While we may have always been talking, practices of listening are undergoing a transformation. For this first issue of, Soapbox, a graduate journal for cultural analysis, we invited students and young researchers – alongside more established scholars – to offer their perspectives on practices, conditions and policies of listening. The resultant articles cover topics from political protest to video art, speech to text software, and audiovisual ‘time crystals’.
Please note that print copies of Off the Grid are sold out until further notice.
Read the entire issue below, or scroll down to read and download individual articles.
We are also publishing articles written around the theme ‘Practices of Listening’, exclusively on the Soapbox website. Read more here.
Soapbox 1.1 Practices-of-Listening
Foreword
Laura Pannekoek and Zoë Dankert, editors-in-chief
To the Boundary of the Known World: Acousmatic Listening and Imagination in Derek Jarman’s Blue
Andrea Avidad
Andrea Avidad teaches Film Studies and Communication Studies at The Bronx Community College of The City University of New York.
Dragon NaturallySpeaking: Being Listened to and the Subservience of Speech
Eeke van der Wal
an active determinant in the relation between listener and speaker, instead of a conception that merely infers the act of receiving and obeying. I observe that although the software is marketed as a technology that would obey by listening to the user’s commands, my experience with the software points to another direction.
As a computer operating subject, I am dependent on Dragon’s recognition of speech. Drawing on Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, this paper argues that Dragon is an active participant in the relation between user and technology, rather than a mere tool. Following Karen Barad, I highlight the material-discursiveness of speech. Rather than focusing on meanings, Dragon attunes to—or listens for—the materiality of speech through its recognition of phonetic speech structures. As such, the article moves away from an anthropocentric understanding of listening.
Eeke van der Wal holds a master’s degree in Organisation, Change and Management (UU). Currently, she is completing a research masters Cultural Analysis (UvA). Fascinated by the (e)mergence of material-discursive practices, her recent research revolves primarily around material encounters and the way in which they (re)configure, organise and resist (cultural and individual) understandings of self and other.
Radiant Language and Entangled Listening in Svetlana Alexievich’s Chernobyl Prayer
Niall Martin
Niall Martin is an Assistant Professor in the department of Literary and Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam. His research engages with the different ways in which concepts of noise interact with and produce our ideas of globalisation. Recently, Niall has been working with the concept of il/literacies, exploring how the il/literate extends questions of decolonisation into discussions of semiosis and new materialism.
Immersed in Multiplicity: Subjective Time in a Time Crystal
Emilio Aguilar
Emilio Aguilar is a singer specialized in the performance of music from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century. He currently combines his professional work with an interdisciplinary project between the University of Amsterdam (Cultural Analysis) and the Conservatory of Amsterdam (Early Music Singing) in which he researches material-discursive practices to bridge the gap between the speaking-thinking and singing-performing body.
On How to Pry Beyond the Image Frame with CC (Closed Captions)
Stepan Lipatov and Sissel Møller
Sissel Vejby Møller (1994) and Stepan Lipatov (1989) are both graduating students at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam. As graphic designers they experiment with the language between text and image.
One Megaphone and Two Thousand Bottles: Listening to Frames of a Mistransmitted Protest
Erica Moukarzel
Erica Moukarzel (1993) is a Lebanese writer and researcher based in Amsterdam. Her work centers on the intersection of cultural memory and urban space, aiming to weave gaps left by past spatial divisions using long forgotten memories and stories. She recently obtained a Research Master’s in Cultural Analysis from the University of Amsterdam and currently works as Curatorial Assistant at the Oude Kerk.
Decolonial Listening – An Interview with Rolando Vázquez
Read moreRolando Vázquez is associate professor of Sociology at University College Roosevelt and Utrecht University. Together with Walter Mignolo, he has coordinated the Decolonial Summer School at UCR since 2010. Vázquez belongs to the movement of Decolonial Thought and Aesthesis and, in 2016, wrote with Gloria Wekker et. al. the report of the Diversity Commission of the University of Amsterdam.
Earwitnessing the Assembly: Listening to the Voice of the People in the Gezi Park Protests
Duygu Erbil
Duygu Erbil is completing her RMA in Comparative Literary Studies at Utrecht University. Her research interests primarily focus on critical posthumanisms and new materialism. She is currently working on an analysis of autobiography in the context of prison activism and experience in the United States.
Learning Listening
Mieke Bal
Reflecting back on the articulation of the methodological framework for the practice of cultural analysis and the founding of ASCA over twenty years ago, Mieke Bal explores a practice of listening through her own installation Nothing is Missing. The videos presented in the installation featured mothers of migrants being interviewed by a person close to them. This resulted in confronting dialogues that have the potential to offer the attentive viewer — and listener — new perspectives on familial relationships, migration and interculturalism. Ultimately, through her analysis, Bal demonstrates the enduring pertinence of the notion that ‘the object speaks back’.
Read the extended version, exclusive to Soapbox online.
Mieke Bal is a cultural theorist, critic, video artist and occasional curator. She works in cultural analysis, focusing on gender, migratory culture, psychoanalysis and the critique of capitalism. Her books include a trilogy on political art. Her video Madame B, with Michelle Williams Gamaker, is widely exhibited. Her most recent film is Reasonable Doubt, on René Descartes and Queen Kristina (2016).
Editorial Board
Laura van den Bergh
Noura Borggreven
Zoë Dankert
Calvin Duggan
Callum McLean
Isobel Miller
Laura Pannekoek
Mick Vierbergen
With thanks to
David Bennewith
Aster Hoving
Céline Hürzeler
Erica Moukarzel
Graphic design
Stepan Lipatov
Sissel Vejby Møller
Logo
Zep de Bruyn