Fouad Asfour, Ricarda Denzer, Christina Goestl, Brandon LaBelle, Seth Weiner / Sadie Siegel, Karen Werner and Hui Ye.

Working as an artist with spoken language, oral history, recorded interviews and conversation fragments, I established a situated work practice which resulted in an in-depth study of the substantial qualities of sound, the political dimension of listening and, most importantly, the phenomenon of the human voice. Finding, creating, and linking forms, objects and narratives are integral parts of my work process. Yet, how do these forms, narratives and motifs emerge? Do they rather attract or distract, and how are they related to one another? These questions consequently led to my involvement with 

 aims at exploring in how far an acoustic listening approach to the world can lead to a multitude of social experiences. In practice, a distinct artistic format arises from movement or interaction, from the exchange with, the linking of, the delineation from and the permeability between various artistic disciplines. Eventually, the possibilities of said format will be investigated to allow for a critical and caring agency as well as for alternative ways of narration. With this performative approach, I intend to analyze and deepen the practice of listening through form-finding, both textually and spatially in connection with the concept of collectivity. On that account, the performative format of the ‘Audio Paper’ is central to this publication.

Following an action-oriented approach to the method of artistic research in relation to situated listening, I engage with art education as sonic act by way of experiment and design, using audio papers for a broader research framework. The material manifestation of the acoustic search movement as performative research is part of a working process which consists of several elements. One of the latter is to convey art in class through artistic means and to make it accessible for students.

To this end, four workshops are held at the Angewandte Vienna on March 12th, 2022. Additionally, on March 14th, 2022, a collaborative listening session to ‘Audio Papers’ is offered, followed by a panel discussion with contributions by Fouad Asfour, Christina Goestl, Brandon LaBelle, Karen Werner, Seth Weiner/ Sadie Siegel, Hui Ye and me. This event takes place at the Auditorium of the Angewandte Vienna and online and is open to the public.

 is a collective happening considering space as both a catalyst as well as a framework for thoughts and speculations to simultaneously express a form of situatedness inside and outside of where and how we listen, and of experiencing artistic thinking as sonic act.

I wish to thank all collaborating artists, researchers, scholars, writers, musicians and colleagues at the ZFF, APL, KKP, and the University of Applied Arts Vienna.

ABOUT SOUNDING RESEARCH

In 1955, Algerians fighting the French colonial rule transmitted their resistance efforts on the radio broadcast 

, with the French colonists regularly censoring the transmissions by jamming the radio frequency. As Franz Fanon writes in 

, Algerians, ‘glued’ to their radio sets, listened to the beginnings of the 

 broadcasts and whenever the signal was jammed, they would begin to improvise the rest of the broadcast, imagining and narrating the revolution’s broken signals into reality. This duet of signal and jammed signal was generative for the Algerian resistance, creating a gap that invited co-creation. In light of this, the colonial interference only made the resistance stronger. Fanon’s account thus is a stepping stone for the generative possibilities of a jammed signal, namely the ways interference, intended or otherwise, can inspire and expand practices of listening, transmitting, sending and receiving.

SATURDAY 12th March, 2022, 10 am-12 pm, FLUX 2

What defines a signal, and what is meant by sending and receiving a signal? What are common assumptions and metaphors used for describing what communication is? One way to approach these questions is through communication obstructions such as radio interference and signal jamming, long used as a political form of radio censorship. Interference and jamming are typically seen as a problems to overcome but I believe are rich points of entry for understanding communication and for honing and deepening our transceiving skills. Working with radios, transmitters, walkie talkies, antennas and our attuned bodies, this workshop will create a laboratory of signal transception. Embracing interference and minding the gaps, we will query and queer communication. Our task will be to play, imagine, design and enact forms of sending and receiving beyond our current conceptions.

 is radio artist and sociologist creating radio plays, songs and live performances for broadcast and narrowcast. She also creates radio stations of various scales and forms including the community FM radio station 

 (radiomulte.live) in Bergen, NO. Karen’s radio pieces have been broadcast on national and community stations, and she has produced several sound installations in Vienna with 

. Karen teaches and writes about radio and communication and is a Ph.D. artistic research fellow at the Bergen Art Academy.

