Monday, April 27, 2015 at 6:00 pm to 7:45 pm
Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Artist, PhD Candidate and Lecturer, Forensic Audio Investigator
Co-Sponsored by the Vera List Center for Art & Politics
Abstract: Since 2010 Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s Aural Contract has been dedicated to understanding the role of voice in law and the changing nature of testimony in the face of new regimes of border control, algorithmic technologies, medical sciences, and modes of surveillance.
Marc Fiaux Michele Baptist Gabriela Benazar Acosta
Description:
The following is an audiovisual response to artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s lecture from the Understanding Media Studies (UMS) course at The New School. The video is composed of footage taken from the aforementioned lecture; Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s April 24 keynote presentation in What Now? 2015: The Politics of Listening symposium, co-organized by the Vera List Center for Art & Politics and Art In General; and Brian Larkin’s Understanding Media Studies presentation, on March 9, about the use of loudspeakers in Nigeria. Bringing together Hamdan’s two talks into one creates a temporal bridge through space and time between the speaker and his audience. This juxtaposition of the repeated lecture brings to the foreground the “meta” aspect of listening to a speech about listening. Weaving in related insights from Larkin’s lecture then turns the interaction into a dialogue between Lawrence, Brian and Lawrence — and reinforces their shared messages about the politics of listening.