[URBANTH-L]ANN: Sound and the City: Interdisciplinary Perspectives

Angela Jancius jancius at ohio.edu
Tue Feb 19 10:03:00 EST 2008


From: H. Steiner <hs294 at cam.ac.uk>

...............
Sound and the City: Interdisciplinary Perspectives
CRASSH - Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities
University of Cambridge
22 February 2008

Over the past year, the Cambridge University City Seminar at CRASSH has
explored diverse and enlivening topics in the study of cities, urban space,
architecture, and visual and material culture. These topics have ranged
widely in time and space, from predictions for the age of the
supermetropolis to the use of digital technology in architectural space to
an analysis of Mussolini's use of Rome's imperial past in the construction
of its present. Out of these encounters emerged an aspiration to allow for
a more intense investigation of a particular area within this field. This
will find its preliminary culmination in a one-day conference to be hosted
by the City Seminar organisers at CRASSH in Lent term 2008. Taking as its
theme the intersection of sound and the city, this seminar seeks to present
theoretical, artistic and empirical accounts of the complex relationships
between acoustics, sensory awareness and performance in the context of
urban space, landscape and the built environment (historic and
contemporary). But the concepts of 'sound' and 'the city' are only intended
to serve as departure points for more creative reflections on, or
interventions into, this theme. A discussion of sound could well include an
account of silence, just as a description of a city or urban space might
well ask where the city ends and its other begins. Consequently, we expect
an eclectic and illuminating discussion stemming from a variety of
differing disciplines and backgrounds and forming previously unimagined
connections.

Confirmed speakers:

    * Janet Cardiff (Installation artist, Berlin & New York)
      via videoconference
      "Noise in the City"

    * Eric Clarke (Heather Professor of Music, University of Oxford)
      "Various Realities: Sound, Music, and Ecological Theory"

    * Michael Bull (Media and Film, University of Sussex)
      "Sounding Out Cosmopolitanism - Mobile Technologies and the migration
      of Difference"

    * Graham Jeffery (Institute for Performing Arts Development,
      University of East London)
      "Expanding the learning soundscape: notes from some interventions in
      urban arts education"

    * Juliana Hodkinson (Composer and arts writer, Copenhagen)
      "Instrumentality and the urban instrumentarium: representation and
      agency in urban sound art"

    * Jacob Kreutzfeldt (Arts and Cultural Studies, University of
      Copenhagen)
      "Acoustic territoriality in a Japanese shopping area"

    * Robin Rimbaud/Scanner (Sound artist and composer, www.scannerdot.com)
      "Imaginary Highways: Sound Polaroids in the City"

Organisers:

    * Uta Staiger (Department of German and Dutch)
    * Henriette Steiner (Department of Architecture)
    * Benjamin Morris (Department of Archaeology)

For registration or administrative enquiries, please contact Anna
Malinowska at apm50 at cam.ac.uk.

Please visit for more information
http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/2007-8/soundandthecity.html 




More information about the URBANTH-L mailing list