KAREN WERNER Audio Paper & Workshop 

The only space I can think of as free is sound. We haven’t figured out a way to occupy it. You can’t really catch it or hold onto it. Grab a voice or song, it's tangible but can't really be touched. It can be bought and sold as a promise but needs an intervention in order to be heard. Scores, records, videos, files, footsteps. The sounds they make occupy us. We carry them around in our bodies, trying to pass them along through generations.

https://sethweiner.org/audio/menthol-sculpture.mp3

I'm interested in the ways art can still be free, how we come to agree upon behavior, how we occupy space and join clubs. Recently, I’ve been listening to how sound detachesfrom our bodies. How it travels and edits space. When someone yells at another person, the voice becomes a weapon. When someone whispers, they soothe. Sound is an extension of touch that can project beyond the body’s skin, travel through walls, around doors, and fill up whatever container it’s given.

If you counted all the people on the street right now with their ears plugged, you'd run out of fingers.Earbuds are a new type of domesticity. Their music, a form of sonic enclosure. A personalized architecture that follows you around like a bubble, expresses a feeling, catalogs and changes the mood of your surroundings.

are interior spaces without permanent sites. Sonic images of basements. Voices stolen from domestic life and woven into melodies. Scores that try to touch their visual surroundings while remaining unseen.

SATURDAY 12th March, 2022, 10 am-12 pm, SE 21

As I write this I’m an hour out of Vienna in Semmering, experimenting with an Austrian holiday. I’m looking out of the window at a ski slope that’s been carved into the side of a mountain and covered in machine made snow. The apartment we rented is on top of a cabin style restaurant at the edge of a parking lot. Its walls are thin enough to hear people eat and the vibrations from every door that's shut in the hallway. A PA system is thumping with a steady four to the floor. Some dudes are yelling in German into any leftover frequencies about skiing, the joy of tasting food, and travel. The songs mostly mirror them along with some sex-positive anthems. It’s been a while since I’ve listened to optimistic music for an extended duration. From where I’m sitting in this room, all of the sound’s high end has been cut off. All chest register, no head.

The t-bar that drags skiers up the hill is on a loop that fits with the circular shape of the drum patterns and chants. It looks like its speed is synced to the BPM of the song to create a holistic experience. At some point the t-bar stops but the music continues to cover the landscape. I go outside on the balcony to inspect and watch my partner and son argue with their hands about technique. The sun finally comes out, and the scene starts to glue together…

 workshop, we’ll treat sound as an architectural act, focusing on the sonic images we can create from our immediate surroundings. No priorknowledge is necessary to participate, but please bring a phone and a pair ofearbuds if possible.


Often containing performance and proposal simultaneously, Weiner’s work employs a wide range of media in which he explores the gaps between architectural fiction and social convention to create both actual and imagined spatial environments. In 2008, Weiner began the music project of Sadie Siegel, using his great-grandmother’s name to collaborate with himself and explore sound as an architectural act. The two of them currently live and work together in a basement in the 2nd district of Vienna.

SETH WEINER  Audio Paper & Workshop

this sound is … an invisible matter …

this sound … already mine and yours … and more …

this sound … never … one or the other … but both … this sound is … precisely … a space between …

from me … to you to this … and to what is behind and farther …

it is already shared … dispersed … invasive … or … and withdrawn … this sound that is more than human … that … alienates germinates interrupts …

heals … this sound … like all sounds … an assemblage …

with what is close … and the different …

with the difference … I am … always already … and which makes … it possible to say … I am here … by way of you … by way … of this other one … that shifts the silence … that … pulls the threads … that leans into … and away … figuring … the figuring of … speech and action … thinking and doing … across the dirty sidewalks and quiet moments, stories told and stories let go … a circulation … a … happening that steps out of itself … … the outdoors … the outdoors … a being-in-the-open … and … falling … … is … mattering (suggesting a disposition, an ambience, a tonality of dispossession, letting be, this being prepared to be unprepared)

