Visiting Practitioners Series: Jennifer Allen & Dan Scott
Thursday 9 May | London College of Communication (Lecture Theatre B)
2.30pm – 4.30pm | Open to all
[non UAL student/staff please email j.wynne@lcc.arts.ac.uk to book a place]
Jennifer Lucy Allan is a writer and researcher in her final year of a PhD on the social and cultural history of the foghorn, looking at its significance as a massive sonic sound marker along our coasts and at sea. She also runs the record label Arc Light Editions, previously worked as online editor for The Wire magazine, and recently hosted BBC Radio 3’s Late Junction. Her research is entitled Fog Tropes: The social and cultural history of the foghorn 1853 to the present day. The foghorn sounds when visual information is eliminated or reduced, giving primacy to the auditory, and as such has been used to signify complex emotional reactions and represent mental states. Foghorns first appeared as a result of a shipping boom during the industrial revolution, but how does its use in popular culture relate to its history around that time, and beyond? Taking the foghorn as a starting point, she explores the questions of nostalgia, safety and danger, power and melancholy inherent to the call of the foghorn, and crucial to understanding our changing sonic environment.
Dan Scott’s work incorporates installation, performance, and participatory practice and often investigates the politics and poetics of listening. He works as a visiting lecturer at The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, where he tutors in sound and scenography, and he is currently engaged in a practice-based PhD at CRiSAP. For him, listening is a methodology for developing practice, and his research, entitled Ways of listening in sound art: How can multiple ways of listening inform contemporary sound art practice? proposes the existence of a listening art, distinct from sound art, where listening's various aspects (openness, attention, desire, focus, etc) act as both a medium and a mode of engagement.
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CRiSAP and the Sound Arts Department at LCC co-run a Visiting Practitioners Series of weekly talks at the college, exploring the diverse field of sound arts practice. Each term member of Sound Arts staff curates the series of talks, inviting a number of sound practitioners to share their work.