Sonic Presence, Sonic Animacy
Sonic Presence, Sonic Animacy
Saturday, November 21 / 14:00 - 17:00
Cosmopoetic Studio / The Listening Biennial
Lettestrasse 7 - 3rd floor, 10437 Berlin
Please join us for an afternoon of presentation, discussion and listening with Constanza Bizraelli, exploring the concepts of relativistic sonic presence and sonic animacy. As part of The Listening Biennial's current focus on Cosmopoetics, we’ll delve into sound as a force of animation, drawing upon a range of cultural references and practices. Is not sound often punctuating presence with its material movements and energetic vitality, bringing things to life with its stirrings? Sound is movement, and it puts things into motion. As many wisdom traditions emphasize, sound is a sacred force that explicitly connects us to the divine dimensions. These are philosophies and cultures that follow sound as a life-force, as a breath of the heavenly, a spirit whose vibrational currents pass across bodies and things, drawing connections across material and immaterial, human and nonhuman worlds.
Central to our gathering, Constanza Bizraelli will introduce the philosophical and sonic foundations behind her 2021 research project and sound installation Auralisms: The Relativity of Acoustic Presence, premiered at the Spatial Sound Institute, utilizing 4DSOUND technology. Auralisms is a transdisciplinary work that expands the reach of contemporary theoretical speculation, incorporating spatial sound as a field for the conceptualization of presence, consciousness and spacetime through the development of speculative spacetime-to-sound transduction models and sonic cosmological schemes that establish a dialogue with multiple spatiotemporal regimes.
The conceptual axis of the project incorporates elements from the theory of General Relativity alongside Eastern philosophical ideas regarding presence, embodiment and spirituality. Departing from the notion that celestial bodies bend spacetime, introducing a plasticity compatible with other wave-like phenomena and oscillating fields, Auralisms proposes a thought experiment: is it possible to access an intuition of spacetime through the act of listening?
The project also introduces the notion of “multiple-bodied” presence: the possibility that presence may operate across different experiential, spatial and temporal registers rather than being reducible to a single physical body or location. Utilizing General Relativity as a referential scheme, the installation involved a custom algorithm through which users could alter the sound space with their presence and listen to these transformations, resulting in topological aural concavities along the field. Auralisms proposes ways to intuit and cognize presence through a purely aural experience, envisioning the plasticity of time and space in their inexorable connection with presence. As such, these reflections might shed light on new ways of understanding living forces through the oscillatory realms, unveiling sound in its vital and animated dimension.
Constanza Bizraelli is a Peruvian composer, producer, sound artist, and philosopher. She has released music on labels such as Opal Tapes (UK) and Club Chai (US). Her sound art projects include The Burial Theme: Trans-Matter Port & Objects (2018) and Auralisms: The Relativity of Acoustic Presence (2021), exploring spatial sound, presence, cosmology, and philosophy. She is also the founder of Cyclops Journal, a publication devoted to contemporary and experimental theory, where she has published her own theoretical work. Her work has been presented at Tate Modern, MASS MoCA, Berghain Säule, Rewire Festival, Sónar Reykjavík, Dekmantel Festival, and MUTEK Montréal, among others.