Paying It Forward: Sound Art Strategies for The Post-Anthropocene (original) (raw)
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A Sonic Anthropocene. Sound Practices in a Changing Environment
Cadernos de Arte e Antropologia - A Sonic Anthropocene – Sound Practices in a Changing Environment 1, 2021
The introduction to this double issue entitled "A Sonic Anthropocene: Sound Practices in a Changing Environment" explores some of the concepts and methodological issues that inform our understanding of what we call the "Sonic Anthropocene". We argue that incorporating practices of listening and aural documentation that register the transformations in the acoustic landscape creates a space of potential for examining the increasing impact of human activity on the environment. This introduction is divided into six sections. First, we provide an overview of the notion of the Anthropocene. Secondly, we explore the relationship between sound, environment and perception as cultivated by different strands of scholarship. Thirdly, we discuss the capacity of ethnography to generate new insights into the conditions of life in the Anthropocene. With this in mind, we highlight various examples of collaboration between environmental sound artists, researchers, and activists. Lastly, we introduce the essays included in this first volume. Ultimately, this double issue seeks to contribute toward sounding the Anthropocene by placing sound at the centre of an interdisciplinary conversation about the economic, social, cultural, political and ecological processes that underlie the currently ongoing planetary transformations.
Resonance, 2021
Taking the new materialist and climate change themes of Ashley Fure’s The Force of Things: an Opera for Objects as a departure point, this article examines sound studies’ recent invocations of new materialist philosophy alongside its foundational concern toward the Anthropocene ecological crisis. I argue that new materialist sonic thought retraces new materialism’s dubious ethical program by deriving equivalencies of moral standing from logically prior ontological equivalencies of material entities and social actors rooted in their shared capacities to vibrate. Some sonic thought thus amplifies what scholars in Black and Indigenous decolonial critique have exposed as the homogenizing, assimilative character of new materialism’s superficially inclusional and optimistic ontological imaginary, which includes tendencies to obscure the ongoingness of racial inequality and settler-colonial exploitation in favor of theorizing difference as a superfice or illusion. As I argue in a sonic reading of Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, some of new materialism’s favored analytical and ecological terms such as objecthood, vibrationality, and connection to the Earth are also terms through which anti-Blackness, colonial desire, and the universalization of Whiteness have historically been routed. This historical amnesia in new materialism enables its powerfully obfuscating premises. As a result, I argue that new materialist sound studies and philosophy risk amplifying the Anthropocene’s similarly homogenizing rhetorics, which often propound a mythic planetary oneness while concealing racial and colonial climate inequities. If sound studies and the sonic arts are to have illuminating perspectives on the Anthropocene, they must oppose rather than affirm its homogenizing logics.
Sounding the Anthropocene: Rethinking soundscapes and nature
This paper traces dominant ideologies of nature, starting with Aristotle's inclusive formulation, which incorporated all things, biotic or abiotic. This view was lost with the Roman division of society into the domestic (domus) and savage (silva). Abrahamic religions proposed an originary paradise, an Eden corrupted by humans, who nonetheless are granted superiority over nature. The providential ideology holds that nature is a resource without value, until tamed and managed. In the 18th century, the Romantics valorised nature as moral good, a wellspring of aesthetic and spiritual inspiration. This paper will explore how these ideologies are expressed in R. Murray Schafer’s The Soundscape, using sources from anthropology and human geography (Jedediah Purdy, Philippe Descola). The goal is to understand how Schafer relies on a dichotomy between nature and humanity that is inherently problematic in the Anthropocene. A clear understanding of the limitations of the soundscape will enable the development of sustainable sound practices.