How might we consider the relation between listening and love? If love drives us beyond ourselves, opening paths for working passionately, caring for others, undertaking inspired and generous acts, in what sense does listening contribute to loving power? Is love a potential framework for challenging capitalistic ideologies, to reorient understandings of value from that of exchange to the relational? If in moving our labors in the direction of love, do understandings of labor change– does labor shift towards an idea of craft or art, if we consider a broader understanding of an ‘art of living’ in which work, care, relationships, and practices of sustainability are brought together? In pursuing the relation between listening and love, we will reflect upon love beyond romantic relations, considering love instead following what Richard Gilman-Opalsky terms ‘communist affection’, where love is figured as a public power. As Gilman-Opalsky highlights, love is grounded in a sensual schema, expressed through forms of care, responsibility, andattention. In light of such perspectives, we’ll consider listening as an art or ethical practice that wields attention as a means for nurturing and sustaining life as an expression of becoming-with. Through collective discussion and exchange, the workshop aims atcreating an attentional space where we might begin to enact listening as what may move us toward a framework of loving power.

 is an artist, writer and theorist. His work focuses on questions of agency, community, pirate culture and poetics, which results in a range of collaborative and para-institutional initiatives, such as: 

, a publishing house based in Berlin. His publications include: 

BRANDON LABELLE Audio Paper.& Workshop 

“…It was as if the physical world were really tissue-paper-thin [...] and I was flung through the tissue paper with a huge ripping sound”, Jane Roberts reflects on her prime perception of the spirit medium Seth, having expressed itself through her voice.Roberts delivered numerous speeches and spiritual teachings as Seth “in a deep, masculine-like voice”. Transcripts and recordings of these ‘sessions’ were published, being regarded as a cornerstone of New Age philosophy.

Proceeding from the ‘Seth phenomena’characterized by the conveyance of multiple identities’ voice characteristics through a single person, the entanglement of voice and identity inlight of artificial intelligence is questioned. Using voice cloning programs and digital documentary material, the voices of Seth and Roberts will be ‘studied’ and eventually resynthesized.

The title of this paper originates from an excerpt of a Seth session on identities in a

great spiritual and biological nature”. To this end, the spiritual medium will be ‘reincarnated’ and the myth of immortal spiritual leadership investigated in relation toa time in which replication of vocal identity becomes a mass product.

 “New Age Sage: Remembering Saratoga Psychic Jane Roberts”

https://saratogaliving.com/remembering-the-famous-psychic-of-saratoga-and-seth-the-spiritual-guide-who-spoke-through-her/

–  Jane Roberts, “The Coming of Seth” (1966)

– Excerpt from Seth Class Session, May 15th, 1973, 

https://sethcenter.com/collections/individual-seth-audio-digital-downloads

As one of the most ancient sonic instruments of human beings, the voice is both prime tool of communication and audible display of our physical being. Apart from the linguistic content, the socio-cultural context of one’s speech greatly influencesthe listener’s perception.

Take the example of Foreign Accent Syndrome (FAS), a rare form of speech disorder caused by brain damage of the respective brain areas for controlling vocal anatomy.Affected persons often experience sudden changes in their speech such as faltering, awkward intonation or odd pronunciation. Thus, listeners often draw on stereotypes to ascribe a particular foreign accent, although there is no ethnic or cultural relation between the speaker and the region to which their‘accent’ supposedly refers.

Drawing from the phenomenon of preconception and misinterpretation of speech sounds, the workshop investigates the correlation between vocal identity and the inherent subjectivity of auditory perception. Through a collective listening session, participants are invited to explore the perception and modification of identitiesin regards to both the act of vocalization and the often unconscious classifying reception process. As we subsequently analyse various vocal personalities from the perspective of the listener as well as the speaker, participants are encouraged to join the open discussion on the complexity of subjective cognition linked with the voice.

