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Guelph Talk by David Cecchetto

Please join us for another installment of SOFAM's Sound and Vision Lecture Series. We are delighted to welcome David Cecchetto (York University) who will present "Infrequent Listening: Algorithms, Attunement and Aesthetic Listening". This lecture is co-sponsored with the International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation (IICSI).

When: January 29th, 5:30pm
Where: Mackinnon Hall 107

All are welcome!

David Cecchetto: "Infrequent Listening: Algorithms, Attunement and Aesthetic Listening"

Contemporary technoculture, with its characteristic coupling of human activity with unthinkable machinic speeds and scales, intensifies the basic but essential problem of how to act responsibly when one's actions are implicated in nonlinear networks that exceed the purview of consciousness. In this talk, I'll try to listen alongside the ways that sounding art has—and might continue to—address this bind. Specifically, I'll argue that aurality-informed approaches to digital technologies, and to algorithms in particular, can reveal certain perceptual biases that underwrite these technologies, opening the ground for meaningful intervention in their use, design, and dissemination.

Listening itself, an improvisative act engaged in by everyone, announces a practice of active engagement with the world, where we sift, interpret, store and forget, in parallel with action and fundamentally articulated with it ("Mobilitas Animi" 113).

– George E. Lewis