Tag: sound

Join us in a Midsummer Fertility Ceremony for Bladderwrack – an Invitation from (P)Art of the Biomass

On June 24, 2021

During calm nights in May and June, and synched by the full moon, bladderwrack releases its eggs and sperms. If you want to pay tribute to the forests of the sea and help bladderwrack reproduce, especially in the Baltic Sea, you can help it find new homes.

You don’t need to erect an underwater Midsummer pole, as (P)Art of the Biomass did together with marine biologists Cecilia Wibjörn and Maria Bodin at Tjärnö Marine Laboratory, Sweden. The only thing you need is a large rock where fertilized eggs of bladderwrack, zygotes, can settle. Or a brush, with which you can scrub a cliff clean from green algae, below the waterline, nearby where bladderwrack grows. If there’s an abundance of green algae, bladderwrack might find it hard to find a surface where the tiny zygotes can settle and grow.

Midsummer full moon occurs the 24th of June, 8:40 p.m. (CEST/Swedish time). If it’s a calm evening, the bladderwrack will spawn. Before this happens, take a walk with us to the sea.

It’s the smell of home I guess

Denna bild har ett alt-attribut som är tomt. Dess filnamn är lobell_blastangjuni2021-14-1024x683.jpg

^{Sound, voice and editing: Janna Holmstedt. Field-recordings from an intertidal zone and singing by Janice McEwen in Lofoten, Norway.}

Find your way to the sea
Seek out where bladderwrack grows on hard cliffs and stones
Air-filled pods keep the algae afloat
Spongy bladders are swelling when ready to spawn
Prepare a clean, hard surface
Scrub a cliff
Sink a stone
Feel the sponginess and readiness
Smell the tangle
And for a moment, be that stone

^{Photos: Malin Lobell and Janna Holmstedt}

This ceremony has been composed by (P)Art of the Biomass for the Nordic-Baltic transdisciplinary State of the Art Network in which the Posthumanities Hub is a member, and was originally posted here.

The Posthumanities Hub Seminar “Sonic Visions of the Arctic” with Åsa Stjerna (online)

By posthumanitieshubweb

On February 2, 2021

In Events, News, Webinars

When: 25 March, 13:15-15:00 (Swedish time/CET)

Where: Online. In order to take part in the seminar, please register by sending an email to the.posthumanities.hub@gmail.com by 23^rd March 2021 at noon (CET) the latest.

Photo: Åsa Stjerna. Sulitjelma glacier 2020.

How can sound mediate information of global relevance about the Arctic? How can this information be transformed to an embodied sonic experience in public space?

We are so happy to introduce to you Åsa Stjerna and her work Sonic Visions of the Arctic!

Sonic Visions of the Arctic is a transdisciplinary study that investigates the “agency of the sonic” and its potential of establishing alternative perceptions of the Arctic as a site and public space of great global significance. By investigating the current and potential role of the acoustic underwater technologies currently used in scientific research on the Arctic in Sweden and Svalbard, as well as by exploring the complex artistic processes of transformation that take place when the scientific data extracted by these technologies is transformed in an artistic context, this project intends to both map existing sonic worlds and to develop new sonic experiences, elucidating the complex transversal processes involved in taking sound’s unused potential into consideration.
The project is funded by Vetenskapsrådet (VR) and conducted by Åsa Stjerna, postdoc at Faculty of Fine, Applied and Performing Arts, University of Gothenburg, 2021-2023.

Åsa Stjerna is an artist and researcher, using sound and listening as her artistic modes of exploration. Through her site-specific installations, she explores sound’s potential, making the embedded conditions and underlying narratives connected to a situation perceivable. In her artistic research, she has been specifically interested in exploring the contemporary conditions of sonic situated practice and its ability of being transformative, i.e. what it actually means “to make a difference” in the era of Anthropocene and advanced capitalism. Guided by methodologies of feminism, ecosophy, and posthumanism she proposes an understanding of site-specificity as an aesthetic–ethical practice and engagement. Stjerna represents the professorship Sound Art at Hochschule für bildende Künste in Braunschweig, Germany, 2020-2021.

