Keynote Speakers

Jamie Allen (CA)

The media arts seem quite concerned with a particular set of binaries: mediums and messages, contexts and contents, forms and functions. These dualities seem endlessly fascinating, as they allow for repeated reassertions of materialist reveals, exposing how aesthetic “illusion” is produced by “real" infrastructure. Media arts and activism are forever disclosing the nervy tensions between signals and their substrates, hiding-in-plain-sight—images are composed of pixels that consume the energy of electrons; moving images laid bare as a mere perceptual delusion of stroboscopic sequence; what we call “sound” entrains near-negligible variations of pressure waves; the Internet is but a crisscrossing of wires at the bottom of Earth’s oceans; you’re carrying a piece of Africa around in your pocket. Once internalised by communities of practice and concern, and taken up by popular imaginaries and culture—that is, once these points are made—what more can we do with these insights, what can come after these important media reveals?

Using examples from the study, theory and practice of infrastructures (made of matter, ideas and people) I would like us to think together about what we think the arts and sciences of media can do to push beyond the materialist and constructivist debunking of media as infrastructure. How might we find ways of addressing the current crises of environment, politics and identity in technologically-saturated cultures that provide something in addition to these now somewhat repetitive, pseudo-novel reveals? And how can we productively question suppositions that such revelation is always inherently interesting or radical? What preliminary or speculative, non-binary and non-representational, strategies and openings appear when we cease presuming and declaring technological-saturation as inescapable? Can hopeful interventions and improvisations occur in the media-technological undercommons?

As someone I love recently said to me, “the things you pay attention to grow”, and the question of what media practices, as arts of attention, cultivate and propagate, is always in need of essential re-examination. What energies and relevances can be recovered in an art, research and pedagogy that are not in advance denatured or economized, but hopeful, supportive, expressive and generative of the presence and attentions needed to allow good things to grow?

Jamie Allen. Chilean National Museum of Natural History, Santiago, Chile. March 26, 2017

About

Jamie Allen is a Canadian-born artist and scholar who investigates what technologies teach us about who we are as individuals, cultures and societies. He has been an electronics engineer, a polymer chemist and an exhibition designer with the American Museum of Natural History. He likes to make things with his head and hands—experiments into the material systems of media, electricity, and information as artworks, events, and writing. He attempts to recompose the institutions he works with in ways that assert the importance of generosity, friendship, passion and love in knowledge practices, like art and research. Allen is Senior Researcher at the Critical Media Lab in Basel, Switzerland, co-founder of the media, art and philosophy journal continentcontinent.cc and Canada Research Chair in Infrastructure, Media & Communications at NSCAD.

Salomé Voegelin (UK)

This keynote as curatorial performance brings the heard and its audition into the sphere of things rather than into the context of their name and function. It joins a current debate on new materialism by developing via sound and listening the idea of materialism as a materialism of transformation that reconsiders an anthropocentric worldview without bestowing objects with mythical self-determination; and that accounts for the object’s autonomous agency rather than placing it in a mathematical frame. Thus, it involves an unperforming of the lexicon and of numbers, and practices a listening to the invisible by its intensity, expanse and duration, to hear echoes of responsibility and the vibrations of flesh in animate and inanimate things.

Listening to the soundscape, the voice and sonic works, this curatorial performance rethinks current ideas of speculative realism and new materialism via the in-between of things. It suggests that while a ‘masculine new materialism’ insists on the absence of the human to get to the unthought, and thus ultimately proposes the end of philosophy in its own mathematical probability, a ‘sonico-feminine new materialism’ brings us through the creative performance of matter and language to the seemingly unthinkable, to reperform it not in words but on the body and on things: doing, digging, gardening as a revocalization and rephysicalization of theory through its interbeing with things.

About

Salomé Voegelin is an artist and writer engaged in listening as a socio-political practice of sound. Her work and writing deal with sound, the world sound makes: its aesthetic, social and political realities that are hidden by the persuasiveness of a visual point of view. Voegelin is the author of Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards a Philosophy of Sound Art, 2010, Sonic Possible Worlds: Hearing the Continuum of Sound, 2014, and The Political Possibility of Sound, Fragments of Listening, 2018. Voegelin’s work brings the philosophy of sound to a participatory engagement: she co-convenes Points of Listening with Mark Peter Wright. While this series of monthly events engages in collective listening and communal sound making, her textual phonography blog SoundWords is an on-line template for a participatory and public listening, writing and score making. As an artist Voegelin works collaboratively with David Mollin, Mollin+Voegelin, in a practice that engages words, things and sound and focuses on invisible connections, transient behaviour and unseen rituals. Most recently they performed at Errant Sound in Berlin 28.10.18, and their work A Cartography of knuckles and fingertips was part of Liminaria, collateral event of Manifesta 12 Palermo November 2018. Voegelin is a Professor of Sound at the London College of Communication, University of the Arts London.

Christoph Cox (US)

In this talk, I present an overview of sonic materialism and foreground its political dimension. I contrast this materialist position with alternative positions such as object-oriented ontology and prominent versions of poststructuralism. Sonic materialism, I argue, necessitates attention to several...

Marie Højlund (DK)

Working with sonic interaction design and sound art in various public spaces call for an ecological and enactive methodology entailing investigations of actors and their interrelations with their respective environments as attuning and explorative agents...

Samson Young (HK)

On the occasion of RE:SOUND 2019, artist Samson Young will present a lecture-performance that centres on the concept of echoic mimicry from social psychology...

Panel: Conversation with Sound Art Curators

How have curators helped advance investigations into the production, positioning, exhibition and reception of what we call Sound Art? How has their treatment of a diverse array of sonic practices enriched our modes of inquiry and means of knowledge mobilization?

Track 5 Co-Chairs Liora Belford and Jason van Eyk invite a diverse group of international Sound Art curators for an open, moderated discussion to answer these questions. Together, they will explore the critical histories, positions and strategies that inform their practice.

Panelists include Barbara London–MoMA's media art curator emerita; Arnau Horta–Barcelona-based curator/critic/researcher and collaborator with MACBA and the Reina Sofia; RE:SOUND conference chair Dr. Morten Søndergaard, Associate Professor and Curator/Creator of Interactive Media Art at Aalborg University; and Dr. Salomé Voegelin–artist, writer and un-curator engaged in curatorial performances, London College of Communication.

Barbara London

Barbara London is a curator and writer who founded the video exhibition and collection programs at The Museum of Modern Art, where she worked between

Arnau Horta

Arnau Horta is an independent curator, art critic, journalist and researcher specialized in the roles of listening in contemporary art practices.

Morten Søndergaard

Morten Søndergaard is Associate Professor and Curator/Creator of Interactive Media Art at Aalborg University, Denmark

Salomé Voegelin

Salomé Voegelin is an artist and writer engaged in listening as a socio-political practice of sound. Her work and writing deal with sound, the world sound makes: its aesthetic, social and

Keynote Speakers

Here you can find information about all the keynote speakers and their topics.

Jamie Allen (CA)

Beyond the Media Reveal: Full of Sound and Fury, Signifying… What?

Salomé Voegelin (UK)

Sonic Materialism: A Philosophy of Digging and Gardening

Christoph Cox (US)

Matter, Flow, Sound, Politics