Image: Design by Blank Blank Studios
The second seminar from the MSCA Postdoctoral Project Connecting Resonances (2023 – 2026) at KMD, examines the cultural and spatio-temporal limitation of “technology”, oftentimes understood as a Western anthropogenic concept for facilitating linear progress, control and profit within a capitalist model. Technological modernity is celebrated as an outcome of European enlightenment and industrial revolution, and a wartime innovation in electronics, such as transistors, sound recording and photography, which always thought to be travelling from Europe to the othered worlds, received without resistance and impacting modernizations of non-Western societies. This view is propagated within a colonial narrative of Europe’s superiority. Within this narrative, Premodern technologies and tools, especially born outside of Europe, are not considered or recognized.
However, technological innovations in the vast regions of the Global Souths in the wider fields of agriculture, disaster management, geoengineering, as well as cultural practices such as musical instrumentation, tuning and design, were as intricate and as sophisticated as their global counterparts. This seminar will demonstrate how these premodern and precolonial sound-producing technologies were more integrated and embedded in the natural systems on ecological, as well as material, temporal, and spatial considerations. The seminar will not only help a reassessment of media technological history, but also de-modernize Western-born technologies on a planetary scale for democratizing electronic arts field.
Full program
Thursday 5th June 2025, Auditorium Knut Knaus, KMD
Session 1: 1 - 2:30 pm
Paola Torres Núñez del Prado, Stockholm University of the Arts
Kristin Bergaust, Oslomet
Tea/Coffee break: 2:30 - 3:00 pm
Session 2: 3:00 - 4:30 pm
Gabriele de Seta, University of Bergen
Juan Duarte Regino, Aalto University
Listening Lodge: 4:30 - 9 pm
Friday 6 June 2025, Knut Knaus KMD
Session 3: 1 - 2:30 pm
Budhaditya Chattopadhyay
Stas Shärifulla
Tea/Coffee break: 2:30 - 3:00 pm
Session 4: 3:00 - 4:30 pm
Miguel Carvalhais and Pedro Tudela
Brian Bamanya (Afrorack)
Roundtable: 4:30 - 5 pm
Live Performances, BEK: 7:30 - 10:30 pm
Aldana Duoraan & HMOT
Paola Torres Núñez del Prado
Juan Duarte Regino
Marie Yevkiné Tirard
Budhaditya Chattopadhyay
Hexorcismos aka Moisés Horta Valenzuela
Miguel Carvalhais and Pedro Tudela (Cronica Electronica)
The artistic investigation contributes to the discourse around the topic of technology along with a scholarly rigour of the seminar. This artistic component includes a series of live electronic arts and music performances at BEK in the evening programs developed and to be realized in collaboration with several leading artists and KMD colleagues working in the field. The focus of these performances is not only to pursue the artistic investigation of the topic but also networking in the context of the local electronic arts, media arts, sound arts and experimental music scene in Bergen City and their situated discourses across Norway. This scholarly and artistic relationality will help further and nurture the project development as well as contribute to a healthy ecology of co-sounding and co-listening, probing collectively into the phenomena of intercultural interaction and forms of sonic, medial, artistic and technological confluences.