Next weekend – at 11:15am on Saturday, November 23rd, to be precise – I'll be delivering a talk at the Tuning Speculation conference here in Toronto. It promises to be an exciting weekend of baffling and delightful ideas delivering by the cream of the critical theory and sound studies community. If you're in the area, I can't recommend it highly enough. You can check out the full programme here, and register as an attendee here (no fee required; only pay-what-you-can).
I'll be speaking about listening, technology, and the apocalypse. In addition to the conventional abstract found on the programme, I crafted a second abstract that is less formal, but much closer to the spirit in which I'll be presenting. To pique your interest, I offer it for your scrutiny below:
- Do you find yourself paralyzed by fears of a planet rapidly sliding towards ecological cataclysm, economic catastrophe, and slow-motion holocaust?
- Do you also find yourself giddy at the prospect of a post-human utopia, as virtuo-mechanic enhancement looses the trammels of the space-time continuum?
- Do you have trouble reconciling these two paradoxical positions?
Then take hope, you poor raggabrash! You may be eligible for
Adventures in Meatspace
a reunion of the ear and the body!
Our program is designed to de-program a quarter-century of technological triumphalism and digital hegemony through such exercises as:
The Body Is Dead, Long Live the Head – how neoliberal modes of listening reify Cartesian mind-body duality.
White People Dancing – post-humanism as speculative colonialism.
The Cake Is a Lie – what happens when scarcity and disaster slam the brakes on progress.
I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing – building community through the embrace of our own imperfect materials.
Synthesizing the ideas of Ned Ludd, Alfred Jarry, David Toop, and Max Rockatansky, Adventures in Meatspace invites participants to tackle tomorrow’s problems today by abandoning hope, embracing the suck, and getting down with their bad selves. To do any less is to acquiesce to brain-vat delusion and to forfeit our physical selves as foodstuffs for future generations.