Digital Archives, Audiovisual Media and Cultural Memory - Conference

Call for papers: Digital Archives, Audiovisual Media and Cultural Memory - Conference, The University of Copenhagen, November 14-15, 2013

Keynote speakers:

David Hendy, University of Sussex

Karin Bijsterveld, Maastricht University

Lev Manovich, City University of New York

Michele Hilmes, University of Wisconsin-Madison

We welcome abstracts for our open paper sessions and for panels taking place at the conference. Sub-calls for the panels can be found by following the links bellow.

Digitization enables us to meet cultural heritage artifacts and narratives in heretofore unimagined media and platforms. Accessibility to written, visual, auditory and audiovisual sources increase dramatically. But how do we wish to access and interact with cultural heritage sources in the 21st Century? This conference focuses on practices of cultural memory in the multiform meetings between users and cultural heritage. What interfaces are established between users, be they researchers or ‘ordinary’ citizens, and the archives of cultural heritage? What possibilities are opened for interaction with cultural heritage artifacts? And what methods and scientific paradigms are relevant to order and describe such immense archives.

One aspect, which seems still to have received too little treatment is the question of the auditory and audiovisually based cultural heritage’s role in the construction of historical narratives. Music, film, radio, and television have become ingrained in a nation’s cultural memory, and in many, not least, European countries, state-governed national broadcasting corporations have played and do still play a vital role in narrating and interpreting the past, not least by establishing institutional production archives which give producers access to historical material otherwise inaccessible. Such reuses of historical materials afford renegotiations of the historical past(s) by valuating the new historical materials as significant historical sources. Digitization means that such historical materials, be they broadcast or other cultural heritage artifacts, are to an increasing degree accessible outside the production environment, e.g. for research. One recurring problem is that the materials are still under the editorial control of the parent institution and accessible only for some uses to some users. This motivates a new look at the question of who has the right to circulate archived material in what forms, and thus who is allowed to narrate the past. The question is relevant at all levels, from the level of national cultural politics all the way down to the concrete definition of rights for individual users in the archive or on broadcaster’s websites.

The conference wishes to contribute new perspectives on the first by focusing on (access to) digital media archives, a phenomenon that has only really come into existence within the last decades; Secondly, by focusing on auditory and audiovisual source material, i.e. data sources with an extension in time, as oppose to texts and pictures. Again, digital archives of auditory and audiovisual material are rather young compared to archives of (scanned) texts and pictures. Finally, the conference’s focus is on the digital archives’ role in the construction of a cultural history as well as studies in cultural history and cultural memory. Traditionally, digital humanities have tended to focus on the internal structure of artifacts, e.g. using digital texts to investigate language systems, translations, stylistics etc.

The conference welcomes contributions from a broad range of researchers, designers and developers who work with digital archives of auditory and audiovisual media in the investigation or production of cultural history phenomena. All of these definitions shall be taken in their widest sense. A digital archive can range from enormous national archives to the archives collected by individual researchers and research groups. Similarly, the conference wishes to invited both concrete experience with collecting and using a digital archives as well as theoretical reflections on the nature of the digital archive. Likewise, the concepts of cultural history and cultural memory shall be taken in their broadest sense and can include both historical investigations and research within the broader humanities with either an historical or an aesthetic scope.

Papers

We welcome papers relating to the general outline of the above call. The conference will embrace three sub themes:  Interface (i.e. the construction, design and interface of the archive), Immensity (dealing with the vast amounts of data which all of a sudden are available to research that has heretofore tended to work qualitatively with rather small samples), Memory (choosing from the archives, sampling and building a coherent interpretation). Please indicate if your paper addresses one or two of the themes in particular.

Panels

Along with open and themed paper sessions, we have accepted a number of themed panels to take place at the conference.  A themed panel will consist of a minimum of 3 papers with a common research question. If you whish your paper to be taken under consideration for a particular panel, please select the panel as “category” in the Easy Chair submission form. Submissions not accepted for panels will be taken into consideration for the open paper sessions.

Submissions

Deadline for paper abstracts (max 200 words) 1 June 2013 Notification on acceptance will be given by the beginning of July 2013

Please send submissions via EasyChair: https://www.easychair.org/account/signin.cgi?conf=larm2013. Please forward the automatically generated submission confirmation to: conference@larm-archive.org.

We strongly encourage presentations of practice based and artistic projects.

