Anita Castelino is a queer sound artist and PhD candidate in Environmental Studies at York University. Her research explores the changing social, spatial, and ecological relations of digital technology infrastructure. Anita incorporates sound into her political commitments and her previous sound works have been exhibited at New Adventures in Sound Art (NAISA) and across Europe and the UK.

Sherry Ostapovitch is a sound artist and educator based in Toronto whose work incorporates field recordings and multi-channel sound installations. Previous work includes the ambisonic 360-degree sound installation, In a Queer Time and Space, which assembles memories, places, and acoustic abstractions while grappling with the impermanence and fluidity of queer geographies. Sherry is currently undertaking a PhD in Social Justice Education at the University of Toronto. Research commitments include: listening, sonic pedagogy, sonic geographies, popular education, and practices of decolonization.

On 5 October 2019 WalkingLab and the ReImagining Value Action Lab (RiVAL) assembled a temporary community of activists, artists, scholars and other peripatetic counter-speculators in Toronto’s financial district to share knowledge, ideas and forms of resistance through a series of presentations at various locations. A Walk-in-Progress is a sonic response to this walking event. This creative composition is composed of recordings of the speakers, interventions, and sounds of Toronto’s financial district made during the walk. Modular synthesis threads together the recordings, documenting resistance to Canada’s role in global extractive industries and consequences of finance capitalism.

Biography

Anita Castelino is a queer sound artist and PhD candidate in Environmental Studies at York University. Her research explores the changing social, spatial, and ecological relations of digital technology infrastructure. Anita incorporates sound into her political commitments and her previous sound works have been exhibited at New Adventures in Sound Art (NAISA) and across Europe and the UK.

Sherry Ostapovitch is a sound artist and educator based in Toronto whose work incorporates field recordings and multi-channel sound installations. Previous work includes the ambisonic 360-degree sound installation, In a Queer Time and Space, which assembles memories, places, and acoustic abstractions while grappling with the impermanence and fluidity of queer geographies. Sherry is currently undertaking a PhD in Social Justice Education at the University of Toronto. Research commitments include: listening, sonic pedagogy, sonic geographies, popular education, and practices of decolonization.

Artist Statement

On 5 October 2019 WalkingLab and the ReImagining Value Action Lab (RiVAL) assembled a temporary community of activists, artists, scholars and other peripatetic counter-speculators in Toronto’s financial district to share knowledge, ideas and forms of resistance through a series of presentations at various locations. A Walk-in-Progress is a sonic response to this walking event. This creative composition is composed of recordings of the speakers, interventions, and sounds of Toronto’s financial district made during the walk. Modular synthesis threads together the recordings, documenting resistance to Canada’s role in global extractive industries and consequences of finance capitalism.

Myrtle Henry Sodhi is a graduate student at York University.  Her research focus relates to well-being, African epistemologies, and education. Outside of academia she offers integrative art, movement, and ancestral embodiment experiences for women, with an emphasis on the Black community, focusing on liberation through an Afro-Caribbean wellness lens. She is currently working on a Canada Council of the Arts funded project, The Body Speaks, which is an integrative storytelling event that revives Afro-Caribbean storytelling through visual arts and performances.  She founded The Beyond Strong Community which offers integrative art experiences for Black women by Black artists. She is a visual artist, writer, and educator who believes in the importance of joy and ease in cultivating a socially just world.

My presentation will explore the connection between voice, embodiment, and belonging. This will be explored through an integrative storytelling format that will include audio, digital, and visual arts components. The short film presentation (10 -15minutes) will investigate the immigrant experience from a child’s point of view through poetry, animation, music, and nature sounds. The Child Who Could Not Say Her Name is a story that exposes the role voice plays in the immigrant child experience. The child in the story struggles with making sense of her new world and encounters a struggle with sound and language. She must find her way to the reclamation of her voice, language, and belonging through the practice of ancestral embodiment and developing connections to the natural world.

Biography

Myrtle Henry Sodhi is a graduate student at York University.  Her research focus relates to well-being, African epistemologies, and education. Outside of academia she offers integrative art, movement, and ancestral embodiment experiences for women, with an emphasis on the Black community, focusing on liberation through an Afro-Caribbean wellness lens. She is currently working on a Canada Council of the Arts funded project, The Body Speaks, which is an integrative storytelling event that revives Afro-Caribbean storytelling through visual arts and performances.  She founded The Beyond Strong Community which offers integrative art experiences for Black women by Black artists. She is a visual artist, writer, and educator who believes in the importance of joy and ease in cultivating a socially just world.

