Workshops

Marlo De Lara: Sounding Personal Narratives

From childhood journals to the sharing of family histories, we enjoy the embodied process of speaking, sharing, and telling personal experience. Inscribing one’s own narrative is an empowering process and politically potent. By taking intimate thoughts and translating them to others in the external social and political world, we further reclaim spaces that aim to make invisible the multiplicity of voices and the specificity of unsaid struggle and resilience. In the process of group listening, we receive and hear ourselves in others.

In this workshop, we push beyond the word to sound. Participants will be asked to bring in sounds in the various forms of audiovisual recordings, instruments, and text that they feel are representative of themselves, objects that speak to their identity. During the session they will be guided on how to piece together an audio collage and share it with the group, creating spaces and places in present time.

“Like ghosts, sound and narrative have no physical presence, suspended in the air, waiting to be heard once more. Together, they haunt the ephemeral and illusive geographies that are constructed through listening…stories and sound are vital in the creation of what we relate to ‘as place’. Therefore, the act of listening is not a passive one, but instead, creative and productive” (Anderson, ‘Voice, Narrative, Place: Listening to Stories’, Journal of Sonic Studies, v.2, May 2012.)

 

Rebecca Lee: The Technology of Listening  

In discussions about representation in sound, technology and cyberspace, the focus is quite often on how to cultivate a ‘voice’, and how to speak out. But there are important strategies needed that also foster new approaches that ensure we are able to listen and give attention. Models of listening are bound to technological or idealized linear forms, where listening-as-labour and affective listening are negated often along gender and racial lines. The potential for intersubjective, perhaps networked listening and non-aural aspects to listening are undervalued or unexplored. This discursive workshop asks, in the context of gender and technology, what other models for communication can we imagine? Might there be a feminist listening? How would attention to listening as labour enable us to reconfigure spaces and relations of sonic technology and sharing? And importantly, what ways can we actively withdraw listening?

Stine Kloster: Where does a body end? Cyberspace as a platform for equal access to the field of Sonic Art, Play and Education.

Programme description:
This workshop provides theoretical framework to create greater gender balance in teaching environments, through utilising Cyberspace as a free, open platform. It also serves as a hands- on guide to sound foraging in both Cyberspace and IRL, as a creative strategy.

Background: Based on initial research in sonic stereotypes and music education, the workshop has been designed around the idea that increased gender balance in the field of sound art and education could be pursued through developing a solid frame work for “equal opportunity learning environments”. In such environments there exist no barriers in terms of skills or socio-economic factors, to hinder contact and engagement with creative tools and resources to start working with sound on various creative levels.

Who should attend:

The workshop is aimed at those who either seek inspiration and tools to develop workshops themselves, or who seek inspiration for their own creative endeavours.

Tech requirements: The premise for the workshop is to collect and treat sound with “devices at hand”, so, although attendees are encouraged to bring one or more devices that can record, it is not a requirement.

The 1 hour workshop will be devised into three parts:

1) Quick Introduction
2) Creative session part 1: Foraging in Cyberspace: Creative strategies.
3) Creative session part 2: Audiodramaturgy: Framing a narrative (pedagogical perspectives)