Sonic Continuum: Histories of Listening

About

Saturday 28 March & Sunday 29 March 2020 | 12pm & 11am
Nottingham Contemporary
Free Event

The first instalment of the symposia series Sonic Continuum, our long-term research strand investigating practices of world-making through sound and social architectures of time, features artists, thinkers, musicians, and sound researchers to ask how do we perceive time?

Throughout the centuries, philosophers, physicists and musicologists dabbled with a central conundrum: what determines our sense of time? While it is fundamental to ideas of history, to our everyday selves and to our expectations, conventional views describe it as forward-moving, one-dimensional, universal and made up of spatial successions. Musical time, however, is made up of tempos, rhythms and syncopations that ward off, suspend, accelerate and re-organise our perception. Thinking through sound and music, could the ear be the body of time? How do we listen to time?

Histories of Listening is a two-day programme of talks, moving image, poetry, performance and listening sessions that looks at the compositions of time at play in the interconnected biosocial rhythms of human, vegetal and mineral lives. Departing from global histories of labour, it investigates how the complex of time emerged out of colonial encounters and how the pulsing rhythms of colonial modernity are central to capitalist modes of production.

This gathering is an opportunity to explore the entanglement of sound, environment, and imperialism, and addresses climate urgency, colonial memory, and the social distribution of possible futures. Participants include Space Afrika, Manuel Ángel Macía, Jonathan Cury-Machado, James Mansell, Diana McCarty, Jota Mombaça, Pedro Neves Marques, Diana Policarpo, Tabita Rezaire, Martin Savransky and Salome Voegelin, among others.

Programme details will be added soon.

Free. Booking recommended.