(born inGuangzhou, CN) is a Vienna-based artist and composer. She works with different media (e.g. experimental documentary, video and audio installations), addressing questions of individual social identity and its entanglements with cultural and political contexts. In recent projects, shefocuses on exploring the correlations between sonic culture and contemporary societies.Ye is laureate of the Kunsthalle Wien Prize 2018. Her works have been presented at venues such as Kunsthalle Wien (AT), Museo Palacio Dionisi (ARG), WRO Media Art Biennial (PL) and Times Museum (CN).

HUI YE Audio Paper.& Workshop 

Such hybrid concerns cannot be addressed through binary thinking. They require a change in our approach towards materiality, away from an understanding of material as exclusively physical and tangible, including both the physical and the non-physical; climate, sound or economics as well as wood, steel or glass. […] Novel combinatory forms have entered every aspect of our lives to such an extent that traditional oppositions –between people and things (objects and subjects), between technology and sensation, between production and perception– are no longer valid. *)

Deleuze’s interpretation (based on Spinoza’s 

) as distinct from affections (Spinoza’s 

) yields a precise definition and helps us understand how forms can perform as a multiplicity. On one hand, according to Deleuze, an affection –such as a perception–, relates to the state of a body resulting from the action of another body or form. Since this affection has to be enveloped by the human body, it is subject to personal, biographical or social mediation. Affect, on the other hand, is described as an “intensity“ transmitted directly by an individual or another form. Affections are the effect of a form on individuals [...] wheras affects are pre-person and unmediated and can generate affections in different persons. *)

(Actar and Harvard University, 2009) Deleuze and Guattari, 

works in the fields of audiovisual live performance anddigital video, utilising series, sequences, modulations and loops, superpositions, cut-upsand electronic impulses. Central aspects of her artistic work are rhythm, dynamics,movement and temporality, communicative interfaces and semiotic systems. Goestl hasrealized numerous projects at the intersections of arts, technology and science, manyof them reflecting sexualities and gender. She is agenderfuck, living in the EU, and holding a master of art degree. Pronouns:as you wish.www.cccggg.net

CHRISTINA GOESTL Audio Paper

In this audio paper, I will re-enact conversations and collaborations with Ricarda Denzer over the past fifteen years, grappling with what is beyond our comprehension. What started in an exchange on Edouard Glissant’s chapter ‘For Opacity’ unfolded in further discourse. While we engage in transmodal forms of exchange –including workshops, performances, lectures and the sharing of sound pieces–, the main aim is to explore how to document collaborative processes when reflecting on indexicality and opacity. It will digress into an obsessive interrogation of speaking and writing, between loss and random restarting of conversations. Based on fragments, collages and montages, it applies the concept of ‘bricolage’ as proposed by Ricarda in the research unit. Refusing to try to find a well-formed solution or outcome, the project rather aims to make visible a thread of lively conversations. Most importantly, these are inspired by a mutual interest not only in the relation of sound, language and writing but in enjoying diverging, contradicting and multivocal unfolding threads of conversations that are held together by a joint interest in transformative, liberatory dimensions of research and learning. I believe that this experimental reflection could become a valuable contribution to artistic research practices studies. Thus, the audio paper is seen as botha movement back to moments of exchange as well as forward towards imagining (im)possible futures of speaking and writing.

 is writer and researcher working in collaborative frameworks of publications, exhibitions, performance and research projects. He has contributed to numerous contemporary art and research projects and has published widely, holds an MA in Linguistics from Vienna University (AT), and an MA in Creative Writing from Rhodes University, South Africa. He founded the publishing project

 in 2011, and is part of the art research projects 

FOUAD ASFOUR

, I seek for an artistic research method which renders tangible the aural qualities of one’s inner voice. To this end, relevant questions on auditive perception and reception will be raised. This eventually yields a listening approach to the crucial issues of our times through ‘sounding’ the act of thinking while taking notes which is a central element of my artistic practice.