Conference fee: 60 € (reduced price for students)

Organisation

Organizers: Jacob Thøgersen, Jacob Kreutzfeldt, Morten Michelsen, Per Jauert, Frederik Tygstrup & Bente Larsen

Scientific committee: Morten Søndergaard, Erik Granly, Ditte Laursen, Marianne Lykke, Birger Larsen, Erik Svendsen

Contact: for questions and enquiries please contact Jacob Kreutzfeldt (jacobk@hum.ku.dk) or Jacob Thøgersen (jthoegersen@hum.ku.dk)

Music | Digitisation | Mediation: Towards Interdisciplinary Music Studies - Conference

Music is being fundamentally transformed by digitisation and digital media. With the growth of internet access across the developing and the developed world, and the accelerating appearance of mobile and new media platforms in which music plays a critical affective role in attaching users, digitisation is fostering a range of escalating changes that radically alter the environment for the creation, circulation and consumption of music. Not only creative and distributive practices, but the nature of music as a cultural object are evolving in far-reaching ways. Institutional and industrial reconfigurations are paralleled by the renegotiation of intellectual and cultural property regimes, by new musical literacies, and by the emergence of novel sonic materialities, new aesthetics and genres. Digitisation inflects longstanding musical subjectivities and gender dynamics; it demands new thinking about the periodisations and temporal assumptions that govern the historiography of late-20th- and 21st-century music. But these changes also have wider repercussions, since music is often held to be in the vanguard of the changes to contemporary cultures and cultural economies afforded by digitisation. The fate of digitised music is thus taken to portend what is to come for audio-visual media as, increasingly, they circulate through the internet and via sites such as YouTube.

This international and interdisciplinary conference addresses such changes. It features an array of leading and younger scholars from music, anthropology, sociology, ethnomusicology, sound studies and new/media studies. The aim is to forge a new interdisciplinary field of digital music studies, while feeding the benefits gained from the analysis of music today back into anthropological, media and social theory.

An additional goal of the conference is to present and discuss, with colleagues engaged in related work and those from relevant disciplines, the research findings of Music, Digitisation, Mediation: Towards Interdisciplinary Music Studies (MusDig), a 5-year research programme based in the Faculty of Music at Oxford.

Sessions: Music, Mediation, Actor-Network-Theory; Industry and Platforms; Gender; Materiality and Creative Practices; Digital Aesthetics/Fusion; Consumption; Circulation; Digital/Anthropology

Keynote speakers:  Prof. Anahid Kassabian (University of Liverpool), Dr. Jason Stanyek (University of Oxford), and Dr. Heather Horst (Digital Ethnography Research Centre, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology)

Other speakers: Victoria Armstrong (St Mary’s), Geoff Baker (RHUL and Oxford), Andrew Barry (Oxford), Eliot Bates (Birmingham), Nancy Baym (Microsoft Research), Frauke Behrendt (Brighton), Georgina Born (Oxford), Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier (Victoria), Michael Bull (Sussex), Mark Butler (Northwestern), Nicholas Cook (Cambridge), Aditi Deo (Oxford), Blake Durham (Oxford), Andrew Eisenberg (Oxford), Adrian Freed (UC Berkeley), Haidy Geismar (UCL), Andrew Goffey (Nottingham), Sumanth Gopinath (Minnesota), Christopher Haworth (ICASP), Steve Jones (Illinois at Chicago), Mark Katz (North Carolina), Cathy Lane (LCC), Eric Lewis (McGill), George Lewis (Columbia), Noel Lobley (Pitt Rivers), Sonia Livingstone (LSE), George Marcus (UC Irvine), Lee Marshall (Bristol), Frederick Moehn (KCL), Keith Negus (Goldsmiths), David Novak (UC Santa Barbara), Gascia Ouzounian (QUB), Alex Perullo (Bryant), Benjamin Piekut (Cornell), Trevor Pinch (Cornell), Marilou Polymeropoulou (Oxford), Nick Prior (Edinburgh), Katherine Schofield (KCL), Nick Seaver (UC Irvine), Joe Snape (Oxford), Jonathan Sterne (McGill), Martin Stokes (KCL), Will Straw (McGill), Paul Théberge (Carleton), Patrick Valiquet (Oxford)

Dates: 11-13 July 2013

Venue: St Anne’s College, University of Oxford
Registration: http://www.music.ox.ac.uk/research/musdig.html

We welcome proposals for poster presentations to be displayed at the conference. Please submit an abstract (ca. 200 words), linking your poster presentations to one of the conference session themes listed above, and a bio (ca. 100 words): musdig@music.ox.ac.uk

Please direct any questions to Emily Payne: musdig@music.ox.ac.uk

* Please note: it is advisable to book early, as spaces are limited.

