Where: Online. In order to take part in the seminar, please register by sending an email to the.posthumanities.hub@gmail.com by 23rd 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.
Welcome to the first session in The Posthumanities Hub Seminar Series 2021!
When: 28 Jan 2021, 13:15-15:00 (CET) Where: Zoom (link will be sent out after registration). Please, have your name visible upon entering. Registration: In order to take part in the seminar, please register by sending an email to the.posthumanities.hub[at]gmail.comby 26th January 2021 at noon (CET) the latest. Recording: The session will be recorded, and possibly also made available online at a later stage. By attending the seminar, you accept these conditions (and can of course choose to keep your camera switched off).
ABSTRACT This session, moderated by Morten Søndergaard and Janna Holmstedt, will focus on sound as evidence and sonic explorations in the hybrid field between scientific and artistic practices. It seeks to look beyond the visual, attend to sonically mediated phenomena, and explore how sound and listening might offer ways to navigate fields and areas on the borders of uncertainty and imagination in an age of crisis.
The seminar gathers the contributors to the recently released Special Section (ed. Morten Søndergaard) of Leonardo Music Journal (LMJ) Vol. 30, December 2020 (all the articles are available online). The artist-researchers who have contributed to this Special Section, follow a line of inquiry into the construction of evidence and its ethical implications. Søndergaard suggests that geopolitical situations of crisis force us to look at the politics of evidence – and how it is being practiced. In doing so, it operates between scientific and aesthetic modes of approximation. It is this intricate relation between world, data, sound, representation and causality the Special Section is investigating. The main claim running through all the articles is that this relation is as intricate as it is challenging, and that we need to reimagine what evidence is, reclaim its politics, through sound.
Here, listening emerges as a shared orientation and critical mode of inquiry in technological layered and mediated environs, a strategy even, for moving the taken for granted – the unnoticed or oppressed background – to the affective foreground, as well as a form of activism and resistance. In different ways, the artist-researchers explore the potential of a sonic sensibility that can reorient the politics of visibility.
In the LMJ Special Section, Tullis Rennie investigates sociosonic interventions in the context of social engaged art, and the role of disruption and distributed authorship. Laura Beloff, in her contribution on human-plant relations, asks: What does it mean to hear through technological mediation? Louise Mackenzie further investigates technologically embodied and layered forms of looking and listening to nonhuman entities such as microorganisms, while Marie Højlund and Morten Riis invite us to consider processes of transduction and atmospheres as relational attunements in their sonic interventions with wind mills. Janna Holmstedt suggests that “the transformative role of sound and listening troubles Western knowledge systems in fruitful ways”, and Stephanie Loveless proposes the flaneuserie sonore, feminist soundwalking, as a way to recontextualize the practice of walking in literature and art, arguing for listening as a feminist and ecologically oriented mode of engaging with the world. Freya Zinovieff and Gabriela Aceves Sepúlveda further demonstrate that “to listen attentively to the sonic is to situate oneself at the intersection of geopolitics and sensory perception” in what they, with Pratt and Haraway, term Anthropocene Contact Zones.
BIOGRAPHIES Laura Beloff is an active artist and accidental academic working in the intersection of art, science and technology. She currently works at Aalto University, Finland. Marie Højlund is a sound artist, composer and assistant professor in sound studies at Aarhus University, Denmark. She received her PhD in 2017 with her thesis on sound, noise and atmospheres in Danish hospitals: “Overhearing—An Attuning Approach to Noise in Danish Hospitals.” Morten Riis is a sound artist and composer and holds a PhD degree in electronic music from Aarhus University. He has written articles and books on artistic research and music technology, conducted workshops over most of Europe and has received commissions from leading festivals and ensembles in Denmark, Germany and Poland. Janna Holmstedt is an artist and researcher investigating listening as a situated practice, composition in the expanded field and the cultivation of care and environmental attention. She is part of the research group The Posthumanities Hub, and received her PhD in 2017 with her thesis “Are You Ready for a Wet Live-In? Explorations into Listening”. She currently works at KTH Royal Institute of Technology and National Historical Museums, Sweden. Stephanie Loveless is a sound artist and a lecturer at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where she directs and the Center for Deep Listening at Rensselaer. She holds MFAs from Bard College and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Louise Mackenzie is an artist and researcher based in the U.K., affiliated with the Cultural Negotiation of Science research group, Northumbria University. Tullis Rennie is a composer, improvising trombonist, electronic musician and field recordist. He is cofounder of Walls on Walls and senior lecturer in music at City, University of London. Freya Zinovieff is a sound artist and theorist who uses emerging technologies to research the geopolitics of sound in borderlands. Gabriela Aceves Sepúlveda researches the histories of media arts from a feminist perspective and produces interactive installations. She has degrees in graphic design, visual arts and cultural history. Morten Søndergaard is an active curator, exhibition designer and academic working in the intersection of art, science and technology. He is currently working at Aalborg University, Denmark.
Where: Online. In order to take part in the seminar, please register by sending an email to the.posthumanities.hub@gmail.com by 7th Dec 2020 at the latest.
