This multi-platform, collaborative research project included sound and performance commissions, an edited issue of The Contemporary Journal and a writer-in-residence alongside a symposia series that turned into a rolling online talks programme at the onset of the pandemic.
These events imagined how listening might exceed existing frameworks of representation, bringing together cross-disciplinary contributions towards other poetics of time. Playing with notions of voice and address, the programme attended to the grammars that shape our differential experiences of the world, and asked: can sound restitute failures to listen? How might we listen to time affectively? What auditory imaginaries and possible futures can listening unfold?
The sonic offers a multidirectional form of social experience against the law-like authority of clock-time, set alongside the evolutionary tempos and rhythms of extinction, everyday metabolic processes, and broader socio-political chronologies. By assembling multiple, overlapping timeframes, it proposes rhythm as a relational language and conjoins our senses with the unsound, the not-yet audible, and the silenced for imagining new solidarities, aural alliances and forms of attunement.
A dedicated symposia series featuring talks, moving image, poetry, performances, live broadcast, and listening sessions addressed how the sonic shapes contemporary global processes in four instalments:
Histories of Listening
The first instalment of the symposia series was planned to feature artists, thinkers, musicians, and sound researchers to investigate our perception of time.
Throughout the centuries, philosophers, physicists and musicologists dabbled with a central conundrum: what determines our sense of time? While it is fundamental to ideas of history, to our everyday selves and our expectations, conventional views describe it as forward-moving, one-dimensional, universal and made up of spatial successions. Musical time, however, is made up of tempos, rhythms and syncopations that ward off, suspend, accelerate and re-organise our perception. Thinking through sound and music, could the ear be the body of time? How do we listen to time?
The live programme also looked at the compositions of time at play in the interconnected biosocial rhythms of human, vegetal and mineral lives. Departing from global histories of labour, it explored how the modern complex of time emerged out of the pulsing rhythms of colonial modernity, central to capitalist modes of production.
Participants included dub techno duo Space Afrika, sing-songwriter Lucinda Chua, historian Jonathan Curry-Machado, artist Manuel Ángel Macía, sound historian James Mansell, radio activist Diana McCarty, writer and performance artist Jota Mombaça, artist Isidora Neves Marques, poet Selina Nwulu, artist Tabita Rezaire, Black studies scholar and physicist Michelle M. Wright, and sound researchers Syma Tariq and Salomé Voegelin.
Michelle M. Wright, Physics of Blackness
Acousmatic Paranoia
The second instalment of the symposia series engaged the work of Berlin-based Vietnamese artist Sung Tieu, through thinkers and musicians that explore sonic warfare and the psychoacoustic dimensions of fear. It asked, how do sonic frequencies redefine spaces of conflict? Can sonic fictions introduce new political possibilities and auditory imaginaries?
Talks by AUDINT members, Hyperdub founder Steve Goodman (Kode9), media scholar Toby Heys, and media theorist and sound artist Eleni Ikon, turned into a special issue of The Contemporary Journal discussing uses of acoustic force and the sonic mobilisation of bodies in conflict scenarios, as well as the near-future scenario of military research in hypersonicity and augmentations of audition to include the inaudible, informed by theories of post- and in-humanism.
Listening as Critique
The third instalment of the symposia series sought to explore sonic modes of being and knowing that evade or refuse representation, transparency and legibility.
Alongside Western imperialism, colonisation, and enslavement, listening was used to construct and confirm allegedly natural power relationships built on inequity. Yet opposing cultural erasure, acts of refusal, intimacy and care strengthened kinship through sound, ritual and song as world-making strategies.
Departing from the afterlives of slavery and enduring legacies of colonialism, it listened to how musical forms, languages and sensibilities are transformed by transnational movements. From the Harlem Renaissance to international solidarity networks that helped to spread anticolonial sensibilities through music, resistance to standards of European notation across musical genres, and the rise of pop and global dance music as well as club cultures, how do artists and musicians develop forms of critique that listen beyond existing frameworks of representation?
Participants included performance studies scholar Melissa Blanco Borelli, artist and filmmaker Louis Henderson, artist collective Radio Earth Hold (Rachel Dedman, Arjuna Neuman, and Lorde Selys), artist and musician Satch Hoyt, composer and radio host Hannah Catherine Jones, DJ Jayce Clayton, performance and visual artist Jota Mombaça, Black studies scholars Tavia Nyong'o and Tina Campt, sound scholar Fumi Okiji, curator Bhavisha Panchia, poet Nisha Ramayya, and poet Belinda Zwahi (MA.MOYO).
Futurism after the Future, a conversation between Tavia Nyong’o and Jayna Brown, moderated by Melissa Blanco Borelli
Fumi Okiji, The Gathering-work of Music, chaired by Dhanveer Singh Brar
Expanded Listening
The fourth and final instalment of the symposia series asked what are the limits of sound.
In the nineteenth century, developments in the cultural history of hearing in Europe and the emergence of acoustics as a scientific discipline, led to the articulation of new sensory relations and new theories of knowledge. An emphasis was placed on the ear canal as the medium through which humans apprehend the world. Since then, artists, feminists, queer/disability and critical race theorists have struggled against the distance between representation and experience, time and space, and sound and sense, implied by this way of listening to the world.
A two-day programme of performance, dance, talks, and poetry, aimed to tune into the haptic and sensorial dynamics of listening across auditory registers and a wide spectrum of frequencies. It proposed modes of listening beyond the ear towards renewed kinships and a longer tempo of auditory awareness.
Participants included legal scholar Denise Ferreira da Silva, ethnomusicologist Ana María Ochoa Gautier, performance and visual artists Evan Ifekoya and Jota Mombaça, dancer and choreographer Fernanda Muñoz-Newsome, media scholar Nelly Y. Pinkrah, anthropologist Elisabeth Povinelli, artists Libita Sibungu and Jenna Sutela, sound artist and filmmaker Aura Satz, and more.
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