Course syllabus
At this page, the course coordinator posts information that you may need to know before the course starts.
Individual Project Work 1— Listen to your Confusion (VSIND1)
During the summer of 2024 we will explore socially engaged arts practice by listening to our confusion and understanding its relationship to contemporary society. In the course Individual Project Work 1— Listen to your confusion, we will investigate the personal and the collective by addressing how our mental states of noise and confusion correlate to a structural noise arising from a disintegrating society.
This course will focus on practices and theories of sound, listening, noise, voice and critical theory. It is open to students with a broad range of artistic expression who are interested in exploring their practice in relation to different forms of “registering” and listening. No previous experience with sound-production is necessary.
The course will support students in developing their individual projects, while it will encourage collaboration as a form of listening.
The course is based on online presentations, seminars, and supervision in combination with on-site/hybrid intensive workshops. This year the teaching team comprises of Mattin, Ewa Einhorn, Ray Brassier and Jessika Khazrik.
The course is free to EU nationals, delivered in English, and bearing 15 ECTS. The course is rooted in live research currently underway in our academy and within our wider networks of affiliation.
Online and IRL
The course has "meet up" IRL aspects in: (i) Berlin, Germany (June 5-12)
More about the course content:
Have you ever been confused? If you have, welcome to the world.
Through listening exercises and reflecting on current theories of noise, the course will explore the prevailing confusion that emerges from an increasingly complex and contingent reality.
If Pauline Oliveros' deep listening explores the difference between the involuntary nature of hearing and the conscious nature of listening while cultivating a greater awareness of the sound environment, both external and internal, by listening to our confusion, we will explore the social noise that exists between an increasingly competitive and individualistic reality and our inability to adjust to a disintegrating model.
Climate change, wars, AI, precarisation, mental health and neurodivergence are some of the dilemmas we cannot deal with from our current understanding of the subject. How can we confront this subjective homelessness? By looking at different modes of listening to our confusion, the course aims to at address and register internal and external noise that bother, disturb, exhaust or omit us.
The 2024 course is delivered with a particular focus on the following:
(i) Listening: we will do different listening exercises throughout the course, that explore the relationship between the individual and the collective.The exercises will help us register how our personal confusion corresponds to the uncertainty arising from an increasingly uncertain world.
(ii) noise: we will look at the concept of noise to better understand the contingency of our times and the distortion and its limits of our cognition. There is an increasing interest in the question of noise from a broad range of academic fields such as economic theory (in regards to intricate financial instruments and high-frequency trading), biology (in regards to complex entropic processes), media studies (studying phenomena like viral fake news) as well as psychology and psychiatry (researching cognitive dissonance and the mental state of noise).
(iii) capitalist form-determination, we will explore how capitalist relations shape contemporary reality and our capacity for thinking through ideology.
How is it that when we have the most knowledge available in the history of humankind, which could help us have the most advanced models and understandings of the world, and instead we have such a myopic and catastrophic conception of reality? In this course we will attempt to answer this question by actively engaging and sharing our own perplexity and investigating how it relates to broader structural questions.
The course is structured in three phases; introduction to the course themes in early June in a gathering in Berlin (with a hybrid online possibility) and online preparation through tutorials and seminars for indiviual projects projects during June and July. In August the students’ projects are presented and assessed.
Early in the course there is a basic consideration of the different ways in which the domain of the enquiry is constructed that will be unpacked through practice-based, material engagement in combination with listening exercises, readings and conversations.
Acknowledging the complex field of theoretical, critical and activist positions that operate in the interaction/conjunction of practices of listening, noise, politics, philosophy, and art, the course takes a partial survey approach. It does not claim to be comprehensive but does seek to achieve breadth. The course examines the different claims for art’s political agency and saliency.
Cognitive Mapping
Through this course are using the web app Miro to share our thoughts and notes and to make collective diagrams. Here is the link.