My thinkinghas a voice, and this voice has a body. Consequently, my thinking has a body which holds a sensually embodied experience in any particular situation; hence, it is movement within space.With this performative approach, I intend to analyze and deepen the practice of listening through form-finding, both textually and spatially in connection with the concept of collectivity.Naturally, a listening-sounding approach does not take place in isolation but in correlation with other senses or media. It involves interaction, circulation, shifts and fractures or re-configurations.

Thus, I address the sensuality of social interaction not only in relation to my thinking but also as the form of my thinking itself, thereby asking questions which can possibly only be answered in an artistic way.In doing so, I apply my interest to a spatial, non-linear, multi-perspective narrative form as part of my research. Subsequently,the focus is on understanding both learning and mediation as not only a sonic act but also as the correlation of different sensual experiences andtherefore as multi-modal.

’s transmedial works explore audiovisual spaces by interweaving video, writing, photography, audio plays, drawings, and installations with editorial and curatorial work. Her interests include bricolage and composition as visual and acoustic performative act, especially in relation to the human voice. Denzer has taught at the University of Applied Arts Vienna since 2013 and recently exhibited at venues such as Kunstraum Lakeside, Klagenfurt (2019) and Neue Galerie Innsbruck (2018). She curated the art project 

RICARDA DENZER

Ricarda Denzer in conversation with Fouad Asfour and Tracy September on the occasion of their live happening I PASSENGER at the APL on Friday 29th of October, 2021.

This Happening is an experimental walk through spaces set up in the manuscript “I Passenger” in conversation with a sound performance.

Sound artist tracy september and writer Fouad Asfour will explore how spaces appear, intersect and expand in a multi-vocal textual/sonic/spatial installation.

“We are going to have to control your tongue” … “I’ve never seen anything as strong or as stubborn, he says … “how do you tame a wild tongue, train it to be quiet? How do you bridle and saddle it? How do you make it lie down?” (Anzaldua 1987:53). Told in non-linear fragments, this anti-Bildungsroman is inspired by Gloria Anzaldúa’s book “Borderlands”. Working as a check-in agent at Frankfurt airport, the narrator moves back in time, trapped in memories. He falls in love with a character from Albert Camus’ novel “The Stranger”. "

Seeking revenge, he ends up at the shore of Algiers. The bio-mythography is told in inner monologues of a stranger growing up in Europe, moving through fragments of an impossible memory work, bewildered by facts and everyday observations. In a process of unravelling, he finds himself torn between his desire to pass as person who has established an identity, while struggling with his proficiency to transgress physical and psychological borders. Seemingly randomly assembled fragments are brought together in a collage that comes alive through the paranoid and speculative engagement with reality. The happening will open a conversation between text and sound in the search of replacing identities through bio-mythographical narratives.

(The project was funded by a grant from the Baden-Württemberg Ministry of Science, Research and the Arts.)

is a writer and researcher working in collaborative frameworks on publications, exhibitions, performance and art exchange projects. Practicing border writing as a means of dislocating identities, they recently accomplished to get lost in displaced notes and fragments.

Musician, researcher, DJ and performing artist

 sonically experiments and explores characters, characteristics and histories. Working around themes of spirit, memory and protest, she has a particular passion for improvisation, collaboration and connection.

Project in the framework of INTRA, University of Applied Arts realized with the kind support of ZentrumFokusForschung, thanks to APL.

I PASSENGER

My audio piece for the Telepathic Ensemble is a recording of a ritual (inspired by Jerry Hunt). In an unexpected insight, I go to my studio terrace in Vienna at 6 pm on the 21st of May 2021. With a view to the Vienna Woods, I begin a ritual through which I establish a connection to possible sounds elsewhere. Between broadcastingand receiving, an air piece for the power of imagination emerges –  a mental-radio-piece. 

