Updated Programme

13:00 Introduction

13:15-14:45 SESSION I & II: AIR TECHNICS AND EMBODIMENT / ANTHROPOCENTRISM LISTENING AND VOICE
Oriana Walker, Ventilators and the Voice from the Iron Lung to Positive Pressure
Naomi Waltham-Smith, Extant Listening: or Ec(h)otechnics
Martin Daughtry, Precarious Songs of the Anthropocene

15:15-15:40 PERFORMANCE
Andreas Borregaard, Asthma — for accordion and video (Simon Steen-Andersen, 2017)

16:00-17:15 SESSION III: ECOPOLITICS OF SOUND AND SILENCE
Jessica Feldman, “We are Nature Defending Herself”: Decentering the Human through Collective Listening and Coordinated Silence in Climate Protest
Zeynep Bulut, On Non-Dialogic Voicing

17:15-17:45 FINAL DISCUSSION

The workshop will bring artists and scholars together for a sustained conversation on the theme of voice and environment. It will explore physical, cultural, sonic, and social interactions between voice and environment as well as issues relating to atmosphere, climate change, precarious vocality, and varied physical and cultural dynamics of breath and breathlessness. How do our voices interact with the physical, cultural, political, historical, and cosmological milieus in which they are emplaced? Can attention to environmental concerns lead to a productive expansion of the category of voice, stretching it beyond the conventional parameters of the human body and aurality/sound? How might this expanded, posthuman conception of voice help us understand our place in a multispecies world? Can environments listen? Can environments speak or sing? Can humans give voice to nonhuman perspectives? These questions, which engage with recent art and scholarship on the Anthropocene, biopolitics, posthumanism, sound studies, and ecocriticism, will frame the exploration of the entangled dynamics of voice and environment. The workshop will include a panel of short position papers and an intermedial performance, followed by a free-ranging discussion.

 

Daniel A. Barber is an associate professor of architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is also Chair of the PhD Program. He is the author of  A House in the Sun: Modern Architecture and Solar Energy in the Cold War (2016) and Climatic Effects: Architecture, Media, and the Great Acceleration (forthcoming). He has published and lectured widely, and has held research fellowships at Harvard University and Princeton University. He is currently a Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. Barber edits the series ‘Accumulation’ on e-flux architecture.

Andreas Borregaard is recognized as one of the world’s most exciting young accordionists. He has appeared in solo and chamber music recitals in Australia, South America, US, and most parts of Europe. In 2007/2008, Andreas Borregaard was the first ever accordionist to be admitted to the prestigious and highly acclaimed Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London. Since 2010 Andreas Borregaard has been teaching accordion and chamber music at the Royal Danish Academy of Music in Copenhagen and in 2017 he was appointed accordion lecturer at the Norwegian Academy of Music in Oslo, where he is currently also a PhD fellow in artistic research (‘Just Do It! — Exploring the Musician’s Use of Bodily Performance’).

Zeynep Bulut’s research sits at the intersection of voice and sound studies, experimental music, and sound art. Bulut is a lecturer in music at Queen’s University Belfast and visiting research fellow at King’s College London. Prior to joining Queen’s, she was a lecturer in music at King’s College London and a research fellow at the ICI Berlin. She is sound review editor for Sound Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal and project lead for the collaborative research initiative ‘Map A Voice’. Her current book project, Building a Voice: Sound, Surface, Skin, theorizes the emergence, embodiment, and mediation of voice as skin. Her articles have appeared in various volumes and journals, including Perspectives of New MusicPostmodern Culture, and Music and Politics.

Martin Daughtry is an associate professor of music at New York University. He teaches and writes on acoustic violence; human and nonhuman vocality; listening; jazz; Russian-language sung poetry; sound studies; and the auditory imagination. His monograph, Listening to War: Sound, Music, Trauma, and Survival in Wartime Iraq (2015) received a PROSE Award from the Association of American Publishers, and the Alan Merriam Prize from the Society for Ethnomusicology. He is currently writing a book on voice and atmosphere in the Anthropocene.

Jessica Feldman is an assistant professor in the Department of Global Communications at American University of Paris. Before that, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Digital Civil Society Lab at Stanford, after earning a PhD in Media, Culture, and Communication from NYU. Her dissertation considered how advances in the surveillance of cell phone data, decentralized mobile networks, and vocal affective monitoring software are changing the ways in which listening exerts power and frames social and political possibilities. She is also an artist whose work has been exhibited and performed internationally. Her current book project, Radical Protocols: Designing Democratic Digital Tools in Social Movements, considers the ways in which democratic values are (or are not) inscribed in the design of emerging networked communication technologies.

Oriana Walker is a historian of medicine and the human body. She received her PhD in the history of science from Harvard University and is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Berlin Center for the History of Knowledge and at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, having formerly held postdoctoral fellowships on the Wellcome project Life of Breath (Bristol) and at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. Her work uses the history of the body as a space for exploring how imaginations of self and world are made and forgotten and, in turn, how these limit or expand human possibility.

Naomi Waltham-Smith is associate professor in the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies at the University of Warwick, having beforehand taught music and comparative literature at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research interests lie at the intersection between recent European philosophy, especially deconstruction, and sound studies; and her writings appear in journals including boundary 2CR: The New Centennial ReviewdiacriticsParrhesia: a journal of critical philosophy, Music Theory SpectrumMusic Analysis, and the Journal of Music Theory. She is the author of Music and Belonging Between Revolution and Restoration (2017), and her second book, The Sound of Biopolitics, is forthcoming.

In English
With

J. Martin Daughtry (New York University)
Zeynep Bulut (Queen’s University Belfast)
Daniel A. Barber (University of Pennsylvania)
Andreas Borregaard (Norwegian Academy of Music)
Naomi Waltham-Smith (University of Warwick)
Jessica Feldman (The American University of Paris)
Oriana Walker (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science)

Organized by

An ICI Event organized by Zeynep Bulut and J. Martin Daughtry, supported by the Queen’s University Belfast School of Arts, English and Languages (Department of Music and Sonic Arts Research Centre) and the New York University Faculty of Arts and Science (Department of Music)

The event, like all events at the ICI Berlin, is open to the public, free of charge. The audience is presumed to consent to a possible recording on the part of the ICI Berlin. If you would like to attend the event yet might require assistance, please contact Event Management.

KV Voice and Environment