Tuning Speculation: 'Maginary Magnitudes and Sonic Refractions
This one-day symposium approaches such things as sound writing, auditory apophenia and “exploding head syndrome” as critical techniques of existence that dramatize the conditional gap between what a life “is” and what it “could be.” In other words, when taken as speculatively pragmatic ways of being rather than simply impassive fantasies, these techniques can be understood to articulate imaginary magnitudes that refuse not only a single scale of relation but a single relation of scale. In this respect, the ludic urge that informs the sense of sound’s being written, (mis)heard, and hallucinated links itself to activities that are more intensive then they are extensive, more expressive and contingent than substantive and determinate. This engagement with what might be called the abstractions of scale is particularly important in a time when capitalism is beginning to draw surplus value from our cognitive and affective faculties, and as new media technologies extend their reach into increasingly imperceptible and seemingly unthinkable domains. Accordingly, the presenters in this symposium employ their own speculative-pragmatic techniques in order to both interrogate the occult economies of abstraction and to advance forms of critical enquiry that scale between conditional and factual modes of being.
9:30-11
Nick Bazzano (NYU)
Nancy Gillespie (Independent)
Barbara Browning (NYU)
11:15 - 12:15
Nicola Masciandaro (CUNY, Brooklyn)
André Lepecki (NYU)
Lunch
1:45 - 3:45
David Cecchetto (York)
Marc Couroux (York)
Ted Hiebert (U. Washington, Bothell)
Eldritch Priest (NYU)
4 - 5:30
Margret Margret Grebowicz (Goucher)
James Currie (U. Buffalo)
Deborah Kapchan (NYU)
Deborah Kapchan is Associate Professor of Performance Studies at New York University. A Guggenheim fellow, she is the author of Gender on the Market: Moroccan Women and the Revoicing of Tradition (Univ. of Pennsylvania Press 1996), Traveling Spirit Masters: Moroccan Music and Trance in the Global Marketplace (Wesleyan University Press 2007), as well as numerous articles on sound, listening, narrative and poetics. She is translating and editing a volume entitled Poetic Justice: An Anthology of Moroccan Contemporary Poetry, and is also the editor of two recent volumes: Intangible Rights: Cultural Heritage in Transit (2014 University of Pennsylvania Press) and Theorizing Sound Writing(forthcoming, Wesleyan University Press).
The Occulture:
Eldritch Priest writes on sonic culture, experimental aesthetics, and the philosophy of experience from a ’pataphysical perspective. He is author of Boring Formless Nonsense: Experimental Music and the Aesthetics of Failure (Bloomsbury, 2013), as well as numerous journal articles. As a composer Eldritch’s works have been performed in Canada, the United States, Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. He is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Music at NYU.
Marc Couroux is Associate Professor in the Department of Visual Art and Art History, School of the Arts, Media, Performance & Design at York University. His xenopraxis burroughs into uncharted perceptual aporias, transliminal zones in which objects become processes, surfaces yield to sediment, and extended duration pressures conventions beyond intended function. His work has been exhibited and performed internationally (Amsterdam, Berlin, Chicago, Glasgow, London, San Francisco, Sydney) and published by Manchester University Press, Blackwood Gallery and re.press.
David Cecchetto is Associate Professor in the Department of Humanities at York University, Canada. He has published widely—including the monograph Humanesis: Sound and technological posthumanism (University of Minnesota Press, 2013)—and presented creative work internationally.