This symposium foregrounds and critically examines the multiplicity of sites and forms of sonic practice and thought that emerge from contemporary conditions in India, South Asia and Australia.

The two-day programme ‘Modulating Realities’ takes off from the existing project Capture All: A Sonic Investigation– a collaboration between Liquid Architecture, Melbourne, and Sarai, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi. Modulating Realities in Delhi continues the focus on questions of situatedness and relationality that lie at the heart of sound and listening. Through a collection of artistic, experimental and research practices that are working through the complexities of the aural and mediatic environments, Modulating Realities attempts to lay out and propose a potential scaffolding of what it means to think with and by means of sound in the contemporary, and not merely ‘about’ it. 

What are the ways in which an auditory turn affects and constitutes relational practices, positionalities and protocols today? How does the sensorium of sound lend itself to actively probing and unsettling systems and structures of control, capture and extraction? Can a reorientation towards the language of listening inaugurate a new vocabulary and imagination of networked and associative futures? To respond to some of these questions and concerns exploring the realm of sound thinking, the sessions will bring together thinkers and practitioners from across artistic disciplines, sound, film and media studies, artistic research, anthropology, literature, philosophy, cultural and aesthetic theory. 

The public open event on the evening of December 14 will feature CAMP (Shaina Anand and Ashok Sukumaran)– the artist collective that runs pad.ma and phantas.ma.

This programme is supported by the Australia Council for the Arts.

Click here for the registration to the Symposium.