Course team bios:
Mattin
Mattin is an artist, musician and theorist working conceptually with noise and improvisation. Through his practice, writing and pedagogy, he explores performative forms of estrangement as a way to deal with structural alienation. Mattin has exhibited and toured worldwide. He has performed in festivals such as Performa (NYC), Shanghai Biennial, No Fun (NYC), Club Transmediale (Berlin), Arika (Glasgow), Sonic Protest (Paris) and lectured and taught in institutions such as Dutch Art Institute, Cal Arts, Bard College, Paris VIII, Princeton University and Goldsmiths College. In 2017, he completed a Ph.D. at the University of the Basque Country under the supervision of the philosopher Ray Brassier. Along with Anthony Iles he edited the book Noise & Capitalism (Kritika/Arteleku 2009). In 2012, CAC Brétigny and Tuamaturgia published Unconsitituted Praxis, a book collecting his writing, interviews, and performance reviews. Anthony Iles and Mattin are currently in the final stages of editing the volume Abolishing Capitalist Totality: What is To Be Done Under Real Subsumption? (Archive Books). Urbanomic published his book Social Dissonance in 2022. Mattin is part of the bands Billy Bao, Regler and Al Karpenter and has over 100 releases in different labels worldwide. Since 2020, he co-hosts the podcast Social Discipline with Miguel Prado. Prado and Mattin are also part of Noise Research Union (NRU) with Cécile Malaspine, Sonia de Jager, Martina Raponi and Inigo Wilkins. In 2017, Mattin took part in documenta14 (Athens and Kassel). Mattin is currently teaching at the MFA Fine Arts program, HDK-Valand (Gothenburg). www.mattin.org
Ewa Einhorn
Ewa Einhorn is a visual artist and filmmaker working with animation, satirical drawing and documentary formats. She currently teaches at HDK-Valand, Gothenburg University (SE). Influenced by popular culture, her work seeks to unhinge everyday assumptions by misusing language and images. Together with Jeuno JE Kim she has developed the transmedia project „Krabstadt“, which uses comedy and research to dissect the relations between political rhetoric and nations as brands in the Nordic context.
Jessika Khazrik
Jessika Khazrik (b. 1991, Beirut, based Berlin) is an artist, composer, technologist, writer, and DJ whose indisciplinary practice ranges from steganography to performance, machine learning, ecotoxicology, visual art, philosophy of intelligence and history of science and music. Khazrik works with a trans-millennial production of knowledge based on an environmental understanding of the techno-politics of voice, media, and code. While tracing the history, political economy, and myths of discipline, her indisciplinary practice revolves around the collective search and need for polymathic resonance in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and long-term future. Khazrik holds BAs in Linguistics and in Theatre from the Lebanese University (LB) and a MS in Art, Culture and Technology from MIT (US) where she was awarded the Ada Lovelace prize. Her indisciplinary research-based work has been presented at the Stanford Research Institute (US), the Arab Image Foundation (LB), Birbeck’s School of Law at UCL (UK), Center for Documentary Arts and Research at UCSC (US), and Amnesty International (UK & DE), among others. Khazrik has been a fellow at Home Workspace Programme (2012–13), Digital Earth (2018–19), HfK Bremen (2020), and SHAPE Platform (2021–22), and is at present a principal investigator at Research on the Arts Programme by ACSS and AFAC (2021–22), a fellow at If I Can’t Dance (2022–23), and Helmholtz Center (2022–23), and visiting faculty at the Critical Media Lab in UoB (CH), and the Live Art Forms programme at the Academy of Fine Arts, Nuremberg (DE).
Ray Brassier
Raymond Brassier (born 1965) is a British philosopher. He is a member of the philosophy faculty at the American University of Beirut, Lebanon, known for his work in philosophical realism. He was formerly Research Fellow at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy at Middlesex University, London, England. Brassier is the author of Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction and the translator of Alain Badiou's Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism and Theoretical Writings and Quentin Meillassoux's After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency. He is currently working on his second book, tentatively titled Fatelessness, which is about Marx, freedom, and fate.
