In a world dominated by the visual, could contemporary resistances be auditory? How does the materiality of sound affect listening and its capacities? What types of collaboration may be configured from working with biomaterials and sound? Do these bio_sonic_agencies open up other possible spaces outside a visual or logocentric regime? The radio work Bio_Sonic_Agencies follows such questioning through a focus on matters of air. Air is highlighted as an elemental force that moves across human and more-than-human bodies, and that enfolds in its rather invisible and light presence a range of material expressions and dynamics. From the microscopic to the macroscopic, air is radically invasive, affirming, influential; it is profoundly internal, filling the lungs with its molecular support while passing across the planet in atmospheres and weather streams. It transitions through states of materialization and imaginaries, from gaseous ethers and contagions to radiophonic signaling and aerial topographies – air is a deep and dangerous carrier. Bio_Sonic_Agencies is the result of a collaboration between a group of artists and philosophers who work with biomaterials, ontological entanglements, sound and speculative listening. Through a process of shared discussion and sonic experimentation, the collective work captures a series of encounters with matters of air.

Bio_Sonic_Agencies is the first in a series of four broadcasts developed as part of Social Music II, a project curated by Brandon LaBelle for Kunstradio. Social Music is concerned with sound as a social material and the ways in which listening enables dynamic forms of relationality. From voice and speech to the consonant and dissonant flows that punctuate being-together, the series explores how sound contributes to the shaping of collectivity and community in diverse ways. In particular, participating artists and theorists focus on elaborating sociality beyond the human world, to develop approaches to the more-than-human, ecologies of matter, and symbiotic assemblages and entanglements across bodies and things. By way of a range of methods, from biohacking and experimental choreographies to sonic fictioning and acoustic fieldwork, understandings of relationality are extended and problematized, allowing for other conceptualizations of action and agency. What we understand as relationality gravitates less toward recognition and the pronouncement of identity; rather, forms of active and speculative listening support being-alongside, allowing for the sonic figuring of alter-ontologies and more-than-acoustic ecologies.

Spoken Statement by Brandon LaBelle:

PLAY

PROGRAM
CALENDAR