Resonant Bodies: Landscapes of Acoustic Tension - Conference

When a solid body meets its natural resonant frequency, it violently vibrates and breaks into pieces. What happens when the human body meets its resonant frequencies? Mostly a combination of soft tissue and water, the human body is not one solid object. It includes a variety of molecules each of which has a different resonant frequency. Yet the soft tissue and water do not allow these molecules to be completely destroyed. Instead, the human body’s liquidity and elasticity perpetuate the fundamental principle of acoustic resonance: holding a multitude of similar frequencies neither as precisely same nor as perfectly different. For the very same reason perhaps, the human body is involved in a constant reciprocity with its sonic environment. Knowingly or unknowingly, it vibrates with multiple other bodies. Without any necessary physical contact, it matches its resonant frequencies from a distance. Acoustic resonance draws a particular proximity between one’s physical location and his/her phenomenal extension to another.

Consider this proximity acoustic tension, a case of mental distance despite the physical closeness, and equally, a case of mental closeness despite the physical distance. Then picture acoustic resonance as a landscape of acoustic tension, a horizontal spectrum of multiple modalities of sounds, which do coincide with one another but which do not necessarily become one. The very act of hearing holds the acoustic tension. When we hear a sound, we are simultaneously moved to and positioned in a place. What happens if acoustic tension is heightened, if we pay close attention to the intensity and volume of sound? What would be the material effects of such sonic embodiment in everyday life? What kind of subjectivity does it enact? What kind of an epistemology does acoustic tension evoke, mirror and transform? And how do our resonant bodies function in understanding the self’s relation to its external world? The symposium will explore these questions by marking three landscapes of acoustic tension: sensory ecologies of hearing, materiality of voice, language and speech, and affective states of sound. 

#020TODAY DAMGELUIDEN Het geluid van Amsterdam: soundscape en website

#020TODAY Dam Sounds: The sounds of Amsterdam: soundscape and website

Article by Annemarie de Wildt (accessed 24 March 2013)

As of the 27th of March, 2013, Breitner’s painting of the Dam, which was hanging for several months in the Stedelijk Museum, is back in the Amsterdam Museum. And now with sound! Accompanying this painting from around 1898 is an installation by means of which visitors can listen to the sounds which most likely filled the Dam at the end of the 19th century, or in the 1930’s. Specifically, 1895, 1935 and 2012 were the years used as reference points.

The Dam as a site of memory

Dual Origin of the Epithelium of the Mammalian Middle Ear

Hannah Thompson, Abigail S. Tucker
Science 22 March 2013:
Vol. 339 no. 6126 pp. 1453-1456 
DOI: 10.1126/science.1232862

ABSTRACT

The air-filled cavity and ossicles of the mammalian middle ear conduct sound to the cochlea. Using transgenic mice, we show that the mammalian middle ear develops through cavitation of a neural crest mass. These cells, which previously underwent an epithelial-to-mesenchymal transformation upon leaving the neural tube, undergo a mesenchymal-to-epithelial transformation to form a lining continuous with the endodermally derived auditory tube. The epithelium derived from endodermal cells, which surrounds the auditory tube and eardrum, develops cilia, whereas the neural crest–derived epithelium does not. Thus, the cilia critical to clearing pathogenic infections from the middle ear are distributed according to developmental derivations. A different process of cavitation appears evident in birds and reptiles, indicating that this dual epithelium may be unique to mammals.

Read also in ScienceNews 
By Susan Milius
Web edition: March 22, 2013
How mammals grow ears: With a flaw
Newly discovered rupture-and-repair process could explain a lot about infections and hearing defects

Sounds of Europe

The blog of the website will travel to a different European country every month where a local organisation or artist will be responsible for maintaining it. Each country´s particular context and practices with regards to field recording will be explored and presented in a personal way.

Platform for Field Recording

The Noises of Art: Audiovisual Practice in History, Theory and Culture (4-6 September 2013)

A conference convened by the School of Art, Aberystwyth University in collaboration with The Courtauld Institute of Art, London, and Aberystwyth Arts Centre.

The Noises of Art addresses what is arguably the most prolific, varied, and groundbreaking period in the coming together, exchange, and mutual influence of visual art and sound-based practices (such as music and the spoken word). It aims to explore (principally) the visual artist’s engagement with sound, noise, music, and text while at the same time recognizing that there is a traffic of musicians, sound artists, and text artists moving in the opposite direction, who aspire to cultivate visual analogues for their work. Thus, the conference is situated at the intersection of several movements that are converging upon a point of visual-audio synthesis and exchange.

Sounding Out! pushing sound studies into the red since 2009

Welcome to the final week of our February Forum on “Sonic Borders,”  a collaboration with the IASPM-US blog in connection with this year’s IASPM-US conference on Liminality and Borderlands, held in Austin, Texas from February 28 to March 3, 2013.  The “Sonic Borders” forum is a Virtual Roundtable cross-blog entity that will feature six Sounding Out! writers posting on Mondays through February 25, and four writers from IASPM-US, posting on Wednesdays starting February 6th and ending February 27th.