Preface
The 8th International Conference on the Histories of Media Arts, Science and Technology, RE:SOUND 2019, took place at Aalborg University in Aalborg, Denmark, between August 20 and 23, 2019. RE:SOUND is part of the Media Art Histories conference series, which has brought together leading researchers, artists, and scientists on a series of interdisciplinary topics for over 14 years.
This edition of Media Art Histories, under the name RE:SOUND 2019, focused on sound and the sonic domain as intrinsic dimensions in the development of art and media technologies. Although sonic experiments and sound expressions abound in the histories of art, the occurrence of sound in art and media remains heavily undertheorized and decontextualized. RE:SOUND aimed at filling this gap in understanding sound by addressing the techno-resonance, trans-mediality, and cultural and social reverberation of media art, art exhibitions, and archives.
RE:SOUND 2019 featured keynotes by renowned scholars and artists, including Jamie Allen, Samson Young, Salomé Voegelin, Marie Højlund, and Christoph Cox. Additionally, a special panel with curators presented a conversation on topics related to exhibiting sound and included contributions by Barbara London, Arnau Horta, Voegelin, and Morten Søndergaard. The conference was divided into nine tracks that explored different aspects of sound and its relationship to art, institutions, philosophies, politics, and power.
Conference General Chair: Morten Søndergaard
Conference Co-Chair: Laura Beloff
Art Track Chair: Sebastian Bülow
Assistant Conference Chair: Rodrigo Guzman-Serrano
Organization: Karla Zavala, Adriaan Odendaal, Charlotte Hyldgaard, Morten Kattenhøj
Conference Tracks
Track 1
Resounding Media Art: Archaeologies, Indeterminate Textualities, and Possible Futures
Chair: Tanya Toft Ag
Track 1 revisits the foundations and formulations, as well as the contextual and epistemological entanglements of the histories of media art. Subthemes include the ontology of contemporary art, ecologies and imaginaries, sound and the development of visual media art, and the concept of post-humanism in art.
Track 2
Sounding Difference: Gender, Sound, and Technology
Chairs: Gabriela Aceves Sepúlveda and Freya Zinovieff
Track 2 seeks to unravel the social, cultural, political, and disciplinary structures that have excluded difference from the canonical histories of media art and its archives. The presentations in this track propose a different set of power relations between sound, art, and technology, and call for a recalibration of the systems that have perpetuated the divide between those who are heard and those who are not.
Track 3
Sound and Voice: Art Practices and Politics
Chair: Luz María Sánchez Cardona
Co-Chairs: Luis Sotelo Castro, Iris Garrelfs, Jordan Lacey, Polly Stanton, Jennifer Stoever and Dolores Inés Casillas
Track 3 explores and reactivates the histories of the political sound, politics and sound, the power of spoken words, and the construction of memory within the political sphere as well as in contemporary art practices.
Track 4
Art and Technology: Methodologies, Practices, Histories
Chairs: Magdalena Zdrodowska and Daniel Cermak
Track 4 seeks to explore and contextualize the histories, methodologies, and practices of art and technology. Subthemes include the concept of the post-digital through new artistic instruments and tools, hearing/non-hearing, art-based research, and art methodologies in art and technology practices.
Track 5
Sound Art Curating: Critical Histories, Strategies, and Practices
Chairs: Liora Belford and Jason van Eyk
Track 5 focuses on the role that curators play in the production, positioning, and reception of sound art, as well as the particularities of exhibiting sound. The presentations in this track explore the critical histories of sound art exhibitions and the idea of the curator as composer.
Track 6
Sound within Bodies, Moist Media Practices, Environment, and Life-world: Organisms, Geology, and Ecological Niches
Chairs: Laura Beloff, Dolores Steinman, Michelle Lewis-King, and Anna Nacher
Track 6 brings forth the wide area of sound-art based practices and theories that are concerned with embodied, fleshy, moist, medical, scientific, and environmental approaches and formulations. Subthemes in this track address sound in relation to bodies of biological organisms (humans and non-humans), natural environment, ecology, and geology.
Track 7
The Return of the Sonic Real
Chair: Rahma Khazam
Track 7 explore the philosophical foundations of the sonic real. Subthemes in this track delve into new materialism, speculative realism, and the phenomenology of sound in sonic practices experimenting and operating in-between the sound object as a vital sonic/material hybrid and the psychology of the sonic real.
