Workshops

Workshop Dates

30 June, 2022	Kampnagel, Hamburg
16-20 July, 2018	CLASTIC – European Performing Arts Residency, Valchiusella, Italy
13-15 October, 2017	betOnest, Stolpe, Germany
1-7 July 2017	Armenia
19-21 July, 2015	Kyiv, Ukraine

“Techniques for Auditory Resistance” is a workshop and installation in sound design and field recording, facilitated by the renowned sound artists HYENAZ. The workshop invites participants to create their own sound artworks that interact with natural and or urban spaces.

Our methodology draws upon what is at hand: our bodies, our stories, the materials we find around. With the accessibility of sound recording devices, particularly smartphones, anyone who records a story in a plaza, a song on a river bank, the sound of a frog or discarded trash blowing in the wind is already a sound artist.

The question that motivates the workshop is: What forms of community do we create when we listen together, and after listening, collaborate on artworks that respond to public space? We perceive sound as we perceive our bodies: not as isolated territories separated by a physical divide between “mine” and “yours,” but as interconnected, multiple, perhaps exchangeable entities. We believe that these interconnections can be actualized through the application of technology to the sonic gifts of the living world and its architecture.

“Techniques for Auditory Resistance” aims to empower individuals who wish to explore sound as a tool for empowerment and solidarity, distributing lived experience through auditory means. As such, the workshop explores how the spoken word and the lived environment provide a renewable resource for sound artists driven by the urgency of life in the 21st century.

Sound, in a sense, is animate: it takes a life of its own. It is also produced by entities (such as wind, flowers, metal, bees, humans) that occupy different places on the vast spectrum of “liveliness”. We are interested in the inclusion of these non-human entities in this sonic encounter, and we seek to actively problematise this encounter. A key question we pose when we “take sound” is: How do those human and non-human entities signal that they consent to be part of the artwork?

While there is no definitive answer, such questions offer immense creative potential for thinking through issues of consent and extraction.

Curriculum

“Techniques for Auditory Resistance” comprises the following elements:

1. Continuous critical-theoretical discussions on the concept of sound and its potential to support forms of human agency and intersectional political movements.
2. Writing exercises to develop texts that can be integrated into sound artworks and/or compositions.
3. Education in the theory and practice of field recording using what is present in the environment, such as the body, everyday objects, and improvised instruments.
4. Sound excursions that utilize the affordances of public spaces to capture the sonic gifts of the living world and its architecture.
5. Workflow and sound archive management.
6. Software tools that allow for the manipulation of sounds received from the field into forms of abstract instrumentation and altered soundscapes.
7. The development of compositions for presentation as interactive “audio walks” created using the “Sonic Maps” system. Sonic Maps and similar free apps utilize geolocation technology to create audio tours in public spaces. In the audio walk we create together, participants will be able to move through public spaces and hear sonic artworks in specific locations using their own smartphones.