By necessity, we tune in to some signals, and filter others out. In determining what is signal and what is noise, listening is political – all listening, all the time. As is looking: when we focus, we sharpen the subject, and exclude the rest. Consigned to the back, signals nonetheless continue to vibrate, permeating through the social and the architectural, into the atmospheric.

We want to stage a conversation about sound, art and public space. What if our own practices echo those of the larger forces that filter, groom and autotune political and aesthetic consensus? What do we hear when our listening is less selective? What processes transmit, in the background, and what alternative tuning would receive them? How might we amplify our own complicity in the correction of rogue expressions? Who is most guilty of saying nothing?

This experimental symposium brings together thinkers and performers across sound and art to consider:

Disharmony between percept and concept

Zero-sum games: art v state; non-state art; art’s non-state(s)

Industrial culture in the culture industries

(Music in) the spaces of art – on galleriability and ambient spectacularity

Hatred of music; or the more unmusical the better

Sensoria of the body politic

Print material designed by U-P