The Sound of Distance

21-24 Oct, 2021

New video/audio lecture entitled “Listening to Unencoded Worlds” made in collaboration with J.-P. Caron, debuting at The Sound of Distance festival at HKW, Berlin. 21 Oct – 24 Oct, 2021.

Excerpt of script:

Listening is an activity of localisation, a way of positioning the self and selfhood in relation to the contents of a world in space and time. It is a personal experience, even when shared, enabled by impersonal conditions that collapse a false estrangement between intimacy and distance.

One closes one’s eyes and listens. The world does not recede. The sounds carry their physical referent in terms of sonic sources, place, relative distance, general ambiance. One cannot close one’s ears as one closes one’s eyes. Nor must one choose between hearing and feeling vibration.

And yet, in another sense, worlds do recede, because they can be encoded anew. Worlds are made from the remaking of ruins; through the recrafting of conceptual and material artifacts. The receding of a world occurs as a shadow cast from the perspectival frameworks of an otherworld that reconfigure concrete practices of inhabitation.