Previous Mellon Collaborative Fellowship

The Sonic Image

Artist and audio investigator Lawrence Abu Hamdan, writer and art historian Hannah B. Higgins, and UChicago professor and theorist W.J.T. Mitchell (Departments of English and Art History) come together to explore the ways in which what we hear and how we hear it impacts our ability to perceive and understand things visually.

Artist and audio investigator Lawrence Abu Hamdan, writer and art historian Hannah B. Higgins (University of Illinois at Chicago), and UChicago professor and theorist W.J.T. Mitchell (Departments of English and Art History) come together to explore the ways in which what we hear and how we hear it impacts our ability to perceive and understand things visually. A co-taught course will take place in fall quarter of 2019 when Hamdan will join his Chicagoan collaborators in residence from his home base in Europe. At the core of this Mellon Collaborative Fellowship is a set of questions to guide the initiation of their joint research endeavors.

What are the aesthetic implications of sound as it is performed through civic structures, through legal structures, in the everyday world?
How do we listen?
What are the politics of listening?
How is listening used in legislative processes?
How is it visualized?
For an audience?
What is the vocabulary that we use to visualize sound?
Are there aesthetic and formal crutches that we lean on?
How can they be broken?
How can we author a new collective biography for sound, a new language? The perfect resonance?

Course

The Sonic Image

Department of English Language and Literature 22351 / 42351
Tuesdays | 3:30-6:30pm | Gray Center Lab at Midway Studios, room 112

The Sonic Image offers a unique opportunity to work with three senior researchers exploring the bridge-making and sense delimiting articulations of sound & sight together. Humans can blink to block out something they don’t want to see, but we cannot blink our ears; ears are our primary, proximate, multidirectional warning system. This course examines the implications of the potency of sound in a world largely understood through the process of its visualization as a world picture. In addition to readings in sound studies, visual studies, and media studies will examine pictures that evoke sound, sounds that evoke pictures, the forensics of sound, and sound art, and films that exemplify sound forensics (The Conversation. Blow Out) and the problematics of a sound track (Amour). The three faculty running this course bring distinct interests to this exploration with University of Chicago students. WJT Mitchell’s renowned theorization of images naturally extends to his theorizing the possibility of the sonic image. Artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s commitment to the value of earwitnessing asks the listener to extend forensic knowledge to the very core of what it means to be a human being in the world. The above balloon gun is part of his remarkable earwitness collection of sonic objects — the gunshot effect triggered by a gun configured to squeeze a balloon. As part of the course the artist will develop a workshop comprising a series of practical exercises that experiment with the conditions of testimony or claim making. Using sound as a lens through which to explore how the law come to its truths and how can we use sonic imagination to trouble that and contest somewhat tired modes of enacting justice. Performance scholar, Hannah B Higgins, has studied how musical notation, performance and sound bear on the relationships between sound and vision in recent art history.  We will also schedule an intervention from composer Janice Misurell-Mitchell, whose experience with standard and graphic notation along with the compositional vocabulary of gesture, color, texture, form, and structure will add a dimension of musical testimony to our investigation.

Fellows

LAWRENCE ABU HAMDAN

Lawrence Abu Hamdan is an artist and audio investigator currently living in Berlin as a guest of DAAD. Abu Hamdan’s interest with sound and its intersection with politics originate from his background as a touring musician and facilitator of DIY music . The artists audio investigations has been used as evidence at the UK Asylum and Immigration Tribunal and as advocacy for organisations such as Amnesty International and Defence for Children International. The artist’s forensic audio investigations are conducted as part of his research for Forensic Architecture at Goldsmiths College London where he received his PhD in 2017.

Abu Hamdan’s Rubber Coated Steel 2016 won the short film award at the Rotterdam International Film festival 2017 and his exhibition Earshot at Portikus Frankfurt (2016) was the recipient of the 2016 Nam June Paik Award. Other solo exhibitions include Hammer Museum L.A (2018), Kunsthalle St Gallen (2015), Beirut in Cairo (2013) , The Showroom, London (2012), Casco, Utrecht (2012). Abu Hamdan is the author of the artist book  [inaudible] : A politics of listening in 4 acts  and a forthcoming ebook produced as part of his 2015-17 fellowship at the Vera List Centre for Art and Politics at the New School in New York.  His works are part of collections at MoMA New York, Guggenheim New York, Van AbbeMuseum Eindhoven, Centre Pompidou Paris, Tate Modern London.

HANNAH B HIGGINS

Professor Hannah B Higgins is solo author of Fluxus Experience (University of California Press, 2002) and The Grid Book (MIT Press, 2009) and co-editor of with Douglas Kahn of Mainframe Experimentalism: Early Computing and the Foundations of Digital Art(University of California Press, 2012). She has received the UIC University Scholar Award, DAAD, Getty Research Institute, Philips Collection, and Emily Harvey Foundation Fellowships. Higgins is the daughter of Fluxus artists Dick Higgins and Alison Knowles and is co-executor of the Estate of Dick Higgins and the Something Else Press.

Professor Higgins has been teaching at UIC since 1994 and is the Founding Director of the interdisciplinary IDEAS BA in Art. Her research and course topics examine twentieth century avant-garde art with a specific interest in Dadaism, Surrealism, Fluxus, Happenings, performance art, food art and early computer art. Her books and articles argue for the humanistic value of multi-modal sensory cognitive experience.

