Tuning Speculation III: (in)audible (im)possibilities
20­-22 November 2015, Toronto (Canada)
Organized by The Occulture (David Cecchetto, Marc Couroux, and eldritch Priest)

Plenary Speakers TBA

Insofar as the technical operations of new media involve infra­legible microtemporal events that nonetheless impinge on quotidian human life, they can be understood to render/fabricate an insensible world of possibilities whose perceptions needn’t obey the imperative to become practical. Thus, it seems, a shift in the scale of media corresponds to new phenomenological encounters and, indeed, to new understandings of phenomenology itself. Does sound open a particularly promising field of possibilities in this context? Size, after all, is neither an obvious nor consistent notion in sonic economies, and ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ orders of complexity are often less relevant than relations of resonance that are as much relational as they are spatial or even temporal.

Building on our last two meetings, this conference approaches the techniques of such things as art, play, and even (day)dreaming as radically scalable practices that d​ramatize the conditional gap between what a life “is” and what it “could be.” In other words,​when taken as speculative-­pragmatic ways of being rather than simply impassive aesthetic activities, certain creative techniques can be understood to articulate imaginary magnitudes of existence that refuse not only a single scale of relation but a single relation of scale. In this respect, the ludic urge that informs art, play, and daydreaming links itself to registers of activity that are more evidently intensive then they are extensive, more expressive and contingent than substantive and determinate.

Thus, we seek contributions from artists and intellectuals who employ their own speculative­pragmatic techniques in order to both interrogate the occult economies of abstraction and to advance forms of critical enquiry that scale between conditional a​nd factual modes of being. While several approaches can catalyze such speculations, we propose to concentrate on sounding art—broadly understood—in order to leverage the fated semiotic parasitism, differential production, relational expression, and perceived multiplicity that informs such practices. However, alongside such concentrating we also welcome various reflections on sono­distractions, phonochaosmosis, rhythmanalysis, harmelodic­prescience, audio pragmètics, chronoportation, h/Hypermusic and other invocations of impossible, imaginary, and/or inaudible aural (dis)encounters.

Please send an abstract (maximum 250 words), short bio, and list of publications (for our funding application) to u​nsound@yorku.ca.​ A​pplications received by 1 April 2015 may be eligible for travel funding,​ but applications will be accepted until 19 July 2015. Notification of acceptance will be given no later than mid ­August.