Contact with the More-than-human World
Jono Gilmurray
16:30
AM Kanngieser & Zoe Todd
15:00
Ximena Alarcón
18:00
Susan Schuppli & Faiza Ahmad Khan
19:30
Kunstquartier Bethanien5 € per panel / 10 € day pass at the door
1
In conversation with researcher and electroacoustic composer Jono Gilmurray, sound artist and researcher AM Kanngieser and anthropologist Zoe Todd will give insights into modes of listening, especially to fish. Gilmurray will follow with a lecture focused on ecology and environmentalism in contemporary music and sound art by emphasising the significance of the ecological sound art movement. Sound artist-researcher and »Deep Listening« certified tutor Ximena Alarcón will invite the audience to listen to and reflect on her search for sonic migrations, the resonances left in-between our known divisions when we tune in and meet others across distant locations. Finally, artist-researcher Susan Schuppli and award-winning filmmaker and researcher Faiza Ahmad Khan will introduce their project »Listening to Ice« that was carried out at Drang Drung Glacier in the Zanskar region of the Himalayas. It was also set out to measure, monitor, and record the material transformations of the glacier as well as engage with local mountain communities directly impacted by climate change and glacial recession.
Listening for connection and disconnection in eco-sonic practice. AM Kanngieser and Zoe Todd in conversation with Jono Gilmurray
This conversation will engage our experiences of listening as eco-sonic practice for building respectful and accountable relationships within diverse social-environmental contexts. We will pay close attention to the obligations and concerns we specifically feel as we travel outside of our ancestor's homelands in nations where ongoing dispossession and colonial violence continues to impact the lifeworlds of peoples and ecosystems. Thinking through the complex layered histories that shape Oceania and Canada, and our responsibilities to Indigenous communities over these lands and seas, we will reflect on what it means to listen and act in ways that acknowledge our positions through time and space, both as a means to connect to, and disconnect from places we inhabit and move through.
Ecological Sound Art: Sound, Listening and Environmental Crisis. Talk by Jono Gilmurray
Within the last few decades, a multitude of severe ecological crises, such as biodiversity loss, deforestation, pollution, and climate change, have rapidly grown to become some of the most significant socio-political, scientific, economic – and, fundamentally, moral and existential – issues of our time. The growing global urgency of these ecological crises has been reflected not only in the fields of science and politics, but also by an explosion in engagement with them across every area of our arts and culture. Sound art is no exception to this, with an increasing number of artists using sound and listening as a medium for engagement with contemporary ecological issues, forming a fast-growing movement of ‘ecological sound art’. This talk will provide a comprehensive introduction to this important and timely new movement, with the aim of highlighting the ways in which sound and listening represent a particularly powerful medium through which we might explore our perceptions of, relationships with, and responses to, contemporary ecological crises.
To help guide our exploration of this new movement, key aspects of sound studies will be combined with the analytical tools of ecocriticism to produce a brand new ecocritical framework, specifically designed to discover, investigate, and evaluate the uniquely ecological resonances of sound works. This framework will be used as the basis for conducting active ecocritical ‘listenings’ to numerous examples of contemporary ecological sound art, with the aim of uncovering some of the core philosophies, techniques and methodologies involved. Along the way, it will also draw from core principles of contemporary ecological theory, revealing the fundamental accord that exists between the new modes of thought they propose and the ways in which we experience and relate to sound art, demonstrating that ecological sound art represents not only a significant new field of sound arts practice, but a uniquely powerful modern ecological art form.
Sonic Migrations: telematic music that might hold us as we walk into rituals for collective agency. Talk by Ximena Alarcón
In this talk, I will invite the audience to listen to and reflect on my search for sonic migrations, the resonances left in-between our known divisions when we tune in and meet others across distant locations. Derived from my experience practising Deep Listening® to my own geographical and cultural migration, I will describe the evolution of my artistic process of listening searching for a sense of place and presence through telematic sonic performances, and also engaging in the creation of interfaces that holds us collectively in-between sound fragments, memories and diversity of perceptions across time and space. I will focus on my latest experience with the creation of the INTIMAL App©, in the current context of the pandemic and the shared anxieties of death, separation and disconnection. I am developing it as an embodied interface that holds a vibrational interstitial space as we tune in with the surrounding environment, our walking and breathing pace, emerging vocal improvisations and sonic free interventions shared with others across distant locations. Devoid of geo-locations and playing with different levels of immediacy, directions, and time, the INTIMAL App© invites to perform dream-like rituals, for the emergence of networks of presence. I propose these shared resonances created collectively, as our sonic migrations: interstitial music that might hold, sustain and support us as we walk to strengthen our collective agency.
Listening to Ice
Screening and discussion with Susan Schuppli and Faiza Ahmad Khan
Through a number of site-based activities carried out at Drang Drung Glacier in the Zanskar region of the Himalayas during September-October 2021, the project Listening to Ice set out to measure, monitor, and record the material transformations of the glacier as well as engage with local mountain communities directly impacted by climate change and glacial recession.
Scientific activities included the deployment of an underwater sensor (hydrophone) at the glacial lake, setting up both a GPS and meteorological weather station, as well as installing a series of bamboo stakes along a 15 km stretch into the ablation area of the glacier to measure annual changes in its mass balance. Workshops brought local villagers to the glacier for sessions in deep listening. Lowering various hydrophones into its icy crevasses allowed us to tune into its subglacial streams, to hear the rushing of meltwater, and the underwater crackling of ice and popping air bubbles. For some, the glacier conjured the domesticated sound of boiling tea, for others the whir of a passing helicopter.
The project’s broad aim is to combine scientific and artistic approaches to climate change by developing acoustic and aural methodologies in cryospheric research. Through the deployment of various situated listening practices, the project brought scientific research, local experiences, and inter-generational knowledge of glaciers together.