Welcome
In a short welcome word, Anita Jóri introduces CTM 2021's Transformation theme and the day's three modules that address the topic from a variety of perspectives. Streamed live over YouTube, the audience is invited to send-in questions via chat. These will be discussed at the end of each module together with the presenters and host.
Occupy Wall Street’s »Human Mic«: A Sonic Embodiment of Solidarity
Andrea Liu (Goldsmiths University WAL, US/DE)
During Occupy Wall Street protests, the »human microphone« was a technique whereby anybody wanting to speak to a crowd of activists would speak in chunks of repeatable phrases, which would then be repeated by the entire crowd—a method for amplifying speeches in New York City’s Zuccotti Park where electronic amplifications of sound were prohibited. A speaker might start by yelling, »I am here to a talk to you today,« then a crowd of 200 people would yell back, »I am here to talk to you today.« Entire speeches were delivered this way, creating a call and response effect.
By listening and then reproducing with one’s own body and voice the speech of another, it became impossible to listen detachedly—the words penetrated one’s body, coalescing into an embodied participation. As Urban Studies scholar Rosanna Reguillo describes: »It required an enormous communicative willingness on the part of the speaker to fit his or her ideas into a rhythm reproducible by the people, and to listen and interpret the rhythm, the spirit, and the emotions that emanate and that are co-produced by the relationship between him/her and the people.« The human microphone contributed to the configuration of a subjective transversality that, through speech, transformed an aggregate mass of people into a political community. While being careful to eschew romanticization, this paper explores the transformative potential of the human mic as a sonic embodiment of horizontalism, solidarity, and strength in numbers; as well as its shortcomings, such as its inability to impart intricate or fragile speech. It will also contextualize the act of listening within the human mic in comparison to other acts of listening within call and response dynamics, such as African American gospel songs and the military.
Andrea Liu is a New York City/Berlin-based visual art and performance critic (and artist) whose research often deals with genealogy, or the epistemic context within which bodies of knowledge become intelligible and authoritative, as a point of departure in art production. She was awarded artist residencies in the US, Berlin, Copenhagen, Barcelona, Prague, and Italy, and has written art and performance criticism for Afterimage, ArtMargins, Art US, e-flux (AUP), Social Text, New Museum Social Practice Glossary, Movement Research Journal. She received her undergraduate education at Yale University and thereafter was a visiting scholar at Centre Parisien d’Etudes Critiques (Paris, France).
Between the Mute and the Deaf: Tracing Nonhuman Worlds Through Sonic Cartographies of the Unknown
Elina Tapio (University of Amsterdam, NL)
This presentation argues for an understanding on how political bodies are constructed at the crux where sound and the imaginative potentials of listening meet. With an emphasis on human to nonhuman relations and ecology, the problem to solve will be on the social death that muteness constitutes, which can be seen as telling of our relationship to an ecosystem we are out of tune with. How does listening make the world speak to us and, furthermore, how do we listen to that which cannot not make a vocal utterance? There seems to be an urgency to inquire deeper into the significance of sound as a tool in displaying presence and furnishing beings with ontological value. Sonic relationality will be proposed as a way to reconfigure binary notions of »us« and the »Other,« and steer towards epistemic justice beyond human exceptionalism. Moreover, this will lead to rethinking ethics as the act of response/ability emerging through an ongoing intra-action between sound and the listener.
Elina Tapio is completing a master’s degree in Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam focusing her research on sound, ecology, and (bio)political relations between humans and nonhumans.
Termite Listening: Environmental Knowledge Through Sound
Siobhan Leddy (Freie Universität Berlin, DE)
Data-driven perspectives on ecology paint an alarming picture, from accelerating species extinction to carbon emissions. Yet despite the enormous data sets on climate collapse, this form of knowledge has failed to mobilise meaningful change. The computational approach to planetary knowledge creates a taxonomy, simultaneously definitive and distancing. We are therefore in need of alternative knowledge models beyond computation. Sound, when thought of in non-anthropocentric and non-cochlear terms, is an affective material that offers one such possible way of knowing our environment. Nonhuman examples of sonic knowledge abound: termites use vibration as part of their swarm cognition, extending the relation between different termite bodies into their environment (e.g. through leaves). Sound offers an affective and fundamentally relational episteme that is entangled in its locality.
The task ahead, then, is to cultivate what Rosalind Morris has called the »miner’s ear« (although I make a less anthropocentric proposition). Like the miner, we must attune ourselves to changes in environmental sound — an exercise in parsing signal from noise. Could such an approach transform the relation between humans and environment from one of guardianship to one of embeddedness?
Siobhan Leddy is currently a first-year PhD student at the Freie Universität Berlin, researching more-than-human communication in artistic practice. She also holds an MA in Global Arts from Goldsmiths University of London, and a BA in Art History from The University of Manchester. She is also a writer and (occasional) artist, whose work has been published in The Outline, Real Life, and others.