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.