Artist Statement

My presentation will explore the connection between voice, embodiment, and belonging. This will be explored through an integrative storytelling format that will include audio, digital, and visual arts components. The short film presentation (10 -15minutes) will investigate the immigrant experience from a child’s point of view through poetry, animation, music, and nature sounds. The Child Who Could Not Say Her Name is a story that exposes the role voice plays in the immigrant child experience. The child in the story struggles with making sense of her new world and encounters a struggle with sound and language. She must find her way to the reclamation of her voice, language, and belonging through the practice of ancestral embodiment and developing connections to the natural world.

Jana Vigor holds an MA from the joint Communication and Culture program between X University and York University. Her creative practice is grounded in methods of listening and attention to sonics and embodied relationship with sound, others, and environments. Her scholarly interests engage and build on her foundational artistic practices with sound and voice and professional knowledges from working in anti-violence, mental health, and gender-justice. 

Since its emergence, the #metoo movement has elicited countless narratives. People with experiences of gender-based violence are encouraged to perform their stories for the public or realms of networked publics or counterpublics. The research-creation project ‘the instruction is to tell someone’ is a collaborative investigation into the process of disclosure and how telling a story of violence varies across time and setting, impacting the formation of subjectivity and cultural positions of victim or survivor. The project is a silent moving-image of the spectrographic data of two voices in dialogue. The artwork displays only visual sonic information like rhythm, timbre, pitch, and harmonics, as well as the space of silence and listening while the narrative content is muted. The piece’s silence enacts a melancholic resistance to the prevalence of survivor narratives that uphold neoliberal ideals of personal expression and effort as avenues for healing and wholeness. It also attends to the importance of dynamic dialogue and to the necessity of an engaged listening partner to a person’s telling. The installation runs for the entire 2 hours and 7 minutes of the recorded dialogue.

Biography

Jana Vigor holds an MA from the joint Communication and Culture program between X University and York University. Her creative practice is grounded in methods of listening and attention to sonics and embodied relationship with sound, others, and environments. Her scholarly interests engage and build on her foundational artistic practices with sound and voice and professional knowledges from working in anti-violence, mental health, and gender-justice. 

Artist Statement

Since its emergence, the #metoo movement has elicited countless narratives. People with experiences of gender-based violence are encouraged to perform their stories for the public or realms of networked publics or counterpublics. The research-creation project ‘the instruction is to tell someone’ is a collaborative investigation into the process of disclosure and how telling a story of violence varies across time and setting, impacting the formation of subjectivity and cultural positions of victim or survivor. The project is a silent moving-image of the spectrographic data of two voices in dialogue. The artwork displays only visual sonic information like rhythm, timbre, pitch, and harmonics, as well as the space of silence and listening while the narrative content is muted. The piece’s silence enacts a melancholic resistance to the prevalence of survivor narratives that uphold neoliberal ideals of personal expression and effort as avenues for healing and wholeness. It also attends to the importance of dynamic dialogue and to the necessity of an engaged listening partner to a person’s telling. The installation runs for the entire 2 hours and 7 minutes of the recorded dialogue.

Mona Hedayati is an Iranian-Canadian joint PhD candidate in the research-creation stream of Interdisciplinary Humanities at Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society & Culture, Concordia University, Canada and the digital arts doctorate program at Antwerp Research Institute for the Arts, University of Antwerp, Belgium. Her interdisciplinary research draws on memory studies, sensory ethnography and computation arts. She has a BA in translation studies, an MFA in digital media and an MRes in social-political art and design. Her recent research-creation work has been focused on issues around destruction of material culture due to war and conflict as well as looting, plundering and theft of cultural heritage in parallel with forced migration where she responds through engaging with reparative modes of inquiry by reconstructing poetic spaces of memory and architecture using simulation technologies. Hedayati has exhibited and presented on her work internationally and across Canada at institutions such as Slade School of Fine Arts, University of Manchester’s Whitworth Gallery and University of St Andrews in the UK as well as UBC and Agnes Etherington Art Center at Queen’s University in Canada.

“Self-Service” is an autoethnographic video that builds on a prototype I made for my research-creation PhD project that involves recording my personal narrative of forced migration and translating the verbal account into 2 non-verbal outputs: a sound installation that retains the vocal gestures; and a sound visualization that graphs the amplitude of voice to convey the effect within the verbal narrative. The sound piece incorporates the vocal metrics (e.g., prosody, pause, changes of emotional tenor in pitch and volume) while redacting the language and obscuring the voice as the intense dynamism of the graph offers a discomforting visual signifier as an anchor. The aim behind portraying this process of translation from a voice to a noise is to outline the agencies between the human and the machine that interact, get entangled, leak and move to displace the meaning from a verbal narrative to computer-generated signals which taps into an affective attunement with trauma to highlight the shifting grounds from linguistic communication to bodily and affective competences as autonomous and self-regulating functions that sit outside the hegemony of language. My work addresses the key question of this year’s conference: how might sound intervene to disrupt the status quo, the way that things work in the everyday? as it endeavours to hinder firsthand politics of identification (of the forced migrant) as the gendered and racialized figure of ‘the stranger’ that makes up for the consumption of difference as a commodity by blocking the process of linguistic signification.

