In the era referred to as the Anthropocene, Sonic arts play an important role in problematizing and making experienceable the global condition. Sonic practices such as field recordings and forms of sonification, at the same time constitute practices of witnessing, making audible usually inaudible data, and making connections between the local and the global.

But what happens to the "documentary" when scientific statements are transformed into an artistic context? And conversely, what happens to the "artistic" in the engagement with scientific data? In this presentation, Åsa Stjerna discusses the possibilities and dilemmas of sonic practice as documentary practice, drawing on her own artistic practice and artistic research.

Moderator: Julia H. Schröder

Åsa Stjerna  is a Swedish artist using sound and listening as her artistic modes of exploration. Through her site-specific installations, she explores sound’s potential, making the embedded conditions and underlying narratives connected to a situation perceivable, drawing connections between past and present, local and global, as well as human and more-than human. By this she seeks to reframe the act of listening, evoking a sensibility of places as complex ecologies.

Also active as artistic researcher, she has been specifically interested in exploring the contemporary conditions of sonic situated practice and its ability of being transformative, i.e. what it actually means “to make a difference” in the era of Antrophocene and advanced capitalism. Guided by methodologies of  feminism, ecosophy and posthumanism she proposes an understanding of site-specificity as an aesthetic–ethical practice  and engagement between specific and diverse “bodies” with agencies—human as well as non-human, spanning across and connecting the material, social, discursive, artistic, and technical realms at the same time in a given situation. 

Stjerna has participated in an extensive number of exhibitions internationally, among other Klangstaetten Stadtklänge Braunschweig,  the Transmediale Media Festival, Berlin; the Nordic Music Days, Stockholm; the Ultima Contemporary Music festival, Oslo and the Akademie der Künste, Berlin. Her works include several public permanents commissions: Earth Song (2020), commissioned by Stockholm Konst; Sky Brought Down (2017) Sahlgrenska university hospital in Gothenburg, Sweden commissioned by Västra Götalandsregionens konstenhet and The Well (2014) at Swedish Institute in Paris commissioned by the Public Art Agency Sweden.

Stjerna represents professorship sound art at Hochschule für bildende Künste in Braunschweig, Germany, 2020-2021.

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.

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