Event overview
Histories of Women in Experimental Music
A presentation by Sandra Kazlauskaite: Breaking the Silence - The Histories of Women in Experimental Music and Sound Art
The lecture will address the silenced histories of women in experimental music and the sounding arts. It will explore how women artists’ conceptual approaches to sound and technology have informed their sonic thinking as well as their artistic practice, and will discuss their contribution to the field more broadly.
The existing histories of experimental music and sound art, as the lecture will argue, is still framed in gendered and gendering terms. It continues to be told and re-told from a primarily masculine position. Certain bodies, including the bodies of women’s and those who identify themselves women, have been repeatedly ignored and excluded from the experimental music and sounding arts institution: from performance halls, from gallery spaces, from books… Their input has been continuously deemed as less important and insignificant. In the lecture, I will argue that this issue needs to be addressed and will call for a more inclusive approach to sonic histories.
Through case studies and historical re-evaluations, I will turn to the voices and the bodies of women who have utilised sound in the artistic practice and will demonstrate how their work has continued to shape the field. In the lecture I will also argue that women’s work with sound and technology has always been a political project - a mission to confront and subvert the masculine “techno-fetishism” behind music and sound production.
I will showcase how women artists working with sound have been able to surpass the limitations of technological determinism, offering more expanded interrelations between subjects and the world. To do so, I will turn to the theories of embodiment and feminist writing and will propose for women’s relationship to sound making as anti-essentialist, embodied and sonically expanded.
Dates & times
Date | Time | Add to calendar |
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30 May 2018 | 1:00pm - 3:00pm |
Accessibility
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