Course Schedule VSIND1 2024 (preliminary)
05-June Intro to course Mattin hybrid Berlin 10.00 - 16.00 Location: Lindenstrasse 91, 10969
07-June Workshop Ray Brassier hybrid Berlin 10.00 – 12-00 13.00 – 16.00 Location: Lindenstrasse 91, 10969
10-June Workshop Ewa Einhorn hybrid Berlin 13.00 - 16.00 Location:Lindenstrasse 91, 10969
12-Jun Workshop Jessika Khazrik hybrid Berlin 10.00 – 12-00 13.00 – 16.00 Location: Lindenstrasse 91, 10969
17-Jun Workshop on-line all students Mattin 10.00-12-00, 13.00-15.00
18-Jun Group work on-line all students 10.00 – 12-00 14:00
24-Jun Workshop on-line Mattin 10.00-12-00, 13.00-15.00
25-Jun Workshop on-line Mattin 10.00-12-00, 13.00-15.00
01-July Group tutorials on-line Mattin 10.00-12-00, 13.00-16.00
02-July Group tutorials on-line Mattin 10.00-12-00, 13.00-16.00
7-Aug Submission of ‘Listen to your Confussion Recording deadline 5pm
14-Aug Assessment on-line Ewa Einhorn, Mattin 10.00-12-00, 13.00-16.00 Location: online
15-Aug Assessment on-line Ewa Einhorn, Mattin 10.00-12-00, 13.00-16.00 Location: online
16-Aug Feedback on-line Mattin 10.00-12-00
Ewa Einchorn's Listening Exercise
Exercise
Listening to the (Swedish) national day 6th June / or any other day
PREPARATION:
1.Take a moment to reflect on what kind of sounds you expect to hear on the day of the exercise. These can be both external as well as internal sounds / noise.
2. Decide on 3-5 times of the day for a 1-2min noise sample.
3. Set your phone alarm on those times.
You can go through the whole day as for example
A: 8.00, 12.00, 15.00, 19.00, 23.00
or test another interval as for example
B: 4.30am, 5 am, 6.15am, 8am.
Select a time that fits your schedule and that you are curious about.
EXERCISE**
1. Listen: On your selected time: What different sounds and noises do you hear? What sonic information are you receiving? What are you hearing, and what are you not hearing?
2. “Record”: Write down 5-10 layers of sonic information. Including at least one noise you hear / or not hear in your head each time. It is up to you how you interpret information and sonic
3. Make a short note of what kind of space you are in.
4. At the end of the day, look through your sample: which 3 “recordings” best correspond to your idea of confusion.
5. Bring your notes to class.
** In all exercises we do, you are never obliged to share more then you feel comfortable with, you are not required to share the noise in your head but you are most welcome to as well as your experiences of the spaces you traversed.
Student Portal
In the Student Portal, you will find information that is useful for you as a new student.
Register for your courses
To confirm your place on the course, you must register. It is only when you are registered that you are considered a student on the course and have access to all course materials in Canvas.
You register for the course in Ladok. The registration is open from May 27th-30th May, 2024. If you do not register on time, you will lose your place on the course.
Contact
If you have questions about your registration before the course starts, please contact Student Affairs: admission@hdk-valand.gu.se.
For questions about the content and structure of the course, please contact the course coordinator.
Schedule
Find your course schedule by searching on the course name or course code in TimeEdit.
Note that the course schedule is preliminary up to two weeks before the course starts.
Course Syllabus and Reading List
Find the course syllabus and reading list in the course catalogue, use the course code to search for the course at the University of Gothenburg website.
Study Counselling
If you need help with planning your studies or need study support during your studies, you are welcome to contact the Study Counsellors at HDK-Valand, studievagledning@hdk-valand.gu.se.