Utopias of Sound

May 29 to 31, 2008
 
Symposium and Film Screenings

 
In the last two decades there has been a significant boom in the cultural sensibility towards sounds and noise. Questions surrounding issues of spatiality in the Fine Arts that gained in importance with the surge of intermedia installations were increasingly posed on the basis of experimental sound. Pop music has recognised its specific relation to the materiality of sound as its primary source and positioned it at the core of self-reflective projects. Through the ubiquity of individual and ever-present sonic markers such as mobile phone jingles, corporate sound design and sound installations in public space, everyday life has become the scene of a continuous sonic semiosis.
 
In film, the independent role of the soundtrack has also been brought out ever more clearly, as evidenced by sound concepts which run counter to the direction and tempo of on-screen action or visual montage, or by an orientation towards pre-existing music and towards cultural resonances beyond their inherence in film. The aim of this symposium is to provide a platform for critique and analyses of this "sonic boom". The aesthetical-political references and utopian contingencies of two central qualities of sound will be at the heart of the debate: non-simultaneity and immediacy.

The symposium is being organized by the Academy of Fine Arts in cooperation with the Austrian Film Museum. It will include lectures, films and performances by Nora Alter, Michel Chion, Christoph Cox, Diedrich Diederichsen, Caryl Flinn, Barbara Flückinger, Florian Hecker, Tom Holert, Brandon LaBelle, Mathias Poledna, Alan Rudolph, Constanze Ruh, Christian Scheib, Terre Thaemlitz, Gus Van Sant and Hildegard Westerkamp.