Dobra 55, s. 0.410
Keynote lecture by Caroline Edwards (Birbeck, University of London) at the international conference “Forgotten, Misplaced, Marginalized: Speculations We Don’t See” (May 8-10, 2025), organized by the American Studies Center UW.
More info: forgottensf.net
ABSTRACT
This keynote considers speculations we don’t see. Science fiction media have traditionally drawn on electronic instruments to convey nonhuman or alien acoustic ecologies – we might think of Russian physicist Lev Sergeyevich Termen’s invention of the theremin in 1920, which has featured prominently in SF soundtracks, or Sun Ra’s otherworldly blend of improvisational jazz, African percussion, and electronic keyboards in his collaborative Arkestra project. Jeff Wayne’s prog rock adaptation of H. G. Wells’s 1898 The War of the Worlds (1978) is another iconic example, which employs synths and layered sound waves to convey the terrifying Martian invaders. This lecture will explore a weirder series of science-fictional soundscapes that constitute what I term “sonic apocalypticism.” Recent experiments in biodata sonification have revealed a rich world of nonhuman interaction between plants and fungi. Using synthesisers to convert bioelectrical signals into sounds audible to the human ear, we can finally “hear” communications between living organisms. The converted sounds of plants and fungi suggest science fictional possibilities for worldmaking and collaborative survival. Whether it’s incorporating recordings of ice shelves collapsing, bird species on the brink of extinction, fungal-synth recordings, or the neopagan more-than-human performance of a band like Heilung (who prominently feature trees in their stage performance, as well as instruments soake in their own blood), there are oddly utopian ciphers to be found in these works of sonic apocalypticism.
BIO
Dr Caroline Edwards is Senior Lecturer in Modern & Contemporary Literature at Birkbeck, University of London. Her research focuses on utopian possibility as it intersects with questions of aesthetic form, genre, temporality, political subjectivity, and post/inhuman agency – in literary as well as popular, cultural, and performative texts. She is author of Utopia and the Contemporary British Novel (Cambridge University Press, 2019), co-editor of China Miéville: Critical Essays (Gylphi, 2015) and Maggie Gee: Critical Essays (Gylphi, 2015) and editor of The Cambridge Companion to British Utopian Literature and Culture, 1945-2020 (forthcoming). Caroline is currently writing her second monograph, