Future Scenarios of Non-human Sound

Justyna Stasiowska, Aditi Srivastava, Sergio Santiago. Host: Carla J. Maier

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Fakescapes

Justyna Stasiowska (Jagiellonian University, PL)

My presentation will focus on my sound design/sound art practice of creating fakescapes as a form of critical posthuman approach to soundscapes, acoustic ecologies, and field recording. Fakescapes is a form of thinking through sound about how a mixture of materialities relay on our habits of listening. Fakescapes is a practice of parasiting the cultural landscape of representations and mutating them into something new that never presents as new. Fakescapes are a form of mimicry of different kinds of internal/external, micro/macro soundscapes surrounding us. I practice fakescapes to question the practices of colonial gathering sound and field recording, ethnography which always are a projection of what is beyond, what we are used to listening to. The sounds I make are created through synthesis and are a mimicry of recorded sounds. I focus on the context of listening into and movement of sound in a space. Fakescapes is a manifest in sense of manifesting what is overheard, silenced and under the skin -– it touches the affective force of sound in cultural context referring to spaces of malls, halls, cinemas, commercials pouring out of TV and all the sonic weathering of representations that wrap out information in digestible form.

Justyna Stasiowska is a queer silesian doing theory through sound. Working in the field of sonic narration she focuses on notions of dramaturgy and design in different disciplines. She writes texts and makes audio papers about the performativity of sound perception, creates installations and also works with choreographers and directors in fields of dance, design, theatre and film– creating fakescapes in order to think about the affective force of sound in specific mediums.

Mycelic Thinking: An Artistic Inquiry on Mycorrhizal Neural Communications

Aditi Srivastava (University of the Arts London, UK)

Language may be regarded as the tenet upon which theory and knowledge are constructed; it provides their foundations, their justifications, and even the evidence of their veracity. However, language as means of communication is intrinsically anthropocentric. Logos, or the idea of »who can speak« regards political identity to those who can communicate their agency through language. Mycelic Thinking attempts to reconceptualise the mode of governance of life on earth – to better account for the role of nonhuman entities. This research sits on the investigatory tools employed in mycorrhizal network signalling, in which I attempt to formulate a form of tactile and sonic interaction based on plant electrophysiology. Mycelium, the intricate backbone of symbiotic forest ecologies carries out delicate conversation through electrical signalling — much similar to the ones generated by the human nervous system while talking, listening and deciphering speech. In this speculative imaginary, my research proposes to initiate a new mode of interaction with plant life and a means of emancipation by giving mycelium a political identity.

Aditi Srivastava is an Indian-Born, London-based visual artist, producing work at the intersection of communication design, moving image, and interaction design. Her multidisciplinary body of work explores speculative futures in the Anthropocene wherein she aims to tie the unfolding ecological crisis in India with histories of colonialism and capitalism. Srivastava is also the founder of the harm reduction initiative, KnowHarm, which operates to reduce the harm that comes with uninformed use and radicalised, archaic drug policies in India. She holds a Masters degree in Art Direction from the London College of Communication (University of the Arts, London).

The Aesthetics of Machine Listening: Reanimating Sonic Ecologies

Sergio Santiago Rentería Aguilar (University of Western Australia, MX/AU)

Tracing the production and transmission of animal sounds has long been used for scientific purposes in the field of Bioacoustics. It allows us to better understand the behaviour and welfare of animal populations with listening technologies such as microphones and recorders. Increasingly, listening is being automated with novel computational technologies in what has been called Machine Listening. Despite being prevalent in music informatics, such as in auditory source separation and interactive music systems, their scientific use in digital ecology and environmental sound art remains understudied.   

In response, I scrutinise the artifactuality of Machine Listening from within and expose how it provides a portal to the vocal cultures of non-human others. The aesthetic opportunities of reanimating sonic ecologies are explored through an experimental practice with The Fluid Corpus Manipulation toolkit, a set of bespoke software modules designed to compose music with machine listening instruments. As a source material I use a Western Australian Magpie digital sound archive collected by behavioural ecologists for the study of avian vocal learning. Overall, I aim to illuminate the operation of Machine Listening beyond the myth of artificial intelligence and reflect upon its aesthetic potential in musicking with the voice of non-human life.

Sergio Santiago Rentería Aguilar’s research is concerned with how Machine Listening has shaped the sonic (re)production of birds in arts and sciences. He is a recipient of the PhD studentship, awarded under the Australian Research Council Discovery Project »A Cultural and Intellectual History of Automated Labour.« During his masters he developed a Shazam for birdsong based on a machine learning technique capable of recognizing birds’ complex melodic sequences. He has showcased his work at multiple venues including SymbioticA, in Australia, and Laboratorio de Arte Alameda, Centro Cultural Universitario Tlatelolco, Carnaval de Bahidorá and Tecnológico de Monterrey, in Mexico.

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