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Phd may session

Saturday 31 may 2025

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*Note: THIS SESSION MAY TAKE PLACE ON SUNDAY 1 june in your time zone

Sunday 1 june 2025

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public talk
Sound and space
With mary edwards

Spaces and places speak, hum, and bellows with echolocation. The natural environment, much like architecture or our physical beings, exude intonations and wordless music. Entire scores exist in the depths of the ocean, waiting to be transcribed from a body of water to a body of sounds that convey and express the harmonies and dissonance in our everyday lives.

How do we seek out the conversations that take place at the intersection of these ideas in how sound can unearth or revitalize hidden or obscure histories, stories and events within places, bodies and containers? How can we play with recollection of events paired with addressing environmental exclusivity?

In this talk, Edwards will synthesize these ideas in a discussion of projects: a composition that is an “ode rather than an elegy” to the transforming Arctic landscape/Space Analogues intended to sonically provide access for all by “de-centralizing the centered and un-othering the others” with an understanding of climate vulnerability, elemental sensuality and terrestrial/space connectivity; a poem about environmental stewardship and the pursuit of education in the Jim Crow Era; an aqueous soundscape whose own memory and "voice" implies both a tenacity and a detachment evidenced by the predicament of a tiny but mighty waterway that was once the centerpiece of the 19th Century New England textile industry; and an immersive installation of sonorous geological and oceanographic assemblages in response to my encounters on mountain in Northern California that evoke seismic activity—both destructive and regenerative—as frightening things can also be beautiful.

BIO

Mary Edwards is a composer and environmental sound artist whose interdisciplinary practice encompasses themes of temporality, impermanence, nostalgia and the natural world that recur throughout her work. She is interested in the invisible architecture and the emotive, historic, cinematic and spatial properties of sound that are simultaneously intimate and immense. Listening is an inherent and integral part of her process in conveying how all sounds have the potential to be habitable, and can be transformative once you get inside them.

Her composition, Everywhere We Are is the Farthest Place, has been performed and installed in several iterations at Spitsbergen Artist Gallery (Svalbard), Open Source Gallery (Brooklyn), Epsilon Spires (Vermont), The Beyond Listening International Symposium on Sonic Ecologies (CENSE) in Budapest, and in a continuing monthly residency at The New York Public Library (NYPL) Jefferson Market Branch.

Drawing partly on sound as a vibrational phenomenon and Space Analogues, this immersive compositional soundscape with cinematic audio, is, according to Edwards, “an ode rather than an elegy” to the transforming Arctic landscape, climate vulnerability, elemental sensuality and terrestrial/space connectivity.

Edwards recently began this project while sailing on a field recording expedition above the 78th Parallel to Svalbard (halfway between mainland Norway and the North Pole) to listen to the rhythm and breath of our planet from another pulse point. She researched and documented sound properties of glacial geology and oceanographic data through sonification with geophones, hydrophones and contact microphones, recording the distinct groans and reverberant calving ice tumbling from the sublime glacier walls into the depths of fjords, the movement of subterranean rivers, Beluga whale song and vocal intonations intended to provide access for all by “de-centralizing the centered and un-othering the others.”

Her recent projects include Fathom, a site-related soundscape launched during the 2023 World Forum for Acoustic Ecology (WFAE) Conference, Listening Pasts/Listening Futures and Conservation/Conversation, both for Atlantic Center for the Arts; Endeavour: A Space Trilogy for the NASA Expedition of Dr. Mae C. Jemison, an ambient operetta commemorating the American astronaut’s orbit around Earth; The Call in the Limitless Space, a permanent interactive installation for Wa Na Wari/Seattle based on reclamation of natural and architectural spaces in the city’s Central District; Everyday Until Tomorrow, a conceptual “Library Music” soundtrack for TWA Terminal 5 at JFK airport; Something to (Be)Hold, a large-scale site-specific public sound work produced concurrently with her first career survey by The Grimshaw-Gudewicz Art Gallery; and Tamalpais Higher, a geophonic reimagining of a seismic event based on a blind thrust fault running through Mount Tamalpais north of the San Francisco Bay.

She has an extended, multi-stylistic discography of solo and ensemble projects. Her writing has been published by Oxford American, Invert/Extant (U.K.), The Mentor that Matters series, The Santa Barbara Literary Journal and in the anthologies, Joy Has a Sound: Black Sonic Visions, Polarlit (Svalbard), and Carpenters: An Illustrated Discography.

She holds an Interdisciplinary Master of Fine Arts in Sound and Architecture, and has been awarded residencies and commissions at the ACA Soundscape Field Station at Canaveral National Seashore, Headlands Center for the Arts, The Arctic Circle, Wa Na Wari, InSitu Polyculture Commons, The William T. Davis Nature Conservancy, The Beach Institute Savannah, The Grimshaw-Gudewicz Foundation, 429 Architectural Spaces, Condé Nast Gallery and The Joshua Tree Cultural Preservation Center.

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public talk
alternative reality gardening
With maggie buxton

In this presentation, Dr Maggie Buxton offers a critical analysis of Alternative Reality Gardening - a project facilitated by her company, AwhiWorld in Whangārei, NZ. The initiative explored the intersections between digital arts, ecological sustainability, and social innovation. Dr. Buxton will discuss the methodologies and outcomes of merging traditional and emerging technologies in creative practices through a retrospective examination. This analysis will include a review of the diverse contributions from local and international artists, scientists, space researchers, farmers, psychotherapists, and others who collaborated. Highlighting the project's role as a catalyst for social ínnovation and transdisciplinary practice, the talk will also examine the broader implications of such innovative approaches for academic research and artistic production. Attendees will learn how transdisciplinary strategies can challenge conventional perspectives and foster novel solutions to contemporary global issues.

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syllabus

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phd workshop
critiquing the critique
With jean marie casbarian

This workshop is an exploration into the value of objective and subjective analysis and assessment of the critique itself. A close and holistic observation of our artwork not only expands our understanding of our creative work, practice and the audience who reacts to it, but also serves as an invaluable tool in developing a healthy relationship with criticism.

BIO | SITE

SYLLABUS

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phd workshop
language and accessibility
With ren britton

This workshop on Language and Accessibility considers how language practices operate between frameworks like: disability justice, translation and hierarchies of verbal and non-verbal expression. In this workshop disability justice from SINS INVALID will be shared as a framework that upholds and makes space for non normative bodies and minds and therefore non-normative modes of communication and expression. A discussion of colloquial ableist language will follow. Translation will be discussed through the framework of 'Hungry Translation' from Richa Nagar unfolding how translations often relate to hierarchical power relations, and how this might be thought of in our multi-lingual context. And further practices for inviting multiple modes of expression: non-verbal, verbal, a-syncronous and more will be shared and experimented towards, together. Over two days participants in this workshop will learn about hierarchies of language based expressions and and why they must be dismantled within anti-ableist and anti-racist spaces.

BIO | SITE

SYLLABUS

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