W.J.T. MITCHELL

W. J. T. Mitchell is Gaylord Donnelley Distinguished Service Professor of English and Art History at the University of Chicago. He served as Chair of the English Department from 1988 to 1991, and has been the editor of Critical Inquiry since 1978. He received his B.A. from Michigan State University in 1963, his M.A. and Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University in 1968. He taught in the English Department of Ohio State University from 1968-77 before moving to Chicago.

Professor Mitchell has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Philosophical Society, as well as research conference grants from the Rockefeller Foundation and the Exxon Educational Foundation.  In the winter of 1993 he was awarded a research residency as the Fairchild Distinguished Scholar at the California Institute of Technology. During his editorship, Critical Inquiry has thrice been recognized for the “Outstanding Special Issue of a Scholarly Journal” (1981, 1988, 1998) and for outstanding design (for its special issue, Art and the Public Sphere) by the Conference of Editors of Learned Journals.  Critical Inquiry also won the American Publisher’s Association award for an outstanding special issue in 1998.   Professor Mitchell chaired the planning committee for the Chicago Humanities Institute in 1991 (now the Franke Institute), and has served on the governing boards of the Smart Gallery of Art, the Highgate Art Trust, the Benton Fellowship Program, the Franke Institute, and the University of Chicago Press, where he has served as Chairman of Board.  In 1996, his book Picture Theory was awarded the College Art Association’s Charles Rufus Morey Prize for “an especially distinguished book in the history of art.”  In 1997, Picture Theory received the Gordon E. Laing Prize for the book by a faculty author that has brought the most distinction to the University of Chicago Press.  His most recent work, The Last Dinosaur Book: The Life and Times of a Cultural Icon (1998) was selected as one of the top 100 books of 1999 by the Toronto Globe & Mail.  It was also nominated for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, and won the Award of Excellence and the Juror’s Choice for design at the 1998/99 Chicago Book Clinic Show.

Professor Mitchell’s articles have appeared in numerous journals, including; Art in America, October, Art Bulletin, London Review of Books, Boston Review, Times Literary Supplement, Artforum, Cahiers de l’art moderne, Krisis, Representations, Raritan Review, AfterImage, Salmagundi, Works & Days, New Literary History, ELH, South Atlantic Quarterly, Studies in Romanticism, Eighteenth Century Studies, Trafic, Interfaces, Transition, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. Translations of his writings have appeared in French, German, Dutch, Danish, Hebrew, Swedish, Chinese, and Japanese.  His work is primarily focused on the interplay of vision and language in art, literature, and media, and the subjects of his articles range from general problems in the theory of representation, to specific issues in cultural politics and political culture.  His books include Blake’s Composite Art (Princeton, 1977), Iconology (Chicago, 1986), Picture Theory(Chicago, 1994), The Last Dinosaur Book (Chicago, 1998), and What Do Pictures Want?(Chicago, 2005).  He has edited six collections of essays, all published by University of Chicago Press:  The Language of Images (1980), On Narrative (1981), The Politics of Interpretation (1983), Against Theory (1985), Art and the Public Sphere (1993), and Landscape and Power (1994, 2nd edition, enlarged with 5 new essay, 2004).  During his editorship, Critical Inquiry has published issues on canon-formation, gender, race and writing, public art, politics and poetic value, metaphor, psychoanalysis, identity politics, pluralism, new directions in art history, questions of evidence, intimacy, comics and media, and many other special topics.

Professor Mitchell has twice served as a Professor at the School of Criticism and Theory (Northwestern, 1983; Dartmouth, 1990), and he has lectured at universities and art museums throughout the United States, as well as in Europe and the Far East.  Recent special teaching assignments include a Mellon Faculty Seminar at Tulane University, a seminar on Romanticism at Beijing Foreign Studies University in China, an NEH Summer Seminar for College Teachers at the University of Chicago, a post as Canterbury Visiting Fellow at Canterbury University, New Zealand, a visiting professorship at the Institute for Art History, Aarhus, Denmark, and two visiting professorships at the Institute for Fine Arts and English Department at New York University in 1998 and 2000.  The South African Council for Scientific Development sponsored his lectures in Capetown, Durban, and Johannesburg in the summer of 1997, and Duke University invited him to give the Benenson Lectures in Art History in the spring of 2000.  In the spring of 2002 he was awarded the Berlin Prize Fellowship to the American Academy in Berlin, and in the fall of 2002 he delivered the Alfonso Reyes Lectures in Mexico City. Other recent lectures include the W. E. B. Du Bois lectures at Harvard, and the Patten Lectures at Indiana University.  He was a research fellow at the Clark Institute for Art History in the fall of 2008, and received the MLA’s 2006 James Russell Lowell Prize in Language and Literature for What Do Pictures Want? In 2014 he received the College Art Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award for the teaching of art history.   His recent publications include two books: Cloning Terror: The War of Images, September 11 to Abu Ghraib (2011), and Critical Terms in Media Studies (2010; with Mark Hansen). His book, Seeing Through Race, based on the W. E. B. DuBois Lectures at Harvard, was published by Harvard University Press in 2012, and his collaborative book, Occupy: Three Essays in Disobedience, co-authored with Michael Taussig and Bernard Harcourt, published by Chicago in the spring of 2013. His newest book is Image Science: Iconology, Media Aesthetics, and Visual Culture, forthcoming in 2015. He is currently working on a book entitled Seeing Madness: Insanity, Media, and Visual Culture