Bronwyn Bailey-Charteris, Penelope and Lucinda, film still, 2016
Bronwyn Bailey-Charteris. Photo: Emmeli Person
Meet Australian/Swedish curator, writer and lecturer Bronwyn Bailey-Charteris! Bronwyn is based in Stockholm, a current PhD student at UNSW Art & Design researching water and art in her thesis entitled ‘Ingesting the Hydrocene: Watery thinking for artistic response-ability in the climate crisis’. She is employed at Stockholm University, based at Accelerator and leading the Art+Research program, as well as a Lecturer in Department of Culture and Aesthetics for the Masters of Art Curating. Bronwyn was previously Curator at Index – The Swedish Contemporary Arts Foundation. Research interests are focused upon processes of ecology in contemporary art, water as social metaphor and feminist methodologies. Working with practical learning platforms, artistic research, publications, and exhibitions, she works internationally as a curator and lecturer. https://bronwynbc.com/ https://su-se.academia.edu/BronwynBaileyCharteris
Ingesting the Hydrocene
The Hydrocene is a curatorial theory and practice Bronwyn has created to amplify the pioneering ways some artists and curators are collaborating with water. The Hydrocene argues for artistic methods of thinking with water in the age of accelerating climate crises. The Hydrocene is embodied and relational. It amplifies unexamined perspectives on the interrelation of art, climate, water and intersectional feminisms. By arguing for water-centered artistic practices, the Hydrocene offers up a model for engaging with embodiment, hydrofeminism, transcorporeality and response-ability in the interconnected zone of natureculture. The presentation will offer a short introduction to the Hydrocene and then expand upon artist Latai Taumoepeau – specifically her work with ice, water torture and the climate crisis.
All through the extended history of Earth, the coast line has been a zone of unrest where waves and tides have forged life and land on this planet. Despite sudden changes to our oceanic environments, the wrack zone by the edge of the sea with its kelp forests, mussel beds, flotsam and jetsam, remains a strange and beautiful place (as noted by Rachel Carson). This is one of the starting points for the research in the oceanic (environmental) humanities project, Sea Change. Another starting point is the possibilities for cooking, curing and curating with kelp explored at Lofoten International Arts Festival in 2019, the artistic duo Cooking Sections (and their exhibition 2021 at Bonniers Kunsthall), and that we are now entering the declared UN Decade of the Oceans (2021-2030). Sea Change is a knowledge- and capacity-building project for feminist posthumanities, aiming to connect science with art, humanities and local people so to catalyze societal transformation on low trophic ways of eating, socializing and thinking, together.
Bio:
Cecilia Åsberg, PhD, Guest Professor of STS, Gender and Environment at KTH Royal Institute of Technology Stockholm; Professor of Gender, Nature, Culture at Linköping University, and since 2008 founding director of the Posthumanities Hub. In 2005 she was the first to defend a PhD in Gender Studies in Sweden (a feminist science study on the popular imaginary of the new genetics), and in 2013 she inaugurated environmental humanities in The Seed Box (Mistra-Formas) research programme as Founding Director. Åsberg has attracted over €6 million in grants for her team; supervised 14 PhD students; published extensively (in Swedish, Dutch, English); given talks and taught gender studies, EH, STS, and posthumanities to BA-MA and PhD students in various positions at a range of international universities, incl Lancaster U, Utrecht Utrecht, NL, and as Fellow of Rachel Carson Centre, LMU, Germany.
Where: Online. In order to take part in the seminar, please register by sending an email to the.posthumanities.hub@gmail.com by 3rd November 2020 at the latest.
As part of The Posthumanities Hub Seminar Series, we are exited to present Dr. Evelien Geerts (PhD UC Santa Cruz), a multidisciplinary philosopher and postdoctoral researcher at the University of Birmingham (UK), working on the ERC-funded ‘Urban Terrorism in Europe (2004-19): Remembering, Imagining, and Anticipating Violence’ project. Her research interests include new materialisms, critical epistemologies, political philosophical questions of identity, difference, and violence, and critical & diffractive pedagogies. She has published in Philosophy Today, Women’s Studies International Forum and Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge, is furthermore an avid philosophy meme-creator, and part of the Dutch Journal of Gender Studies’ editorial board.
Dr. Evelien Geerts
A Critical Cartography of New Materialist Constellations & Interventions in Times of Terror(ism)
Abstract: This paper anticipates on my monograph project on critical new materialist theories and the idea of “theorizing from the ground up” during times of global crisis (such as the COVID-19 crisis we are currently experiencing; see Geerts 2020) and terror(ism) in particular.
Using (and commenting on) the new materialist methodologies of critical cartography and diffraction, this paper first of all wishes to reflect upon what it means to “theorize from the ground up” in a feminist philosophical manner by offering a situated critical cartography of contemporary new materialist thought. It is then argued that such a critical cartography is not only a novel but also much needed undertaking, as we, more than almost two decades after the Habermas-Derrida dialogues on terror(ism) (Borradori 2003), are in need of a Zeitgeist-adjusted conceptual framework that takes the more-than-human seriously. Such a “grounded”, critical new materialist framework could assist us with painting a more holistic picture of the complex ontological, epistemological, and eco-ethico-political entangled aspects of global crises, and, specifically, terrorist events, such as the Paris 2015 and Brussels 2016 attacks; the actual terror they produce; and the bio-/necropolitical repercussions they often engender.
