Feedback improvisation: On reciprocal modes of listening and sounding will be a bundling of four transdisciplinary collaborations that seeks to respond to context-specific practices and writings by feminist, queer and Indigenous artists, writers and scholars by imagining practice-based strategies of radical attentiveness to face industrialisation and settler entanglements to human and more-than-human entities in Sápmi / Northern Norway.
It engages critically with academic discourse around methodology, ”fields" and technologies by exercising ‘feedback improvisations’ that reflect relational affect. As a sound artist, Andreas practices feedback improvisation as a form of field recording that brings the recordist and their relations to the environment into the stereo image. The more-than-human actors that one engages with reverberate sounds that contain textures, timbres, pitch and speak of their materiality, agency and surrounding space. In this monstrous correspondence between bodies, technologies, materials and place both sound and the actors involved take shape in a process of feedback.
Much indebted to Paulina Oliveros and her concept of Deep Listening, by this artistic research he aims to evoke holistic listening perspectives and reciprocal sound creation whilst proposing feedback improvisation as a space of relations and for conversation that does not imply documentation nor sound by default.
With help from the writings of amongst others Mark Peter Wright, Kofi Agawu, Dylan Robinson and Liisa-Rávna Finbog, Kühne problematise the role of artists and researchers and in particular field recordist and ethnomusicologists in landscapes where we are guests and bring attention to concepts that foster critical listening perspectives and suggest possible loopholes to exit the canon and imagine more attentive and responsible ways of knowledge and artistic production that aims to activate the receiver's reflection and thus participation.
The ethical dimensions are mediated through various collaborative projects that each manifest different demands of and perspectives on feedback improvisation and his position as an artist, researcher and visitor in both Sápmi and Norway.
He will share insights from his contribution together with Polina Medvedeva and Elina Waage Mikalsen to the making of the new permanent exhibition "Rávdnji – samiske spor i Tromsøområdet" (at The Arctic University Museum of Norway), his collaboration with Joar Nango, Risten Anine Kvernmo Gaup and Tobias Aputsiaq Prytz on the "Skápmáoaivi" installation and performance (as part of the 1001 Nord research project at UiT), as well as from an upcoming audiovisual performance "Facing the Spills" also in collaboration with Medvedeva, and experimental soundscape workshop (within the UiT research project Arctic Auditories – Hydrospheres in the High North).
The presentation will be held in English and last for 45 minutes, with 15 minutes for questions and discussion afterwards.
Bio:
Andreas Kühne is a PhD research fellow in electronic music and music technology at the Tromsø Music Academy, UiT and KMD, Faculty of Fine Art, Bergen, Norway. As a sound artist, composer, and drummer he is involved in making electroacoustic music, collaborative audiovisual performances and interactive installations that focus on listening positionalities and cross-pollination between improvisation practices and the environment.
His doctoral research proposes feedback improvisation as a methodology for sounding material that is aimed to reflect on the relational affects between human and more-than-human entities. It explores the potential for feedback improvisation to aid imagining alternative futures, critical pedagogy, multispecies collaboration and theorising in the fields of acoustic ecology, contemporary archaeology, sound art and visual art within numerous field sites across Northern Sápmi and Norway.
Kühne’s work has been exhibited and performed at Tromsø Museum, Landmark, Bergen Kunsthall, Lofoten International Art Festival (NO), Sonic Acts Festival (NL), HYBRID Biennale (DE), Baltic Circle Festival (FI), Inversia Festival (RU), Lighthouse (UK).