Auditory Presence and Technological Mediation of (Sonic) Reality

14 March – Seminar

Budhaditya Chattopadhyay is a contemporary artist, researcher, and writer. Chattopadhyay produces works for large-scale installations and live performance addressing issues of environment and ecology, migration, race, and decoloniality. His works have been widely exhibited, performed, or presented across the globe. Chattopadhyay has an expansive body of scholarly publications in artistic research, media theory and aesthetics in leading peer-reviewed journals. He is the author of four books including The Nomadic Listener (2020), The Auditory Setting (2021), Between the Headphones (2021), and Sound Practices in the Global South (2022). Chattopadhyay holds a PhD in Artistic Research and Sound Studies from the Academy of Creative and Performing Arts, Leiden University, and is currently a Visiting Professor at the Critical Media Lab, Basel, Switzerland. More information here.

In this seminar, Chattopadhyay will engage with the idea of auditory presence and will discuss several films and audio-visual artworks to shed light on the technological mediation of lived sonic realities to remake a sense of auditory presence in artificial and virtual environments, such as cinema and sounding artworks. Especially drawing from their monograph titled The Auditory Setting (2021/2023) and several recent projects, the seminar will investigate how in industrially made commercial films, a manufactured presence is produced, while in artistically oriented works that are environmentally aware, making of a poetic presence is embraced.

15 March – Performance and Art Talk

Chattopadhyay will perform from his sound works Exile and other Syndromes (2022), The Nomadic Listener (2020) and Landing: Rituals for Situated Sonic Reverence (2023), with discussion afterwards.

This seminar is the first in the Artificial Atmospheres project from the working group in Art and Technology, CineLab – IFILNOVA. Artificial Atmospheres researches the relationships between artistic practices, primarily time-based media such as moving image and sound, with a special focus on media archives, and the development of new technologies, especially in machine learning, with the main purpose of analyzing, evaluating and critically discussing the way in which the alliance between art and technology poses new challenges and offers new ways of responding to contemporary issues related to social, political and economic paradigms. This project explores streams of work, research, and thought through the lens of various artists and artistic practices, as well as practice-based research into and through creative fields.

This seminar is open to the public.

For further information or questions, please contact Maile Colbert at mailecolbert@fcsh.unl.pt.

Event supported by the Foundation for Science and Technology (Fundação para a Ciência e para a Tecnologia) of the Portuguese Ministry of Education and Science under the project UIDB/00183/2020.