Nikos Papastergiadis – Art and the Cosmopolitan Imaginary

Podcast

Nikos Papastergiadis speaks about the globalization of culture and its meaning for people and institutions involved in the world of the arts.

The Australian scholar Nikos Papastergiadis speaks about aesthetic cosmopolitanism. He is professor for Cultural Studies and Media & Communications at the University of Melbourne. His current research focuses on the investigation of the historical transformation of contemporary art and cultural institutions by digital technology. In Summer 2010 he spoke at the Sommerakademie of the art museum Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern, Switzerland.

This is his speech about art and the cosmopolitan imaginary – in four parts of about 12 minutes each.

Norient would like to thank Nikos Papastergiadis and the Sommerakademie Zentrum Paul Klee for the permission to publish this speech.

Biography

Michael Spahr (VJ Rhaps) is a historian MA, journalist, and media artist. He was on the board of Norient from 2008 until 2014. He developed the website norient.com. He was the co-founder and co-director (2009–2014) of the Norient Musikfilm Festival. He contributed with his video art to the audio-visual scientific media performances of Norient. He was the host and DJ of Norients monthly radio show Sonic Traces on Radio RaBe. He works as a freelance artist, film maker, and journalist in Bern (Switzerland). Follow him on his Website.

Published on February 09, 2011

Last updated on April 09, 2024

Topics

Digitization

Ethics

Technology

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Bob Dylan und die Menschenrechte

Radio

by Michael Spahr

Popsternchen und Musiklegenden covern Bob Dylan. Für einen guten Zweck: Der Gewinn geht an Amnesty International. Leider sind die Stimmen aus dem globalen Süden auf diesem Album kaum zu hören. Ein Radiobericht.

Seit fünfzig Jahren kämpft Amnesty International für Menschenrechte. Ebenso lange erfreut der amerikanische Sänger Bob Dylan die Welt mit engagierten Songs. Im Lied «Chimes of Freedom» – zu deutsch «die Glockenklänge der Freiheit» – besingt Bob Dylan Menschen, die ungerecht behandelt werden.

«Chimes of Freedom», so heisst denn auch ein neues Musikalbum, das Amnesty International und Bob Dylan gemeinsam herausgebracht haben. Darauf interpretieren 73 Stars aus der Rock-, Folk- und Popwelt Lieder von Bob Dylan. Alles für einen guten Zweck – allerdings fast ohne Stimmen aus den Ländern des Südens.

Mehr Infos zum Bob-Dylan-Amnesty-International-Album gibt es «Amnesty-International USA.

Biography

Michael Spahr (VJ Rhaps) is a historian MA, journalist, and media artist. He was on the board of Norient from 2008 until 2014. He developed the website norient.com. He was the co-founder and co-director (2009–2014) of the Norient Musikfilm Festival. He contributed with his video art to the audio-visual scientific media performances of Norient. He was the host and DJ of Norients monthly radio show Sonic Traces on Radio RaBe. He works as a freelance artist, film maker, and journalist in Bern (Switzerland). Follow him on his Website.

Published on February 20, 2012

Last updated on August 12, 2020

Topics

Colonialism

Ethics

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Soundscape scholars and composers on a «sound walk» on Mount Koli (photo: Thomas Burkhalter).

Ethical Questions on Working with Soundscapes

Blog Post

by Thomas Burkhalter

I attended a soundscape conference on Mount Koli in Finland, and I really enjoyed this keynote paper by Andra McCartney. She asked a lot of important questions concerning what some would call «Sonic Tourism».

Andra McCartney published her keynote paper on the Soundwalking Interactions blog. This is an excerpt:

When soundscape composers, documentarians, and artists work with soundscapes, they are expressing relationships to the place of work and its inhabitants and visitors, to the sounds listened to, recorded from or projected into the place, and to the audience of the work. Each time a soundscape composer designs a soundwalk or a theatre piece, an installation or broadcast work, relationships with the world are expressed through how the maker treats the place, the sounds and the audience.

Does the maker want to reveal particular sonic aspects of the place as it is, as it used to be, as it might be? Does the composer want to create an ideal place through sound and if so, what are the characteristics of this imaginary place and what ideas and values inform this utopic creation? How does the composer treat the sounds? How prominent are the composer’s treatments in relation to the sounds originally heard in that place, and what are the characteristics of this electroacoustic ecology? What are the dominant and masked sounds in the piece and how do they interact?

