Event overview
Jody Berland is Professor in the Department of Humanities, York University
“But in my dreams began to creep that old familiar ‘tweet tweet tweet’”*
The integration of recorded animal sounds into human sound creations is an increasingly common sonic practice. We hear animal sounds in a range of spaces and social situations, from film scores to spas and therapeutic spaces, from new music to collections of “nature sounds,” from ring tones to pop music, cellphone apps, video games, children’s toys and games and of course Twitter.
We can learn more about the emotional and technological convergences of “nature” and digitality by examining the widespread use of recorded birds and bird songs. Bird song conventionally evokes both comforting clichés of spring and rebirth, and intimations of nostalgia, death, loss, and more recently, extinction. These themes are still present and yet profoundly altered in the history and aesthetics of bird sound recording and remixing.
This paper examines some of the sociotechnical constellations in which bird sounds appear, and explores their sonic reproduction as affective tools in contemporary culture.
Drawing on critical work in affect theory, media studies, interdisciplinary animal studies, and cultural studies, this paper works with birds to explore digital sound aesthetics and ambivalent listening as part of the experience of risk culture in the so-called anthropocene.
*Florence and the Machine, “Bird Song”
Jody Berland is Professor in the Department of Humanities, York University. She also teaches and supervises in the Graduate Programs in Culture and Communication, Social and Political Thought, and Science and Technology Studies, and is Senior Research Fellow in the Robarts Centre for Canadian Studies.
She is author of North of Empire: Essays on the Cultural Technologies of Space, winner of the 2010 Gertrude J Robinson Book Award from the Canadian Communication Association, co-editor of the books Cultures of Militarization, Capital Culture, and Art as Theory/Theory and Art, and editor emeritus of TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies.
Professor Berland has published widely on the “cultural technologies of space” as mediated and articulated through music, culture, weather, nature and animals. She is principal investigator of the SSHRC funded four year project "Digital Animalities: Media Representations of Non Human Life in the Age of Risk."
She is currently a visiting research fellow, Department of Media and Communications, Goldsmiths College, University of London. This talk is a chapter in progress for her forthcoming book, Virtual Menageries.
23 November 2016, 2.00pm, PSH LG01
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 23 Nov 2016 | 2:00pm - 4:00pm |
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