Sonic Literacy with Tiffany Sia and Jordan Lord

Led by artists and filmmakers Jordan Lord and Tiffany Sia, this CTHQ workshop will begin by asking how we might reframe questions of sonic literacy (or how to read sound and audio media) in the face of propaganda, censorship, disinformation, and the livestreaming of genocide. Starting from the notion that access practices such as audio description and captioning are themselves forms of reading, we will consider how access is both a precondition and means of sonic literacy. Similarly, we will examine how state powers mediate access to audio documents of state violence, including those that nation-states themselves produce and circulate as tools of domination—from broadcast propaganda to weaponized frequencies. Understanding access and acts of reading sound as, instead, partial and positional, we will consider what transpires outside regimes of the audible, including what we still need to imagine. This session will explore how sound functions as a political force, examining both its capacity for control and its potential for means of refusal.

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Host or Publisher Creative Time