Sounds  are energies and social impulses that defy capture, control, categorization, and inscription. Post-colonial theorists and Decolonial critics of archiving consider large institutional archives and museums in the West as potential sites of conflict for centralizing the capture and storage of ephemeral experiences. They are recorded, technologically mediated, and objectified with an extractive relation to colonized lands and people as resources. These archives produce stagnant, often inaccessible, repositories of cultural capital through forced collection, quantification, and legislation that reduce experiences to scientific categories.

The seminar “Archival Intelligence: Epistemic Shifts from Sound to Listening” departs from this critical position to offer diverse perspectives on the roles of archives, museums, and other institutional spaces of power today with control over narratives of culture and history. Broader questions are posed about the recordability of ephemeral experiences, such as sound as an object, proposing a multiplicity of listening positionalities and suggesting an epistemic shift from sound to listening and from production to reception. The seminar questions the roles of technologies like AI today in shaping cultures, neo-colonial power, and the affordances of corporate AI that extracts data from archives and museums for profit. As FIAT/IFTA¹ admits, today’s AI systems are trained on datasets derived from European institutional archives (“We are neck-deep in digital oil”), suggesting an ominous nexus between institutional archives and corporate AI. The seminar emerges from the artistic research project Archival Intelligence as a discursive assembly that intervenes in archives of recorded sounds through situated listening acts of transgression, advocating the liberation of incarcerated sounds through participatory storytelling aided by poetic and artistic interventions enabled by technologies such as AI.

The project manifests as an exhibition at Lydgalleriet, Bergen, opening on 22 May and running until 19 June 2026, a seminar at Bergen Assembly on 23 – 24 May 2026, and live acts at Bergen Senter for Elektronisk Kunst (BEK) on 23 May 2026. 

^{1 Admitted by Brecht Declercq (2025), president of FIAT/IFTA (International Federation of Television Archives).}