Track 8
Archive, Archives, Archiving
Chairs: Morten Søndergaard and Rodrigo Guzman-Serrano
Track 8 addresses the situation, histories, and current/future challenges of archives of media art. Subthemes include the challenges of archiving sound, archiving versus collecting, the material condition of archives in general and of sonic objects in particular, leaking archives, and post-digital and post-institutional archives.
Track 9
General Topics
Chairs: Morten Søndergaard and Laura Beloff
Track 9 includes general topics in art and technology, digital art, media art, diverse historical perspectives, contemporary artistic practices, and art and science.
Papers:
Viola Rühse Alison Knowles’s “Bean Rolls”: The influence of mycological and aesthetic discussions with John Cage on early women’s Fluxus aesthetics http://dx.doi.org/10.14236/ewic/RESOUND19.1
Jordan Lacey Zoë, Sonic Relationality and Posthuman Urban Sound Art http://dx.doi.org/10.14236/ewic/RESOUND19.2
Dr Nigel Helyer, Dr Jon Drummond Listening to a Painting and Communing with Bees; Heavy Metal and the Oratorio for a Million Souls http://dx.doi.org/10.14236/ewic/RESOUND19.3
Laura Plana Gracia Curating Sonic Laboratories http://dx.doi.org/10.14236/ewic/RESOUND19.4
Rebecca Smith Parafictions and Contemporary Media Art 2008-2018 http://dx.doi.org/10.14236/ewic/RESOUND19.5
Amresh Sinha The Primacy of Sound in Robert Bresson’s Films http://dx.doi.org/10.14236/ewic/RESOUND19.6
Tiffany Funk Deep Listening: Early Computational Composition and its Influence on Algorithmic Aesthetics http://dx.doi.org/10.14236/ewic/RESOUND19.7
Miguel Carvalhais, Rosemary Lee Soundwalking and Algorithmic Listening http://dx.doi.org/10.14236/ewic/RESOUND19.8
Gail Priest The Now of History: Tomographic and Ficto-Critical Approaches to Writing About Sonic Art http://dx.doi.org/10.14236/ewic/RESOUND19.9
Angélica Yaneth Piedrahita Delgado Revisiting the Stereoscopic Archive as a Memory Recalling Device http://dx.doi.org/10.14236/ewic/RESOUND19.10
Kazuhiro Jo, Paul DeMarinis Life in the groove: Re-visiting the common sense of sound reproduction http://dx.doi.org/10.14236/ewic/RESOUND19.11
Polly Stanton Embodied Listening: Exceeding the Restrictions of Visual Perception http://dx.doi.org/10.14236/ewic/RESOUND19.12
Maj Hasager, Ask Kæreby Sounding Pico http://dx.doi.org/10.14236/ewic/RESOUND19.13
Afif Arabi, Sahar Sharara Nasser the Radio Star and Sound Icon in Arab Collective Memory http://dx.doi.org/10.14236/ewic/RESOUND19.14
Sigrun Lehnert Music and Voice in German Newsreels of the 1950s/1960s http://dx.doi.org/10.14236/ewic/RESOUND19.15
Hernani Villaseñor Ramírez Open, High and Low: Getting Deep in the Sound Source Code http://dx.doi.org/10.14236/ewic/RESOUND19.16
Angélica Yaneth Piedrahita Delgado, Erick Vazquez Camarillo Heartprint: Acoustic Tactics to Tune in Within Each Other http://dx.doi.org/10.14236/ewic/RESOUND19.17
Mi-Jung Kang The Sound of Shamans in the Works of Nam June Paik and Early Korean Video Artists http://dx.doi.org/10.14236/ewic/RESOUND19.18
Heidi Tikka Tactile-sonic enactments – on the agency of air in “Untitled No2, 2014” http://dx.doi.org/10.14236/ewic/RESOUND19.19
Daniel Cermak-Sassenrath, Stina Hasse Re-Volution Sampler – The Aesthetics of a Participatory Archive of Political Songs http://dx.doi.org/10.14236/ewic/RESOUND19.20