The ritual: Graaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhh– SOUND 1: thinking of a friend / SOUND 2: the hidden message / SOUND 3: synth mystery / SOUND 4: a car / SOUND 5: a passant / SOUND 6: playing classical music at the country club / SOUND 7: command yourself to relax / SOUND 8: thinking of nothing/ SOUND 9: to converse with angles / SOUND 10: fiddling with wires / SOUND 11: abstract und complex / SOUND 12: gesture groups / SOUND 13: grinding away / SOUND 14: connecting correspondences / SOUND 15: layers, strings, masques / SOUND 16: stage delusion/ SOUND 17: signing/ SOUND 18: punctuation of thoughts SOUND 19: a thirty thousand Euro grant / SOUND 20: domestic realism / SOUND 22: talismans / SOUND 23: a state of permanent transformation/ SOUND 24: grounding/ SOUND 25: comedy/ SOUND 26: radical skepticism / SOUND 27: the totem lost in the woods.

Mental Radio

In April 2021, Karen Werner invited Ricarda Denzer to a one-hour live broadcast on her community radio station SkottegatenFM. The 5 weekly conversations are oriented towards the form of "free association" around the theme of 

. The radio talks can be listened to in original length here. 

I Heard my Mind Today At Noon

FIRST THINGS FIRST

shared sky

Panel in the context of the 8th Annual Conference of the Austrian Society for Gender Studies: "Ambivalent un_visibilities" in September 22nd, 2021.

How Recent Sound Interventions Address Representation

The question who can make themselves heard, and who needs to listen to whom, why, under what conditions, has long loomed large in feminist theories of representation, especially for authors who consider intersectional points of audition (cf. Carby 1982, Spivak 1988, Alcoff 1991). Feminist interventions have addressed listening as a question of “voice and vote” for minoritized subjects (cf. Butler & Spivak 2011), as a political strategy of finding contact points between differently situated feminist subjects (cf. Thürmer-Rohr 1994), and as an aesthetic dimension that can be played with to unsettle stereotypical expectations of ‘the Other’ (Min-ha 1982, 1989, Chen 1992). In recent years, sound art and sound art studies have located a similar political potential in sound, however not always in dialogue with intersectional feminist knowledges of listening. They often suggest sound and vision as ‘fundamentally’ different sensorial fields that afford different forms of experience, and thus political agency. Here, ‘invisibility’ (our spelling w/out ‘_’ is deliberate) seems to promise an escape from dominant regimes of Visuality.

Our panel engages with recent sound interventions that speculate about how to disturb scopic regimes, while at the same time keeping within earshot the complex relations between in_visibilities, voice/sound, and representation that are so prominent in earlier feminist accounts on listening. We will take our cue from artworks and initiatives that pose questions of storytelling, bearing witness, producing a record, and the fleetingness and in-accessibility of voice in space, most prominently, from Huda Takriti’s of cities and private living rooms (2020) and the audio platform aka - angewandte kunst audio, Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s After SFX (2016), Ricarda Denzer’s audio paper Sounding Research (2021), Julia Tieke’s Achtung, Aufnahme! (2016). Asking how these works employ sonic means to address in_visibilities as decidedly audiovisual agential fields and bodies of knowledge, we will discuss how their strategies amplify, resonate with, or create dissonance to feminist theorizations of representation via sight and sound, via ‘voice’ and ‘vote.’

Ricarda Denzer is an artist and Senior Lecturer at the University of Applied Arts Vienna (Department of Art and Communication Practice (KKP) University of Applied Arts Vienna)

Kristina Pia Hofer (Department of Media Theory,University of Applied Arts Vienna) is a media theorist, musician, and performer based in Vienna.

Huda Takriti is a trans-disciplinary artist. She received her Master degree from the TransArts department at the University of Applied Arts Vienna.