My contribution to this year's CTM Festival - CTM 2014 Dis Continuity:
Sound, Gender, Technology – "Where to" with Cyberfeminism?
Lectures and panel discussion: Sadie Plant, Marie Thompson, Fender Schrade, Susanne Kirchmayr, Moderation: Annie Goh
Sat 1st Feb 14:00
Kunstraum Kreuzberg Bethanien
Recent discourse on the subject of
women and electronic music falls tendentially into two categories;
either writing forgotten histories of pioneering work of women such as
Daphne Oram, Elaine Radigue, Delia Derbyshire, Pauline Oliveros,
Maryanne Amacher amongst many others, or with reference to the recent statistics via female:pressure,
which highlight the huge quantitative discrepancies between male and
female musicians, DJs, and producers represented at labels and music
festivals worldwide.
Whilst both can be considered worthwhile approaches in their own
right, the former approach risks creating fetishized figures of "
patchbay nuns"
(Abi Bliss) and the latter finds hostile responses and risks
ostracization in its own field. In both, one fundamentally important
aspect remains overlooked - Judith Butler formulated this as the
necessity not only to inquire how the category of “women” might become
more fully represented - for example here in music -, but also crucially
to understand and critique the very categories and structures of power
in which these discourses operate.
Taking root from an abstract ontological level, in which binary
categories of sex and gender have long been refuted (biologically as
well as culturally), the panel aims to assess the interactions between
sound, gender and technology from various philosophical and artistic
positions. The widely discussed "cyberfeminism" borne in the early 1990s
questioned the perpetuation of technology as male-dominated domain,
whilst also inciting digital culture as an ideal flourishing ground for
subversive strategies. Though the relationship of this purported digital
utopia never largely or explicitly addressed sound, it shares
dimensions in its affective power as well as non-linear, decentralized
and un-hierarchical characteristics.
Approximately two decades since cyberfeminism boomed - how can we
assess the cyberfeminist dream of the subversive potentialities within
technology in the current status quo? How does an inquiry into the
nature of sound tally to the broader aims of cyberfeminism? Does a
gendered understanding of technology and sound technologies help the
dismantling of the structures that form sound, gender, and technology
today, or does it perpetuate these? Referring to both levels of feminist
activism and feminist theory outlined above, as well as the dual
tendencies within cybernetics towards order and chaos at the core of
cyberfeminism – what can be identified as continuity and discontinuity
in the structures of sound, gender and technology?
Lectures:
Sadie Plant
Abstract coming soon.
Fender Schrade
Fender Schrade approaches live sound engineering through an artistic
as well as a trans*feminist perspective. The talk will discuss the
particularities of the agency of a live sound engineer and the
interactions with space, bodies, technology and sound.
Susanne Kirchmayr
Susanne Kirchmayr will deliver insights into her praxis of sound
production and composition. Drawing on her background in linguistics,
her recent compositions have worked with human, often female voices to
deal with themes of the disintegration of spoken languages,
deconstruction, and reorganization of meanings and [grammatical]
structures. In her presentation, she will also demonstrate her research
into the musical potential of concurrent sequences with divergent
timings in order to go beyond the scope of ordinary rhythmic
synchronizations.
Marie Thompson
Marie will explore the relationship between constructions of
femininity and noise, which is understood here as an affective
transformative force, rather than simply as unwanted sound. She will
suggest that ‘feminine’ noises are often deemed negative; not because of
what they mean, but as a result of the transformations they threaten to
induce. Marie will raise questions around essentialism – does talking
of a feminine or feminized noise require us to adopt an essentialist
position, or can an alternative approach be found?
http://www.ctm-festival.de/festival2014/2014/02/01/programme/event/sound_gender_technology_where_to_with_cyberfeminism/
[Recording coming online soon]
Sound Knowledge
Rethinking Histories and Futures of Electronic Music – Keynote lecture by Tara Rodgers (via Skype)
Sat 1st Feb 14:00
Kunstraum Kreuzberg Bethanien
How do we know what we know about the
history of electronic music, and how does this knowledge frame, and
sometimes limit, approaches to the creative, technical, and social
possibilities of music-making in the present? What knowledge might sound
itself give us to live more mindfully and create more expansively?
This lecture draws upon feminist theories and archival research to
explore these questions in the context of the CTM festival's theme of
"discontinuity," which calls for challenging and presenting alternatives
to existing histories of electronic music.
http://www.ctm-festival.de/festival2014/2014/02/01/programme/event/sound_knowledge/
[No recording of this at lecturer's request]