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Call for Contributions: Ecomusicology, Sounding Board

By posthumanitieshubweb

On July 20, 2020

In Uncategorised

Ethnomusicology Review would like to invite you to share perspectives from your research for our online platform “Sounding Board.”

Sounding Board is an informal, yet academically focused online platform to discuss research, ideas, and other issues related to the fields of musicology and ethnomusicology.

Deeply interdisciplinary, the field of ecomusicology is a branch of study exploring the various and complex nexus between people, nature and sounds. Ecomusicologists can come from the fields of composition, acoustic ecology, bio-acoustics, ethnomusicology, historical musicology, biology as well as ecocriticism, biosemiotics, ecosemiotics, phenomenology.

Texts on any of the following subjects are welcome:

-Music and Climate Change

-Music in the Age of Anthropocene

-Posthumanities and sounds /music / acoustic patterns

-DNA / Metabolic / Transgenetic poetics and sounds

-Music in or about Landscapes

-Natural Sounds, acoustic ecology, bio-acoustics

-Music and/in Environment

-Music and/ in Place or Space

-Music and ecosemiotics / biosemiotics

-Music and Robotic Poetics

-Music and phenomenology / eco phenomenology

-The death of music or an era after music

Additionally, if you have any other project, conference paper, or unpublished work dealing with issues surrounding ecomusicology, feel free to reach out!

Please contact Nikoleta Zampaki, at nikoletazampaki@hotmail.com if you wish to contribute or have any questions.

The Blowhole: lecture performance, reading and Q&A with Janna Holmstedt, 21 Nov, 10:00-12:00, StDH

By posthumanitieshubweb

On November 15, 2019

In Events

Where: the cinema [Bion] at Stockholms Dramatiska Högskola, Valhallavägen 189

If you missed the two events at Reaktorhallen in August, /Mis/communication/s/ and Interstellar Species Society Assembly, where artist Janna Holmstedt delivered a lecture performance and a talk on sonospheric communards, you now have a second chance to see them.

In a combined lecture performance and reading, Janna revisits neurophysiologist John C. Lilly’s interspecies communication experiments, carried out in the 1950s and 60s and partly funded by NASA, where dolphins were supposed to learn to speak English with their blowholes. At the centre of her session are tape recordings from language lessons with the dolphins, and a woman whom during 75 days tried to live under equal conditions with the dolphin Peter in a flooded house.
She will also talk about touching the matter of language, points of listening, and snuggle technologies.

The event is hosted within the framework of the independent course “Sound as Critical practice” at the Department of Film and Media at Uniarts/StDH.

Mini-symposium “Becoming with Alien Encounters and Speculative Storytelling”

By posthumanitieshub

On March 11, 2018

In Events, News, Symposiums

The Posthumanities Hub in collaboration with Tema Genus Higher Seminar Series and The Eco- and Bioart Research Network have a pleasure to present:

Mini-symposium

Becoming with Alien Encounters and Speculative Storytelling

5th April 2018

13:15 – 16:30

Linköping University

Room: Faros, Tema building (Campus Valla)

20170311_161249 (2)

Speculative fiction – as an ‘umbrella term’ – refers to a wide range of narrative fiction that employs ‘fantastic’, supernatural or non-mimetic elements. In the times of the climate change and environmental crises accompanied by futuristic ‘technology-will-save-us’ scenarios on the one hand, and visions of ‘doom and gloom’, on the other, speculative fiction has gained a momentum as an alternative way to reimagine the future in the ‘Anthropocene’.

As feminist scholar Donna Haraway writes, the ‘speculative’ element of story-telling leads to ‘opening up what is yet-to-come in protean entangled times’ pasts, presents, and futures.’ (2011).

Taking this as our starting point, we see speculative narratives that combine reality and fiction, and philosophy, science and art, as a prolific site for the emergence of different ontological, epistemological and ethico-political possibilities. Through the stories of experimental encounters with alien species, in/organic entities, non/living assemblages and the void, we explore ethico-onto-epistemologies of becoming in a more-than-human world.

Speakers:

Katja Aglert (independent artist, Stockholm, SE)

Nina Lykke (professor em., Linköping University, SE)

Line Henriksen (lecturer, University of Copenhagen, DK)

Marietta Radomska (postdoc, Linköping University, SE)