If a tree falls in a forest does it make a sound? Reflections on the keynote with Nora Sternfeld

Sunday 25 February 17:56

Nora Sternfeld at Sonic Acts 2018
by Jaime Heather Schwartz How do we know something we don’t yet know? Nora Sternfeld’s Sonic Acts keynote begins with a question, one that elicits a response. What if there is nothing we don’t yet know? Who gets to determine what knowledge already exists and what does not? We study, we learn, we are taught and told. We listen to and trust in truths disseminated by institutions. We search archives to find an echo, a reflection of a sound that can make lost knowledge resurface. In looking for answers to an (un)known, are we just asking to be heard? Knowledge collection and production can be a sonic act. Vocalising, reverberating, receiving and resonating. Nora proposes another question. How can we learn something that doesn’t yet exist? The front of our brain takes a story apart, the back of our brain puts a story together. Our ears are in between the two, negotiating with reality. Sound is inherent to cognitive understanding, our sense of hearing has partly evolved out of a sense of balance. We know the position of our body from the vibrations in our ears. What happens, however, when our bodies are no longer the singular axis point? Nora shares her experience working at the Bergen Assembly in 2016, calling it an ‘experimental collective thinking process’. She speaks about hope and the power of our imagination. An attempt to recreate the Partisan Coffee House – an artistic space of resistance organized by the British New Left in the 1950s London Soho – unexpectedly encountered occupants in the former fire station proposed as a site. A joint retelling emerged and the material archive of the former fire station became The Museum of Burning Questions, which also hosted a reiteration of The Partisan Café. A new dialogue resulted from the narrative echoes that almost went unheard. How do we come together in a world that increases to isolate us? Imagination is something of the mind but we must feel it in our bodies. Its cerebral state can only gain power through fleshy determination. Sound enters our nervous system through words, language, tone. Sternfeld's talk encourages us to push ourselves to keep creating new modes of knowledge production, to compose new scores with new modes. To build infrastructure that hold elements of the past, and can be improvised on for future use. We collect information in our ears, and use our neural pathways to connect ideas and create meaning. We make sense out of the sonic. We negotiate a reality with resonance. We sit here/hear. We use our ears to help us balance, to find equilibrium, a harmony. We are the echo, the collective voice that cannot go unheard. We don’t give up hope. We believe in our ability to imagine another possible future.

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