Social Acoustics focuses on developing research and material projects that advance questions of embodiment through positioning the listening body as the subject, object and method of inquiry. The project aims to develop work on and through embodied listening to bring artistic practices into dialogue with various fields of research including enactivist neuroscience, arts therapies, psychology, philosophy, feminism and queer phenomenology.
Moving away from traditional reductionist accounts of the body as a biological object detached from the mind, the self and the social, the project instead seeks to account for bodies through their porosity and relationality (Blackman). From this perspective the body is no longer an object bounded by the skin, but is rather a process (Gendlin) or a network (Latour). Such bodies are not self-evident but performative (Butler), enacted through webs of power relations; bodies which are done, redone or undone through everyday practices and rituals (West and Zimmerman). Such bodies are always moving and affecting (Sheets-Johnstone), always becoming (Deleuze and Guattari) and have more in common with hurricanes than statues (Di Paolo et al.)
In collaboration with project partners three interconnected threads of inquiry are planned to develop performative work, materials and publications.
Embodying Sound: The project develops the possibilities of what and how listening may embody when considered as multi-sensory and dynamically co-constituted, rather than only auditory and receptive. As such the research engages with a range of questions simultaneously focused on the nature of sound and listening through what Michel Serres calls mingled bodies which are knotted with each other and the world.
Bodies in Motion: Sounds, like bodies, are always in motion. The project seeks to trace the consubstantiality of sound and movement by paying special attention to the relationship between sound, movement and affect. Research will draw out the ways in which embodying sound may compel us to move, be moved and move with others, and how embodied audition may initiate, restore or rupture relational intimacies.
Between Bodies: Bodies, like sound, defy separateness. Bodies are constantly extending, affecting and connecting to other bodies and their environments. Through consideration of the resonant and contagious qualities of social interactions questions of listening will be used to explore the “inter” of our inter-actions, inter-subjectivities and inter-affectivities to better understand the entangled relationality of lived experience.
Di Paolo, E. A., Cuffari, E. C., & De Jaegher, H. (2018). Linguistic bodies: The continuity between life and language. MIT Press.
Blackman, L. (2008). The body: The key concepts. Berg.
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1988). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. Bloomsbury Publishing.
Gendlin, E. T. (2018). A process model. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the social: an introduction to actor-network-theory. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.
Serres, M. (2008). The five senses: a philosophy of mingled bodies. London: Continuum.
Sheets-Johnstone, M. (2009). The Corporeal Turn. Andrews UK.