A hybrid listening across totems and talking wires

Description

In this paper, I propose to elaborate on some parallels perceived across a text section entitled “Totem Pole as an Acoustic Event” by Hildegard Westerkamp (1976) and the suggested narrative from the painting “The song of the talking wire” by Henry Farny (1904). The relation of the text and painting links to indigenous listening, and mediation to the sonic environment. The Totem for Westerkamp means a medium with a fundamental connection to its surroundings, in material and symbolic terms. In Farny´s depiction, we observe a listening experience to a totem replaced by the telegraph line. The meaning of sacred spaces is amended from the traditional point of view, and it is augmented through the connecting telegraph network. These technologies mediate a tacit tension between the western modern world and ancient cosmologies: the places of contemplation once allocated to totems are in the present day replaced by media infrastructures, as sensing nodes that become appropriated beyond their original purpose as in the case of Farny´s painting. A sort of environmental listening to ancient and new totems is expanded from aural into haptic and embodied while resonating with its landscape. This analogy and study inform the development of my artistic research on designing instruments for Synthetic Deep Listening. In sound art, technologies are an object of study for approaches like deep listening (by Pauline Oliveros), which engaged with sound technologies to aesthetically expand the human sensorium, exploring notions of machine spirituality and sound meditations. In this sense, I look into indigenous listening as a way for making sound technologies that embrace ecological views, merging nature, technology, and culture. Finally, I intend to elucidate how diversification of technologies beyond their former intended use means a way to resist technological determinism in listening practices.

Bio: Juan Duarte Regino is a Mexican artist based in Finland, he is working with environmental sound to explore sensing in-between nature and technology. His current research and artwork is interested in developing methods for augmented listening, which combine machine learning with remote sensing, exploring the notions of deep-listening, ethnocomputing and cosmotechnics, through interactive instruments, artifacts, and devices. His proposal attempts to redefine human and machine sensing from a manifold worldview. His work comprises lectures, workshops, and sound interventions. His work has been presented at the CTM Festival , Spiral Gallery, Radio and TV Museum of Lahti, Pixelache Festival, Hai Art, IAMAS, RIXC, Media Art Histories, Ujazdowski CCA, ISEA, Goethe Institut Beijing, ETH Zurich, Medialab Matadero.

Aikajakso	23 maalisk. 2023
Pidetty	Stetson University, Yhdysvallat
Tunnustuksen arvo	International