Chairs: Aleksandra Kremer, Alex Rehding, Sophie Seita
Theme: Sounding (Out) Access
Sound/Text examines the intersections and interstices of language, textuality, music, and noise, from experimental poetry to sound archives, from conceptual art to psycholinguistics, from media aesthetics to neuroscience, from critical organology to sonic anthropology, from material culture to practice-based research. This seminar provides an interdisciplinary forum for conversations about the roles that sound plays in all aspects of our lives. We will consider questions around liveness, documentation, histories of interpretation, and new modes of reading and listening. In keeping with the broad umbrella of sound studies and performance studies, the format of our meetings will explore an equally wide-ranging approach: academic talks, lecture performance, listening sessions, concerts, poetry readings, and roundtables.
The events of Sound/Text in the academic year 2023/2024 will be dedicated to questions of disability justice, access, and care. Playfully and attentively, we will explore and ‘sound out’ the poetics of access: the creative potential of, for example, closed captions and audio description as poetic and performative genres in their own right.
We will also learn from scholars and practitioners who think about listening beyond conventional ‘hearing’; investigate the visual, embodied, textural aspects of sound, as well as questions of time, duration, and attention, in the context of stuttering, sign language, and disability arts. Specifically, we will hear from Professor Mara Mills (NYU) and musician and writer JJJJJerome Ellis, and others.
As such, our theme this year looks at sound and text as a question of media and a question of disability justice. We invite you to join us in these poetic, sonic experiments, with care and curiosity.
