ÆSR Public Lecture
With ANNIE GOH und MARK PETER WRIGHT
ÆSR Public Lecture is a co-operation of the ÆSR Lab and the seminar Auditory Cultures by Kristina Pia
Hofer.
Annie Goh: The Whiteness of Echo: the always already colonial in archaeoacoustics
In this talk I will play and talk through sounds collected from my fieldwork observing the field of acoustic archaeology,
or archaeoacoustics. I propose understanding the figure of echo as a material-semiotic figuration of sonic knowledge production,
which analysis thereof can help us understand contemporary assumptions about sound and sonic matter. I aim to outline how
the echo is shaped by coloniality, whiteness and cisheteropatriarchy and on the basis of its limitations, I seek to re-conceptualise
echo as a feminist and decolonial sonic figuration.
Mark Peter Wright: Micologies
Whether
recording the sound of environments or voices, the microphone is a key actor for sound arts practice and research. It is part
of an assembly of media and senses that participate and interpret place. Yet for all their integral performance in the construction
of knowledge, microphones are rarely heard in the recordings they capture or referred to in textual accounts. They are surreptitious
actors that slip by unnoticed; absent yet utterly present.
This presentation will reconfigure the role of recording technology
within sound arts/studies via an investigative aesthetic approach (Weizman and Fuller, 2021). I will present an ‘autopsy’
of a specific microphone that aims to deconstruct and follow its elemental and political flows. It is vital to consider these
medianatures (Parikka, 2012) in the chain of sonic thinking and doing; from microphones, cables, recording devices, SD cards,
and batteries; to copper, neodymium, PVC, rubber, silicon, silver, gold, palladium, aluminum, zinc, manganese, and potassium.
These are just some of the natural resources that facilitate digital investigations. What are the consequences of such entanglements?
What are we not hearing when we grip the plastic casing of a microphone? What footprint is going unheard?
About:
Dr. Annie Goh is an artist
and researcher. Her work, in its numerous forms from sound installation, composition and computer music to writing, performance
and social practice, takes a critical approach to contemporary debates in the fields of digital technologies, media arts,
generative and computational processes and communication studies, with a particular focus on sound, intersectional feminism,
decolonial theory and the politics of knowledge production. She co-curated the discourse program of CTM Festival Berlin 2013-2016
and is co-founder of the Sonic Cyberfeminisms project since 2015 with Marie Thompson. She is currently Course Leader of BA
Sound Arts at LCC, UAL and a member of CRiSAP (Creative Research in Sound Arts Practice).
Mark Peter Wright
is an artist and researcher working at the intersection of sound arts, experimental pedagogy, and critical theory. His practice
blends the field and lab, site and gallery, amplifying forms of power and poetics within the creative use of sound and documentary
media. He is the Director of CRiSAP (Creative Research in Sound Arts Practice), UAL, and the author of Listening After Nature:
Field Recording, Ecology, Critical Practice (Bloomsbury, 2022/23). https://markpeterwright.net/
The lecture
is part of the ÆSR Lab – Applied/Experimental Sound Research Laboratory. ÆSR Lab is a cooperation project of the University
of Applied Arts Vienna (Centre Focus Research) and the Artistic Research Center (ARC), the Institute for Composition, Electroacoustics
and Tonmeister:innen-Ausbildung (IKE) of the mdw - University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna and the Phonogrammarchiv
of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. ÆSR Lab is funded by the BMBWF and in co-operation with the Recovery and Resilience Facility
(RRF) of the EU.
