Research Networking Day 2: Asymmetries in Sonic Experiences of Power

Caitlin Shepherd

00:00

Hakeem Adam

00:00

Lottie Sebes

00:00

Hosted by Christoph Jacke

00:00

Ultimate Leisure Workers' Club

00:00

YouTube

The second Research Networking Day module is hosted by Christoph Jacke of the »Popular Music and Media« Programme, University of Paderborn. The sessions will be streamed live over CTM’s YouTube channel. The audience is invited to send questions via the YouTube chat. These will be discussed at the end of each module together with the presenters and host.

Caring to Listen (aka Capitalism Makes Me Sick)

Caitlin Shepherd (University of West England, Bristol, UK)

I examine how working-class backgrounds shape experiences of success when working as a socially engaged artist. This research is important because until experiences of class inequality are better understood in relation to the working conditions and cultures of socially engaged art, the social turn cannot claim to be inclusive or ameliorative. Without evidencing how inequality in socially engaged art practices is understood and addressed, the socially engaged art sector risks making minor adjustments to the capitalist status quo.

Findings arising from my praxis evidence a paucity of research quantifying and analysing the experiences of working-class artists involved with producing contemporary socially engaged art. This represents a crisis of knowledge in terms of understanding how class background determines creative ideation and access to employment and validation when working as a socially engaged artist. More research is needed to understand the causes, scale, and experiences of multi-ethnic working-class people, involved with the production of socially engaged art. Responding to these knowledge gaps, I develop artistic research processes, including The Convivial Listening Protocol; a new practice-as-research method that uses listening and privilege mapping activities to better understand how class origin shapes creative aspirations and experiences of people working as socially engaged artists.

Caitlin Shepherd is an artist, writer, researcher, and educator concerned with making disruptive, socially engaged site-specific artwork. She proposes peer to peer convivial listening protocols as one way to give voice to female, non-white, working class experiences, often excluded from the production of socially engaged art. Her artistic practice is concerned with developing the relationships between listening, care, art and critique. Themes covered in her work include the violence of primitive accumulation, patriarchy, and capitalist society, concurrently working towards relational alternatives to competitive individualism, extractive capitalism, ecological degradation, and patriarchy.

In Response to the Archive. Researching Post Colonial Identity through Digital Media

Hakeem Adam (University of the Arts, Bremen, DE)

The African finds themself in a peculiar state of metamorphosis in the post-colony, where the general idea of who you are and why you matter is still defined externally and reinforced through instruments of power. In an attempt to understand how this identity metamorphosis occurs and functions, I engage in research into archival material relating to Ghanaian identity, manifesting as Ghana Airways. My artistic project examines the construction of post-colonial identity and this instance of hypernationalism in Ghana.

How do we design appropriate or applicable methods for researching post-colonial identities through archival material, and base them on specific instances of sensibilities, rather than constricting them to existing academic or ethnographic models? Using sound as medium, I engage in a narration of one possible dimension of Ghanaian identity through a sculptural assemblage. The work, which involves various transpositions of the archive into sound, offers insight into the malleability of material (physical or ephemeral) via digital media. This presentation reveals the techniques and insight involved in interfacing the archive in narrative-driven work.

Hakeem Adam is a Ghanaian digital artist and freelance arts and culture writer exploring the power of narrative. He is the founder and creative director of DANDANO, a Pan-African cultural platform for African film and music criticism and documentation. Hakeem has exhibited internationally at the CHALE WOTE Street Art Festival in Accra, Ghana (2018); Many Studios in Glasgow, Scotland (2018); Okay Space in New York, USA (2018); SPACE10 in Copenhagen, Denmark (2019); Abandon Normal Device (2021); and York Mediale (2021). He has participated in the British Council’s ColabNowNow Residency, Maputo (2018) and the Cryptic International Artist Residency, Scotland (2019). He is currently pursuing a MA in Digital Media from the University of the Arts, Bremen.

The Sounding Sewing Machine: Re-voicing Gendered Media Histories

Lottie Sebes (UdK, Berlin University of the Arts, DE)

How have gender relations affected the historical development of specific technologies, and reciprocally, how do the uses and designs of technologies maintain gendered techno-cultural associations over time? This artistic research project examines 19th and early 20th century vocal simulators, foot pedals, and the sewing machine, as devices which can serve to begin answering such questions.

In simultaneous and synergistic investigations, where sonic performance practice and academic writing inform and feed into one another, an instrument and a sonic performance have been developed, in which aspects of these mechanisms are re-appropriated and integrated with sounds from the gendered discourses surrounding them. This dynamic interface is a vehicle of shared agency, the creator of a shared voice, which questions and re-forges the possible uses and meanings of the tools it comprises. In performance, an encounter between woman and machine is staged, impelled by a history of countless encounters of the same kind. In re-sampling the archive of the history of technology in a specualtive, disrupted and noisy way, this project aims to queer historical research methodologies, to look at research not as an process of unearthing truths, but rather as way of making a performative claim to existing cultural associations in the archive.

Lottie Sebes is a Berlin-based artist, curator, and researcher from Australia with a practice spanning the fields of sculpture, video, sound, installation, and performance art. Driven by her research in media archaeology, she is fascinated by the past lives, cultural meanings and living agencies of old and new technologies. Sebes has a Bachelor of Visual Arts from the University of Sydney and is a recipient of the Eleanor Sophia Wood Travelling Research Scholarship. She is currently undertaking a Master in Sound Studies and Sonic Arts and the Universität der Künste (UdK) in Berlin.

Exiting the Domestic Factory

Ultimate Leisure Workers’ Club (collective, Vilnius, LT)

From the »houses« of Chicago House and mothers of vogue to the tribes of rave and on to the rent parties of the Harlem Renaissance, nightlife communities have long since challenged what a family is and how our domestic spaces may be inhabited as sites of labour, reproduction, intimacy, violence, pleasure and escape.

Responding to a climate wherein right-wing valorisations of family life have conjoined with the intensified burdens of our domestic realities under pandemic conditions; unleashing the full potentials of these alternative kinship forms appears more relevant now than ever. Reflecting on this situation, the Ultimate Leisure Workers’ Club will present research developed under their current cycle »Exiting the Domestic Factory« – consisting of creative workshops, talks, performances, readings, and communal feasts – addressing how artistic and sonic communities operating in the spheres of leisure and reproduction have moved through, against, beyond the home and family, as an organizing terrain.

The pandemic has brought about a radical decomposition of traditional organising approaches; resulting in both new compositions and a speculative, horizontal politics that has fed into many different conversations on what is to come. The Ultimate Leisure Workers’ Club, founded in 2020, is very much a child of these circumstances. The unusual format of our nightclub is in part an outcome of this situation and on the other hand, an active effort on our part to radically problematise what, in fact, constitutes a club – its politics, economies, cultures. Skirting the lines between a nightclub and social club; entertainment and politics; the party and the Party; restoration and insurgent regeneration, the Club has involved figures as diverse as researcher and curator Annie Goh to philosopher Kristin Ross, and music collectives such as BCCAA System Oramics and Datacide. In 2020 the club released the ULWC Reader, with contributions by Annie Goh, Oramics, Mattin, Anthony Iles, amongst many others.