In my talk I track “the voice” as it slips between the world and the sonic in Scandinavian sound art and media poetry. Beginning with historic experiments in Nordic text-sound—Per Højholt’s method of resisting ocular mastery in favour of vibrational attention; Åke Hodell’s radiophonic dissent; and Sten Hanson and his corporeal tape-poetics—the talk situates voice as more than speech: a situated, resonant act that reconfigures perception and publics through innovative and political uses of technology.
I then link these lineages to contemporary Scandinavian practices where voice becomes a liminal interface and epistemic method: Marie Højlund’s Svanesang (with Julian Juhlin & Christian Albrechtsen) listens to adolescent vocal thresholds in a church, staging fragility as a shared survival space; William Kudahl composes with breath, organ tone, and wind-read pages to reimagine reading as aerial voicing; Christian Skjødt Hasselstrøm’s μ gives “voice” to cosmic rays via particle detectors, extending vocality beyond the human; and Arendse Krabbe’s We are all fish attunes us to hydrological infrastructures where bodies, toilets, wells, and coastlines co-speak. Across these works, the keynote advances the governing claim that our social listening deficit is not merely cultural but epistemic, and sound art—precisely through vocal practices that refuse disciplinary boxes—offers tools for a resonant citizenship in a time of deep geopolitical and social deficits. The voice, here, is a boundary object of sonic self-reorientation.
Bio
I am a researcher and internationally acclaimed Media and Sound Art Curator at Aalborg University, Denmark. On top of my own sound/design practice, I am engaged with sound curation at Struer Sound Art Lab in Denmark and the Momentum Festival in Norway. I am Co-founder of conference series, including POM – Politics of the Machines conference series (with Laura Beloff) (since 2017) and RE:SOUND MAH2019 in Aalborg, 19-23 August 2019. I have published and curated several international exhibitions since 1994, including at Kiasma, ZKM, Rupertinum, Ars Electronica, Eyebeam NY, Utzon Center Aalborg, Kunsthal Aarhus, and Museum of Contemporary art in Roskilde.