Call, Confusion and Response - exploring interspecies agency through sound-based collective embodiment

Beskrivelse

How can a collective make embodied decisions through non-verbal means such as motion, listening and voice? What kinds of strategies and perceptive schemas are at play and which frictions and potentials do they bring forth? Can other-than-human agents play a role in this collective decision making at a flat hierarchical level? If not, where do the challenges lie, and what can we learn from them? These are some of the questions driving Call, Confusion and Response – a workshop dedicated to exploring interspecies agency through sound and movement-based collective embodiment.
Call and response dynamics are building blocks in every ecosystem. Many occur through sound, from mating calls to territorial utterings, from air raid sirens to shepherd whistles, from a ringtone to name-calling. Beyond sound, the same dynamics are found in movement patterns, ritualized behaviours, bodily excretions and pheromone release, chemical triggering within brain cells, even migration paths in weather changes, all these interdependent phenomena use call and response to move a certain kind of embodied knowledge through different chains of agency and causality – in-between cells, bodies, habitats, within interpersonal, social and political structures, at local and planetary scales.
Call, Confusion and Response means to explore these dynamics at the interpersonal, embodied level, where humans and other-than can participate in relatively flat terms. During the workshop, the participants will explore each other and their relative positions in a space, through sound strategies such as vocalizing, synchronization, interference and resonance. The other-than-human partners, in this case a small community of waxworms (Galleria mellonella), will be given a voice and a bodily role through a combination of sonification (using data produced by their breathing and temperature variations due to digestive cycles, to produce sound in real-time), and “bodysnatching” – where some of the participants will be invited to share their bodily agency by following and incorporating the waxworms’ sound queues.

Periode	10 jun. 2022 → 12 jun. 2022
Begivenhedstitel	A Thinking Practice
Begivenhedstype	Symposium
Placering	Stockholm, SverigeVis på kort
Grad af anerkendelse	International