Modulating Realities: Networks of Sonic Thinking
14th and 15th December, 2023
Sarai-CSDS, Delhi
A detailed report of the symposium is available here.
The programme booklet with abstracts is available here.
Concept
Modulating Realities: Networks of Sonic Thinking came together as the closing chapter of the existing project Capture All: A Sonic Investigation – a collaboration between Liquid Architecture, Melbourne, and Sarai, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi, supported by the Australia Council for the Arts.
Capture All: A Sonic Investigation was initiated in the pandemic, as a set of online intensives to consider how experimental practices of sound and listening may be mobilised as resources for understanding and intervening in forms of capture, extraction, and governance that haunt and influence life in settler and post-colonial Australia and India. Over a period of two years from 2021 to 2023, the project developed into a series of programs spread out across two chapters with different forms and shapes such as an online publication and a residency in Melbourne culminating in performative lectures and workshops.
Modulating Realities in Delhi, continued the focus on questions of situatedness and relationality that lie at the heart of sound and listening. 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? Through a collection of artistic, experimental and research practices, the Sarai symposium in Delhi was an attempt to foreground and critically examine 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 event brought together thinkers and practitioners from across artistic disciplines, sound, film and media studies, artistic research, anthropology, literature, philosophy, cultural and aesthetic theory.