Biography

Mona Hedayati is an Iranian-Canadian joint PhD candidate in the research-creation stream of Interdisciplinary Humanities at Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society & Culture, Concordia University, Canada and the digital arts doctorate program at Antwerp Research Institute for the Arts, University of Antwerp, Belgium. Her interdisciplinary research draws on memory studies, sensory ethnography and computation arts. She has a BA in translation studies, an MFA in digital media and an MRes in social-political art and design. Her recent research-creation work has been focused on issues around destruction of material culture due to war and conflict as well as looting, plundering and theft of cultural heritage in parallel with forced migration where she responds through engaging with reparative modes of inquiry by reconstructing poetic spaces of memory and architecture using simulation technologies. Hedayati has exhibited and presented on her work internationally and across Canada at institutions such as Slade School of Fine Arts, University of Manchester’s Whitworth Gallery and University of St Andrews in the UK as well as UBC and Agnes Etherington Art Center at Queen’s University in Canada.

Artist Statement

“Self-Service” is an autoethnographic video that builds on a prototype I made for my research-creation PhD project that involves recording my personal narrative of forced migration and translating the verbal account into 2 non-verbal outputs: a sound installation that retains the vocal gestures; and a sound visualization that graphs the amplitude of voice to convey the effect within the verbal narrative. The sound piece incorporates the vocal metrics (e.g., prosody, pause, changes of emotional tenor in pitch and volume) while redacting the language and obscuring the voice as the intense dynamism of the graph offers a discomforting visual signifier as an anchor. The aim behind portraying this process of translation from a voice to a noise is to outline the agencies between the human and the machine that interact, get entangled, leak and move to displace the meaning from a verbal narrative to computer-generated signals which taps into an affective attunement with trauma to highlight the shifting grounds from linguistic communication to bodily and affective competences as autonomous and self-regulating functions that sit outside the hegemony of language. My work addresses the key question of this year’s conference: how might sound intervene to disrupt the status quo, the way that things work in the everyday? as it endeavours to hinder firsthand politics of identification (of the forced migrant) as the gendered and racialized figure of ‘the stranger’ that makes up for the consumption of difference as a commodity by blocking the process of linguistic signification.

Headphones Recommended

Biography

Michael Trommer is a Toronto-based sound and video artist; his practice has been focused primarily on psychogeographical and acoustemological explorations of anthropocentric space via the use of VR, spatial and tactile sound, field recordings, immersive installation and expanded cinema. He has exhibited and performed his work at galleries and festivals throughout the world. Michael is a graduate professor in sound design and sound art at George Brown College, course director for Sonic Cinema at York University, Think Tank professor at OCAD University and is currently a PhD candidate and SSHRC Joseph-Armand Bombardier doctoral scholar in Cinema and Media Arts at York University.

Artist Statement

Ancient Thoughts and Electric Buildings is an experimental, audio-led, virtual reality (VR) documentary that examines the portion of Toronto’s downtown core that extends along the city’s Gardner Expressway. This site traverses Canada’s financial nexus and has been the recent locus of extensive condo and commercial development; simultaneously, it exists as a region that is (and has historically been) occupied by a significant number of homeless people. Seeking to build and expand upon Brandon LaBelle’s notion of ‘acoustic territories’, this project seeks to foreground sound as a key sensory modality distinguishing the conditions of the locale’s urban dispossessed from that of the privileged. To this end, spatial and haptic audio dissemination is deployed to emphasize the relentless cacophony within which the homeless remain perpetually exposed, a stark contrast to the acoustically sealed, climate-controlled, humming structures of the financial towers that their habitat is immersed in. Visually, the documentary investigates the homeless population’s reinterpretation of their imposed topography – beneath the cathedrals of commerce, highways become roofs and scrap material is reconfigured as walls and furniture in a surreal contemporary echo of feudal dynamics. Further emphasizing the socio-economic disconnect, fragments of local condominium marketing copy have been composited into the 360 space in order to highlight the disconcerting paradoxes inherent in the clash of these spatially overlapping, yet antithetical territories.