Hong-Kai Wang & Bill Dietz
PLEASE NOTE CHANGE IN VENUE TO TAPLIN AUDITORIUM, FINE HALL.
Taipei-based interdisciplinary artist, researcher and educator Hong-Kai Wang, and composer, writer and co-chair of Music/Sound at Bard College Bill Dietz will present "Singing is what makes work possible." At a moment when the need to rethink the mediation of aesthetics & politics is urgent, how might we think about aesthetic practices attuned to registers of infrapolitics that dominant paradigms, even at their most radical, struggle to hear? What might we learn from listening in to timbre, materiality, & grain as forms of intelligence? & what if embarrassment were precisely the condition and starting point of a move toward hearing differently? How might we become a chorus of failing ears?
Dietz and Wang also invite us to join them in bringing our throats to bear on these central questions of their concurrent exhibition at “Remote Viewing” in Philadelphia. No musical experience necessary.
This colloquium is part of the "Sound Knowledges" series, a Humanities Council Magic Project curated by Gavin Steingo.
About the Series:
In the past decade, “sound studies” has developed as a major field of scholarly investigation. Often conceptualized as an alternative to visually-oriented studies of media and society, sound studies has foregrounded otherwise neglected histories of listening and the acoustic, and has situated audition as a central figure in the production of cultural, social, and scientific knowledge. But despite continued calls for an approach that would cut across different modalities of knowledge production, research on sound remains woefully compartmentalized. By bringing together theorists, artists, and practitioners, this series promises to foster a more robust and genuinely crossdisciplinary approach to sonic knowledge.