Hassan Choubassi, Joe Elias, Sahar Sharara Siri, Give Me Back my Eye: From Audio Culture to Video and Back http://dx.doi.org/10.14236/ewic/RESOUND19.21
Petros Ioannidis, Jung-ah Son, Hernani Villaseñor Ramírez, Tomoya Matsuura Exploring the Cross-Species Experience and the Coevolutionary Capacity: Sensorial Transcoding and Critical Play Design of Bio-Sonic Sense http://dx.doi.org/10.14236/ewic/RESOUND19.22
Nina Sosna Micro-ecologies of sound: Elemental dialog at work http://dx.doi.org/10.14236/ewic/RESOUND19.23
Didiana Prata Archiving and curating activist design on Instagram: the 2018 Brazilian presidential election visual narratives http://dx.doi.org/10.14236/ewic/RESOUND19.24
Dr Cédric Maridet The Figure of the Amateur for a General Organology of Sound Art Practices http://dx.doi.org/10.14236/ewic/RESOUND19.25
Harold Schellinx, Emmanuel Ferrand Freely improvised and non-academic electroacoustic music by urban folks http://dx.doi.org/10.14236/ewic/RESOUND19.26
Izabela Zawadzka Searching for Silence http://dx.doi.org/10.14236/ewic/RESOUND19.27
Dr. Anna Walker Locating the Sound of Trauma Within me. In and Out of Memory: Exploring the Tension Between Remembering and Forgetting a Traumatic Event http://dx.doi.org/10.14236/ewic/RESOUND19.28
Stephanie Loveless Tactical Soundwalking in the City: A Feminist Turn from Eye to Ear http://dx.doi.org/10.14236/ewic/RESOUND19.29
Megan Hines, David Kadish, Maja Fagerberg Ranten Sound as Material for Eco-technogenesis http://dx.doi.org/10.14236/ewic/RESOUND19.30
Clio Flego REsound the UNseen http://dx.doi.org/10.14236/ewic/RESOUND19.31
Ximena Alarcón Díaz, Alexander Refsum Jensenius “Ellos no están entendiendo nada” [“They are not understanding anything”]: embodied remembering as complex narrative in a Telematic Sonic Improvisation http://dx.doi.org/10.14236/ewic/RESOUND19.32
MOON Martina Zelenika The sound of mineral stone: Chemical properties of civilisation http://dx.doi.org/10.14236/ewic/RESOUND19.33
Saskia Isabella Maria Korsten Repeat-Revolution: Forms of Partaker Agency in the Sound Works of Cage, Holmqvist and Bruys http://dx.doi.org/10.14236/ewic/RESOUND19.34
Dami Kim Creating Synthesis: Art and New Technology as Unseparatedness http://dx.doi.org/10.14236/ewic/RESOUND19.35
Dr. Freida Abtan Fear of Flight: Expanded Presence and Inter-sensory Gesture in Multimedia Performance http://dx.doi.org/10.14236/ewic/RESOUND19.36
David Kadish Robophony: A new voice in the soundscape http://dx.doi.org/10.14236/ewic/RESOUND19.37
Charu Maithani Chroma Screens –Intra-Actions, Connections and Gesturalities http://dx.doi.org/10.14236/ewic/RESOUND19.38
Wolfgang Muench An Evening at the Ballroom: Whatever Happened to Televanilla? http://dx.doi.org/10.14236/ewic/RESOUND19.39
Alexis Bhagat Some Tapes in the Wordship: Indexing the Audio Art Archives of Richard Kostelanetz http://dx.doi.org/10.14236/ewic/RESOUND19.40
Laura Leuzzi, Stephen Partridge, Adam Lockhart Approaches, Strategies and Theoretical and Practice-Based Research Methods to investigate and archive video art. Some reflections from the REWIND projects http://dx.doi.org/10.14236/ewic/RESOUND19.41
Willard G. Van De Bogart Creating Sonic Topologies using Electronic Music to develop a new Cosmological Model of Consciousness http://dx.doi.org/10.14236/ewic/RESOUND19.42
Morten Søndergaard Doing things with Sound: The Reflexive Intentionality of the Ultra-local in the Practice of Peter Laugesen http://dx.doi.org/10.14236/ewic/RESOUND19.43