What connections are there in the work between what is heard in the piece and the place of recording? Does the maker imagine the audience as deafened into numbness and needing to be awakened to true listening by the composer or soundwalk leader’s approach to the soundscape? Do we imagine the listener is ignorant and needing enlightenment? Do we think of the listener as possessed of original and unusual ways of listening, contributing to an expanded awareness of how to work with soundscapes? What are the ethics of this expression, and how are these ethics informed by underlying ideologies of sound, of sound production, and of sound ecology?

Read the full article here.

List of References

Cary, John H. 1958. «France Looks to Pennsylvania: The Eastern Penitentiary as a Symbol of Reform». The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 82 (2): 168–203.

Devine, John. 2006. «Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller». ArtUS 15: 63.

Dickens, Charles. 1996. American Notes. New York: Modern Library.

Drott, Eric. 2009. The Politics of Presque Rien: Sound Commitments. Oxford Scholarship Online Monographs.

Ferrari, Luc. 1971. Presque Rien No. 1. Deutsche Gramoophon 2543 004, LP.

Frye, Northrop. 1971. The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination. Toronto: Anansi.

Rosz, James R. 1993. «Ecotone Hierarchies». Ecological Applications 3 (3): 369–76.

Keightley, Keir. 1996. «‹Turn It Down!› She Shrieked: Gender, Domestic Space, and High Fidelity, 1948–59». Popular Music 15 (2): 149–77.

Kuzniar, Alice. 1988. «The Vanishing Canvas: Notes on German Romantic Landscape Aesthetics». German Studies Review 11 (3): 359–76.

Manning, Peter. 1993. Electronic and Computer Music. 2nd Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

McGregor, Gail. 1985. The Wacousta Syndrome: Explorations in the Canadian Langscape. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Nicoletta, Julie. 2003. «The Architecture of Control: Shaker Dwelling Houses and the Reform Movement in Early- Nineteenth-Century America». Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 62 (3): 352–87.

«Empowering Place: Multilocality and Multivocality». 1992. American Anthropologist September: 640–56.

Schafer, Murray. 1977. The Tuning of the World. New York: Knopf.

Schmid, Muriel. 2003. «‹The Eye of God›: Religious Beliefs and Punishment in Early Nineteenth-Century Prison Reform». Theology Today 59 (4): 546. Academic Search Premier.

Thibault, Jacqueline. 1982. «‹To Pave the Way to Penitence›: Prisoners and Discipline at the Eastern State Penitentiary 1829–1835». The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 106 (2): 187–222.

Thompson, Emily. 2002. The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900–1933. Cambridge: MIT.

Tuan, Yi Fu. 1977. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota.

Wilson, Alexander. 1998. The Culture of Nature: North American Landscape from Disney to the Exxon Valdez. Toronto: Between the Lines.

Wrightson, Kendall. 2000. «An Introduction to Acoustic Ecology». Soundscape: The Journal of Acoustic Ecology 1 (1).

Text by Dr. Andra McCarney from her keynote presentation at WFAE international conference Ideologies and Ethics in the Uses and Abuses of Sound, Koli, Finland, June 19, 2010.

Biography

Thomas Burkhalter, PhD, is an anthropologist, multidisciplinary artist, and writer from Bern, Switzerland. He is the founder and director of Norient and the Norient Festival (winner Special Prize for Music 2025 – Swiss Music Prizes). Currently, Burkhalter's focus lies on his new music/AV duo, Melodies In My Head, and the podcast Long Take: Life as an Artist. He is a co-editor of the 2025 released book Home is Where the Heart Strives (Norient Books). Burkhalter has co-directed documentary films, including Contradict (Berner Filmpreis 2020, Al-Jazeera Witness), and created AV/theatre performances. He is the author and co-editor of several books, such as Local Music Scenes and Globalization: Transnational Platforms in Beirut (Routledge) and The Arab Avant Garde: Musical Innovation in the Middle East (Wesleyan University Press). His experimental radio feature, Gqom Edits – A Durban Visit, was nominated for the Prix Europa in 2017. Burkhalter teaches regularly at universities, leads workshops for arts institutions, and, since 2022, has produced the Norient Mixtape for Swiss National Radio SRF3. He currently serves on the board of the ERC/UKRI-funded project Beyond 1932 (King’s College London), Echographies: Journal of Sound Ethnography (Chicago/Zürich), and C:Pop – Transdisciplinary Research Center for Popular Music Cultures and Creative Economies (University of Paderborn). Burkhalter’s work combines personal and global perspectives, often in close collaboration with artists and thinkers from across the world. Follow him on Instagram, Research Gate, Academia.edu, Bandcamp, Spotify, or Meta.

Published on July 05, 2010

Last updated on April 09, 2024

Topics

Ecology

Ethics

Ethnomusicology

Soundscape

Listening

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