Anthropocene Out Loud: Sound as a Tool to Study Modern Nature
Published online at Agosto Foundation, 2020
Praha: Academia, 2020, 344-360.] "There was a strange stillness. The birds, for example-where had they gone? Many people spoke of them, puzzled and disturbed. The feeding stations in the backyards were deserted. The few birds seen anywhere were moribund; they trembled violently and could not fly. It was a spring without voices. On the mornings that had once throbbed with the dawn chorus of robins, catbirds, doves, jays, wrens, and scores of other bird voices there was now no sound; only silence lay over the fields and woods and marsh." (Carson 1962, s. 2) Since biologist Rachel Carson warned of the possibility of a "silent spring" in 1962, not only environmentalists, but also the common people in the countriside started to listen to the sounds of birds more attentively and anxiously than before. The prospect of spring not heralded by the sounds of bird singing became of the most powerful symbols of the environmental concerns of the second half of the 20th century, because it was able to express what most people had already observed in their surroundings and link seemingly ordinary moments of daily experience as morning singing of robins or jays with a complex and organically changing world of global trade, agriculture, transport infrastructure and the use of agrochemicals and pesticides. The image of silent nature which Carson so suggestively evoked, not only signaled a decline in species diversity due to different types of human activity, but also heralded a new era in the relationship of man to nature, which was increasingly perceived as a fragile entity, closely linked to the anthropogenic sphere. Anthropocene is still a predominantly academic term, but one that expresses a more general concern about the global consequences of local human actions that enters public consciousness and imagination thought images such as the one about the "silent spring". Indeed, Carson did not yet talk about the Anthropocene, and her work belongs in the history of the environmental movement that calls for the protection of nature from human activity, but it serves as a good point of departure for this paper as it introduces sound as a means of studying the changing notion of the boundaries between man and nature, as well as a tool for determining what nature is, what it should be, and how it is to be presented and reproduced. The Anthropocene discourse is far from homogeneous, and what we find today under the rubric of "Anthropocene" in science, art, and popular culture contains a number of conflicting visions and approaches, some of which will be apparent in what follows. The Anthropocene is not only a new epoch, but also its specific reflection. The study of sensory perception along with strategies of representation and media communication is essential for revisiting the interconnectedness of modern binary categories such as nature/culture or object/subject and their relationship to the scientific descriptions of the world. Noise of Modernity "But, hark! there is the whistle of the locomotive-the long shriek, harsh, above all other harshness, for the space of a mile cannot mollify it into harmony. It tells a story of busy men, citizens, from the hot street, who have come to spend a day in a country village, men of business."
Listening to Reveries: Sounds of a Post-Anthropocene Ecology
Fusion Journal: Listening in the Anthropocene, 2021
This article reflects on the current sonic relationship between humans and their ecological environment. An ecological model of sound in the Anthropocene is outlined, followed by an imaginary journey into sonic futures after the Anthropocene. From one angle, it references two approaches by sound artists whose work expresses utopian or dystopian sound-and life-worlds where humans influence is absent. From a different angle, it includes reports and observations from the first lockdown phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, framed as a sudden glimpse of a sonic post-Anthropocene; a sudden human silencing that left more space for other sounds, such as singing birds. These examples are termed reveries in the sense of Gaston Bachelard because they enable one to think about post-anthropocentric sound worlds. In this way the paper describes and discusses the ethical and ecological qualities and possible impacts of such daydreamed worlds.
DYING FOR CLIMATE CHANGE- A SONIC REQUIEM FOR THE ANTHROPOCENE
Sound art is at the vanguard of contemporary creative practices seeking to establish a platform for meaningful debate on a range of accelerating global environmental crises. This paper investigates how the Softday art/science collaboration explores imaginations of the natural world in the epoch of the Anthropocene, whilst engaging in a continuum of public and politicised contestations addressing climate change issues. Sound art therefore helps to frame our understanding and imaginaries of our natural world and renders the imperceptible and inconvenient audible. Marbh Chrios (Dead Zone) is a multimedia artwork by the authors, that reflects upon climate change in the context of a local community in Killybegs in County Donegal in Ireland. The work was based on scientific data about contested marine ‘dead zones’ in Donegal Bay in the north west of Ireland, that Softday represented with algorithmically generated music, field recordings and visualizations, in a live performance in Mooney’s Boatyard in Killybegs, in 2010.
Geopolitics and the Anthropocene: Five Propositions for Sound
This appeal calls for sound to be considered as a geophilosophical provocation to, and a method for, political thought. It arises from experiments in ways of knowing and inhabiting the world, gesturing toward disciplines concerned with sound, the politics of language, and the physical and philosophical environment. Anchoring sound as an inherently political medium, it outlines five propositions on inequality, imperceptibility, translation, commons, and the future; it argues that these are critical arenas into which the particularities of sound afford inquiry. Developing this specific reading of sound positions the sonic as a means for opening spaces that challenge hegemonic and violent forms of subjectivation, which are productive of contemporary states of ecological and economic crisis.