuning into their inner and outer sonic worlds with the creative intensity of Beethoven himself. The “J” of the title refers to an ultimately unsuccessful collaboration with the estate of legendary cult hip-hop producer J Dilla (1974-2006), whom HeadSculpt marketers had tapped as the headphones’ second (posthumous) brand ambassador.
This paper is a satire, and a speculative intervention in the areas of disability media studies, affective listening and personal audio technologies, with a critical ear toward the neoliberal branding of creativity. While neither Beet’s by J nor HeadSculpt exist, they nevertheless express tendencies currently at work in exploitative marketing practices, our evolving listening habits and the (anti-)social spaces created in and through our listening bodies. The paper is intended as a practice of pre-emptive critique, leveraging contemporary media and cultural theory toward the imagination and cancellation of a plausible future. - Émile Fromet de Rosnay — Near vibratory disappearance II: the topos outopos of pure medialityNear vibratory disappearance II: the topos outopos of pure medialityAt TS5, I proposed the near vibratory and seismic as a way to think about rhythm and experience, within the context of the West’s notion of rhythm as measurement (since Plato/Aristotle). This notion of rhythm forgets an older (Heraclitean) flow that surpasses number as the smallest quantum of measure. Latour’s claim that “we have never been modern,” from this perspective of measurement, was reformulated as “we keep being modern,” insofar as contemporary notions of rhythm reproduce a logic of mathesis (things learned, information, as opposed to pathesis, undergoing experience). For TS7, I would like to pursue the near vibratory disappearance of experience through the entangled medialities of non-place (outopos, aka “utopia”). To do this, it is necessary to set aside contemporary notions of relation (in the line of Whitehead, Bateson, Latour, Barad etc.), especially as they express ideological notions of “network.” The problem of relata becomes the essential problem of language, because language and the world do not perfectly correspond, just as knowledge and science don’t; and we cannot relate relata, except through “the unrelated with which language has established its relation" (Agamben, 2018, What is Philosophy?). Language is thus very different to “media” in the QM sense (e.g. Hansen). Yet this doesn’t imply an Object-Oriented epistemology. For while immanent experience is unrelatable (yet “sayable”) — where relations are the product of discourse, semantics, world, and the presuppositional nature of language — the utopia of experience implies an open ethics, based on potentiality and contingency, on the irreducibility of historical experience. Paradoxically, on a pure mediality. That is, on gesture as utopia.
- Joel Ong — Sculpting a Cloud: Resonant Soundscapes for Transgenic Aeolian MicrobesSculpting a CloudAs invisible as it is, the air is in fact ‘material’ in many facets of art, science and technology. As a medium for life, the body is entangled/enwinded in its breath, and as an archive, the atmosphere is latent with a spectrum of benign to transgressive agents of all scales and compositions. Our perception of the air as a historical void is countered by empirical demonstrations of the air as a volatile and chemical database; the aeolian wind as conversant, articulate and nonsilent; our bodies and those of the aerial vehicles we construct, perturbations within this capricious sensorium. An resource, the atmosphere exists as much as a site specific experience as it is itself a metaphor for our transcendental immortality.
Since the advent of computation, the entities that exist within this medium of flux do so in a triangulation of forms, in vivo, in vitro and in silico. Computational modeling and environmental sensing coexist in the skies, in the laboratories and in digital/virtual environments. Any environmental study of the will have indulged in a mixture of these processes, through by their constant flux in the elements, these organisms are liminal, invisible and transitional. They are also a fabrication of anthropogenic climate shifting and environmental (d)effect. The first genetically modified organism to ever be released into the environment was Frostban, a strain of pseudomonas syringae that had its icenucleation properties knocked out so that they would be less harmful to plants, though the effect on its cloudseeding/snowforming attributes were far less documented.
Sculpting a Cloud is a project that aims to explore cloud formation via the simulation and lab experimentation of the icenucleation effects of p.syringae through a fluid medium. While proposing new forms of ecopolitical narratives around elemental media, the project also aims to turn an ear to the atmosphere to adopt a multi scalar, multimodal and neotranscendentalist approach to data sonification of aeolian activity. The paper thus describes an installation at the Kittredge Gallery at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington (2018) where the a multi channel parametric soundscape was created via the simulation of bacteriainduced ice nucleation in water. Adopting this bacteria for growth in the gallery, the project also reflects a democratization of tools and technologies for hacking the environment or ‘programmatic earth’. It also describes a liminal and transcendentalist aesthetics of care within a larger framework of nascent bioart practices.
