Previous Mellon Collaborative Fellowship

The Sonic Image

Fellows: Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Hannah B Higgins, W.J.T. Mitchell
Course: The Sonic Image

Fellowship Description

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.

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?

Portable Gray interview with Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Hannah B Higgins, and W.J.T. Mitchell HERE

Course

The Sonic Image
Fall 2019
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. 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 artist’s audio investigations have been used as evidence at the UK Asylum and Immigration Tribunal and as advocacy for organizations 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 a Professor of English and Art History at the University of Chicago and has served as editor of Critical Inquiry since 1978. 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. He has published widely in scholarly journals and written numerous books, most recently Image Science: Iconology, Media Aesthetics, and Art History (Chicago, 2015).