Sunday, November 8th, 2015. 7.30p. $9
UnionDocs 322 Union Avenue, Brooklyn NY
Curated with Johanna Linsley. Begins with David Helbich’s No Music – ‘Ohrstücke’, a performative rehearsal followed by presentations by artists Brian House, Laure Fernandez, Brian Fuata and Alison S. M. Kobayashi. Concludes with an open discussion.
Performing Lost, Stolen and Misplaced Sounds
This event brings together a group of international artists and theorists who work with sounds that are in some sense illegitimate. These sounds (and modes of listening to them) are particularly contemporary. They play on textures and moods conditioned by shifting economic forces, changes in our understanding of the role of the state, and the fragmenting of identity politics. Here, the illicit listening of the eavesdropper taps into the anxieties and potentialities of an era of surveillance and privatisation. The uncanny voice of the ventriloquist speaks of the encounter of human and non-human agent, and asks: who is controlling whom? The voices of the past and the ghost in the machine haunt the proceedings and insist on a reckoning with both history and the future that is nevertheless full of gaps, multiples and indeterminacies.
This event is informed partly by notions of ‘acousmatic’ sounds, or sounds whose origins are in some way obscured or indiscoverable. As theorist Salomé Voegelin suggests, however, this is not to figure origins as singular and fixed, but to open up thinking about context as ‘a plurality of things thinging’ (Voegelin, 2015). This focus on plurality extends to ideas of the live and recorded, so that the distinction between them is understood as dynamic and subject to interpretation.
http://www.uniondocs.org/2015-11-08-eavesdroppers/