Thinking Through Sound

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?