As a counterpoint to the world’s current states of division, war, and pervasive anxiety, we’re seeking artistic proposals that engage with and reflect upon the various potentials of the word »affection.«
Affection, understood as a soft and steady form of love, gives us a sense of security, recognition, and connection. Affection works against agitation. It provides space for healing. It elicits acts of responsibility and care. It is a fundamental need and potential of all people.
Yet it is a resource that is not available equally to all, both in individual and collective dimensions—not only in the personal sense of family, or relationships, but collectively as a community or society. It can be deprived from us willfully or through conditions that are forced upon us; it can be used with manipulative intent, make us dependent, or be exclusionary when extended only to those with whom we sense an immediate resonance or sameness. To think of affection as a potent personal, artistic, and political force that can serve as an antidote to pain, neglect, fear, and division—and as a source of strength for coexistence, community, and solidarity—therefore requires us to imagine affection in different ways.
Such variations of affection need to extend beyond the delimitations of uneven power structures and across social scales — to risk new modes of relationality that are at once intimate and social, dismantling conventional divisions of public and private and embracing ideas of interdependence and the richness of multi-perspective experience.
What could such policies of affection look like in sociocultural, artistic, musical, and sonic fields? How can we nurture our collective capacity for affection and grow networks of affection? How do sound and music transmit affection or become a medium of affection themselves? Is listening an act of affection? Or resonance? Can we hold each other through sound?
Artists might also consider how »affection« in technology might relate to its emancipatory potential in music and sound art, which is the core focus of tekhnē. Narrative, speculative, or investigative approaches might, for example, explore concepts for and imaginaries of affective and sentient technologies, radio and modern broadcasting methodologies as technologies that collapse distance and produce new forms of intimacy, inclusive design and sonic accessibility, or other technologies of care. Live performances should be conceptualised in such a way that a radio piece can be created in the same spirit.