Sound, Embodiment, Community

Social Acoustics is a collaborative interdisciplinary research project focusing on listening, socially engaged arts, relationality and sound, and on how these contribute to practices and discourses of embodiment (lived experience) and community (public self).  The project develops  new forms of artistic work and knowledge that weave together discursive, material, and performative expressions.  

Social Acoustics develops from understandings of sound’s deeply affective and relational capacity, and how it enables gestures of compassion and sharing as well as disruption and cacophony. Exploring the potentialities of sound’s relational, material and artistic qualities, the project engages sound as a productive medium for nurturing collaboration and an ethics of radical openness, and for challenging models of knowledge and agency defined by the apparent, the legible and the quantifiable. 

The project´s dual focus on acts of listening from bodily and community perspectives seeks to question the traditional partitioning of experience as bodily/private or communal/public, reconfiguring these as radically open, porous and entangled states. The liquid, relational qualities of sound challenges binary conceptualisations generating new productive modes of thinking about the complex relationality of lived experience.  

As Les Back states in his book, The Art of Listening, a “sociological listening” is needed to create a space for the excluded and the marginal, as well as the injured, for those that do not always have a voice. This may be extended to recognize how listening is an everyday practice shaping the ways in which friends and strangers may meet, and acts of hospitality as well as disagreement can occur. As such, the project will pose a set of questions as to what constitutes an act of listening, what consequences might sound studies have for research culture, and in what ways may an art of sound instigate alternative modes of being together.

Social Acoustics curates and explores interdisciplinary working through conversations and collaborations with a number of regional and international partners.  These includes cross faculty workings at the University of Bergen with colleagues  in fields such as feminism and gender studies, psychology, literature, philosophy and medicine, as well as a range of international researchers and artists, institutions and festivals such as the FestivalKollektivet, Bergen, OFF-Biennale, Budapest, Errant Bodies, Berlin and Klub MaMa, Zagreb.