Art History Department, The Yolanda and David Katz Faculty of Arts, Tel Aviv University, May 29 - 30, 2016

Sound, Ethics, Art, and Morality is an international conference featuring leading researchers and artists in the field. The conference includes presentations by leading academics. The conference aims to draw attention to the international growth of sound studies, and to carve out original research that cross-pollinates interdisciplinary investigations into the reverbs of the middle voice and its ethical implications.

If sound experience assumes action as being-with, this conference asks to examine the reverbs of communications and ethics, from a metaphysical relationship dictating relations amid beings, to its opposition insisting that being is communication toward a sense to come. This conference seeks to explore the implications of sound in communication ethics; the characteristics of intersubjectivity and how the assumption that subjectivity has sound, in terms of langage and parole, may carve a move toward communication; the question of subjectivity and the middle voice, sharing and being shared by and via sonorous bodies articulating care for others. How does listening to the other generates ethical relationships without an object, in the passive voice? If, being-in-the-world is contingent on being-with, how may we describe the social, political, and ethical grounds of sonority?

Conference Program

Day 1 - Sunday, May 29

9:30 – 10:00 Gathering and Coffee

10:00 – 10:30 Greetings 

  • Zvika Serper, Dean of the Yolanda and David Katz Faculty of the Arts, Tel Aviv University
  • Assaf Pinkus, Chair of the Department of Art History, Tel Aviv University
  • Dorothy Cohen Shoichet, Toronto
  • Adi Louria Hayon, Department of Art History, Tel Aviv University

10:30 – 11:30 Keynote Lecture, The Sonic Agent, Brandon LaBelle, Bergen Academy of Art and Design, Norway

11:30 – 13:00 Session 1: Within a Distance: Post-Foundational Reverbs, Chair: Vered Maimon, Tel Aviv University

Music and Ethics, Marcel Cobussen, Leiden University, Netherlands

"Memory, Psychology—Never Again:” Cage and Lacan, Yoni Niv, New York University

Tears, Fears and Flashes – Theory Act #4, Ido Govrin, Western University, Canada

13:00—14:30 Lunch Break

14:30—16:00 Session 2: Political Aesthesis and Sounds’ Retreat, Chair: Amnon Walman, The Music Academy, Jerusalem

  • What does the Union of Aural and Visual Representation have to do with Gender?, Irene Noy, The Courtauld Institute of Art, London
  • Seeing Music and Hearing Paintings: African American Spirituals at the Barnes Foundation in the 1920s, Alison Boyd, Northwestern University, Illinois
  • A Russian Biblical Play Performed in Hebrew with Bedouin Melodies: On the Ethics of Voice in Dramatic Recitation, Ruthie Abeliovich, Hebrew University, Jerusalem

16:00—16:30 Reception

16:30 – 17:30 Keynote Lecture, The Structure of Swing (taken existentially), Christopher Fynsk, Maurice Blanchot Chair, and Dean of the Division of Philosophy, Art & Critical Thought, European Graduate School, Switzerland and Malta

17:30 – 18:30 Performance, Poetic Intersections between Sound, Maps and Performance  Joseph Sprinzak, Hebrew University, Jerusalem


Day 2 - Monday, May 30

9:30—10:00 Gathering and Coffee

10:00—11:00 Keynote Lecture,  Morality of the Invisible, Ethics of the Inaudible, Salomé Voegelin, London College of Communication, University of the Arts London

11:00—12:30 Session 3: Making an Expanse: Topologies of Poiesis, Chair: Ayelet Zohar, Tel Aviv University

  • Devocalisation and the Fate of Poiesis, David Nowell Smith, University of East Anglia, Norwich
  • The Poetic Mode of Hearing and Listening, Roi Tartakovsky, Tel Aviv University

Performance: Glory Unending, Ed Smith, Marist College, New York

14:00—16:00 Session 4: Techniques of Spatial Planning, Chair: Roy Kozlovsky, Tel Aviv University

  • The Connective Tissue of Physical Computing, Kristine Diekman, California State University, San Marcos
  • Surpassing Figuration: Faces and Landscapes as Haecceities, Andrej Radman, Delft University of Technology, Netherlands
  • Raumgestaltung – Sound Sculpture, Sound Architecture and Immersion, Jan Piotr Cieslak, Jagiellonian University, Poland
  • Four Constituents Tuned by the Golden Ratio and Fibonacci Numbers, Ramzi Suleiman, University of Haifa

16:00—16:30 Reception

16:30—17:30 Keynote Lecture; What's Wrong with Wrong Notes? Hillel Schwartz, Independent scholar