What does it mean to be urgently slow in this undeniably urgent conjuncture? Ego Ahaiwe Sowinski advocates for intentional slowness as a strategy for resolution and healing.

Voices and atmospheres recorded along the length of the Mississippi River Valley, seeking out the political and spatialized through sound, music, and field recordings.

Voices from the Mississippi Headwaters and Twin Cities share reflections on canoeing, protest and a 100-year history of the region.

What is the sound of the Lower Mississippi, a “superhighway” through which huge proportions of exported goods from the US are shipped every day?

The installation The Current presented field studies by artists, scholars, and activists who were involved in the AC project Mississippi. An Anthropocene River.

Using sensory work, artists explore how the effects of opium relate to colonialist and capitalist extraction, and convey a tale of industry and the Latvian geological landscape.

Jeremy Bolen traces the various human interventions that have shaped Cache River Valley in Southern Illinois, asking what can be learned from this landscape.

Talk with Dr. Chelsea Frazier about the importance of Black feminism’s political and artistic engagements with environmentalism. Episode 2 available now!

Abbéy Odunlami and Jared Richardson introduce their individual research projects and discuss Field Station 5’s broader themes. Episode 1 available now!

Katharine Ordway, Fall 2018 represents a stationary gesture amid the distanced movements comprising the Listening to the Mississippi project.

Through a series of conversations Temporary continent. track the different guises the Mississippi has taken, interviewing those who live and work with the river.

The Mississippi’s touristically designated “source” remains a fixture on maps of North American territory and collective cultural consciousness, as this text, video, and audio post explores.

There is no one correct way to listen to the river; there are multiple listenings, and multiple rivers.

Listening to the stories and sounds that resonate around the Mississippi can show how ecosystems exist within multiple crisscrossing interrelations.

A narrative-based podcast that discusses how geography determines many people’s relationship to resources, land, and wellbeing.

This seminar invites participants to reflect on what it means to listen to the Anthropocene by way of a situated case: the touristification of Lisbon.

Sound artist Yoneda Lemma discusses her composition Calm can only make it false (Noise Floor), and the techno-political underpinnings of her compositional practice.

Musicologist Amy Cimini discusses Maryanne Amacher’s (1938–2009) unrealized media opera Intelligent Life (1980–), which draws influence from cutting-edge scientific knowledge and popular culture in the 1970s and 1980s.

Musician C. Spencer Yeh pushes speech synthesizers trained to represent Chinese dialects to the threshold of intelligibility and recognition.

What do machines hear that humans cannot? Artist Florian Hecker explores the formal, perceptual, and aesthetic possibilities afforded by custom machine-listening software.

Composer, musicologist, and improviser George Lewis explores the issues that arise in encounters between machine listeners and their biological counterparts.

Composer, musicologist, and improviser George Lewis discusses Rainbow Family (1984), a groundbreaking work that employs proto-machine-listening software to analyze an improviser’s performance in real time, while generating both responses to the musician’s playing and independent behavior arising from the program’s processes. 

Hydrocarbons plunges into the complexities and contradictions of the oil era and thereby into the molecular basis of the technosphere. Interweaving film scenes with a variety of visual and research materials, as well as the “sounds of oil,” the session explores the speculative cultural genre termed “petro noir,” examining the geopolitical-industrial complex that drives petrochemistry and, by consequence, mobility, consumption, waste and adventure.

Julian Henriques looks at the Jamaican reggae dancehall sound system to explore how this street technology has found creolizing ways to prevail in the neocolonial power struggle between popular culture and Jamaica’s ruling elite.

While the vast macro and micro scales of the technosphere can be difficult to grapple with, so too is the complexity of its many interactions. The artists Andrew Yang and Jeremy Bolen propose a modest attunement exercise to counter this inaccessibility.

In a series of videos, texts and audio, artist Claire Tolan depicts how the ASMR subculture works to connect people in intimate auditory ways over the internet, providing therapy for the alienations and isolations the digital world created.

What techniques do we use when we navigate between the human voice, governmental law and the concept of justice in the technosphere?

One cardinal source of the trauma induced by the technosphere is sonic: the ubiquity of anthropophonic vibrations passing through our environments.

Music creation by Xu Yi, for the Cucurbital Orchestra, video and electronic device spatialized in multi-tracks.

How can we transcend the nature‒culture dichotomy? Making the case for a critical re-evaluation of romantic theory and practice.

What can we learn by re-newing historical art? A sonic work of cause-and-effect interpretation in the footsteps of cybernetic arts.

How might sound be used to translate nonhuman intelligences and systems into understandable forms? Speculative visions and imaginative states for the extension of the sonic arts into them realm of the Aerocene.