The talk intends to create a fertile entry point into the history, practices and aesthetics of sound and listening in South Asia as a key area of the Global South. The talk facilitates an understanding of the unique auditory culture and sonic sensibility of the underexplored southern part of the globe by an artistic research approach departing from the speaker’s own practice with sound and listening. Such new knowledge fundamentally shifts the perspectives in sound studies and in a global sonic art history with a decolonial approach of co-listening with the marginal and nomadic voices in a mode of reciprocity. The talk re-examines a fundamental issue in the studies of modernity and globalization concerned with media cultural encounters and technological transmissions between Global North and South as a two-way process of postcolonial confluence. The project draws from the body of work of practitioners active in South Asia, whose work has often been neglected in the Eurocentric field of sound studies and sonic arts.

Moderator: Jacob Eriksen

Budhaditya Chattopadhyay is an artist, media practitioner, researcher, and writer. Incorporating diverse media, creative technologies and research, Chattopadhyay produces works for large-scale installation and live performance addressing contemporary issues of environment and ecology, migration, race and decoloniality. Chattopadhyay has received numerous residencies, fellowships, and international awards. His sound works have been widely exhibited, performed or presented across the globe, and released by Gruenrekorder (DE) and Touch (UK). Chattopadhyay has an expansive body of scholarly publications in the areas of media art history, theory and aesthetics, cinema and sound studies in leading peer-reviewed journals. He is the author of three books, The Nomadic Listener (2020), The Auditory Setting (2021), and Between the Headphones (2021). Chattopadhyay holds a PhD in Artistic Research and Sound Studies from the Academy of Creative and Performing Arts, Leiden University, and an MA in New Media from the Faculty of Arts, Aarhus University.

Website: https://budhaditya.org/

In the winter semester 2021/22, Sound Studies and Sonic Arts presents a lecture series exploring sound in artistic research. The genome of the master program implies an understanding that theory and practice mutually inform each other and represent two sides of the same coin. We’d like to invite you to join this lecture series and explore the different perspectives on the topic of artistic research as an encouragement to reflect on your own positioning.

Artistic research, aesthetic research, and practice-based research have gained a lot of momentum at art schools and universities in the past few decades. Focusing on alternatives to established methodologies and paradigms based on evidence, historical and political analysis, musicology, critical thinking, and cultural studies, this lecture series addresses how artistic research has been established in sound studies and in the sonic arts.

Primarily for the current MA Sound Studies and Sonic Arts students at the UdK, these talks are also open to the general public and students from all other institutions and departments.

Wedensdays | 18:00 – 20:00 p.m. | online