11:45 – 1:15 — Panel 9
- Mitchell Akiyama & Bethany Ides — I Am ContentI Am ContentA soap opera’s melodramatic method is that of dispersed attention, accelerated signification, and hyper-causal interrelation among emotional states. The soap opera plies consuming emotional immersion to an audience that is often only half-attentive. Anticipating this, the soap opera self-oscillates with effects and sensations, repeating its intensities, modulating and looping narrative for an ear that extends intermittently. Its audience’s ears are often split between several spaces at once, hovering in an involuted distribution of sensations and attention that is operative elsewhere, a suspension that is also a fundamental modality of the séance, of the act of listening the dead into live life.
We propose to host a soap opera which, doubling as a séance, will channel the intensities of inattentive attention and dispersed affects. Positing the form as a framework for alter-communication, perpetually repeating its own disorder, we hope to harness and confuse the potential that listening holds to both receive and produce new states of speculation and experience. Participants will para-communicate via a shapeshifting plethora of characters as we collaboratively work to develop a medium theory that attends to the porosity of roles and voices that are conjured when we listen beyond ourselves. - David Roden — The Sound ArtistThe Sound ArtistThe ontological question - ‘What is sound?’ is typically inflected in a Platonic fashion. It asks after the unitary nature of audibilia: are they, for example, subjective sensory properties, dispositional properties of objects, pressure waves in elastic media, processes or events? However, this ontological frame seems always about to lose its putative object, generating, in its absence, a space of discrepant yet cognitively trivial reflective equilibria.
I argue that if sound is not one (isn’t a plurality united by an essence) then sound arts and auditory technologies are as much expressive channels for sound as means for human control, or expression. Sound operates transversely across reflective equilibria, exposing the naked and masochist ear; an inhuman cochlea and unfurls extravagantly in the dark, a mass of tentacles breaking through its human shell
Auditory technics is consequently a posthuman auditory pharmakon, to the degree that the production of auditory species (outside or after human agency) elaborates and extends sounds transversal possibilities. In this way, auditory technics and ontology is more like politics than metaphysics, as much a disconnection from the human as a connection with intelligible natures.
Audition, thus, is not a contact with a given, but a contract with an ungiven, a xenophilia that hollows itself out in silence. This hard, beautiful agony of sound is not constructed or representational but, I will suggest, something like a ‘truth procedure’ in Badiou’s sense, a tracing of itineraries that eludes any predetermined category or concept; or any determinable subject. - Christof Migone — Soundfullessness (Pitch Black)Soundfullessness (Pitch Black)Are the predictable associations between sound and darkness, night and music, based solely on the ability of the aural sense to focus thanks to a reduction of the visible field? Even if the answer lies in a correlation between physical manifestation and physiological adaptation, the socio-cultural scaffolding that stems from this simple fact is of interest. Sites of investigation: John Oswald's pitch black performances, Studio 303's Noises from the Dark series, James Turrell's Ganzfeld meets anechoic chambers, Adrian Piper's Untitled Performance at Max's Kansas City, Andre Lepecki's (and by extension Fred Moten's) "shared aurality" active in the quartet of darkness/blackness/potentiality/freedom, Derek Jarman's Blue and especially Akira Mizuta Lippit's analysis of the film where sound becomes image and image becomes sound, the use of darkness and a "disquieting recorded soundtrack of hysterical inmates at an insane asylum" at the famed 1938 International Surrealist Exhibition in Paris, the Saydnaya Military Prison, Guy Debord's 1952 film Hurlements en faveur de Sade, amongst others. What is the color of sound? How bright or dark is it? What is the time of sound? What is its place? Eclipses and shadows, caves and caverns—moments and sites where and when sounds thrive, or at least are invoked and conjured. Actual and rhetorical entrapments amplify each other and shade the site of the encounter. Put on your headphones, and close your eyes— enter the night of listening. How does the night sound? Merleau-Ponty begins to answer the question by depicting the night as generator of a different kind of space, one that "has no outlines; [...] is pure depth without foreground or background, without surfaces and without any distance separating it from me." The implications of the inside/outside blur, the porous muddle, on sound are that its sensorial properties have ontological consequences.
1:15 PM — Wrap-Up!