Why not our voices?

Key Note Talk

by Cathy Lane

At Sound Art Matters conference, AARHUS University, Denmark

1 - 4 June 2016

www.conferences.au.dk/soundart2016

We live in sound, it is all around us. We are implicated in the social relationships and ideologies that we hear reflected back to us. Sound art offers the chance to critique the world that we hear and to produce new and different possibilities. Are sound artists taking up the challenge of offering new ways of knowing or changing the world and does this need new ways of listening and understanding? Can sound art or listening act as tools for radical change by ‘de-conditioning’ our listening and help us cross linguistic, cultural, geographic, ethnic, gendered, specied and sexual prejudicial borders? This presentation will consider how a new listenings might lead to a richer more inclusive sound art that can embrace and celebrate difference.

Available as an Audio Paper in Seismograf Journal's November 2017 issue: Sound Art Matters.
 
Sound Art Matters conference: The current art field is full of sound: audible and inaudible, infrasound, ultrasound, sonifications of data, sound machines, field recordings, sound installations, digital sounds, biological sounds, sound walks, sounds from instruments, sounds of voices and so on. Sound art is a diverse field. It comprises a wide range of different artistic practices in which sound is a central element and occurs in a variety of formats and contexts, crossing conventional boundaries between art genres and institutions. It is released on records and distributed online, it is exhibited at museums and galleries, and it is performed at festivals for new music, sound art and media art, in night clubs, and in open public spaces. Despite this abundance of sonic expressions, sound art is still, as Christoph Cox noted in 2011, ‘profoundly undertheorized’.
 
For more information & booking, visit: www.conferences.au.dk/soundart2016

Images by Sound Art Matters 2016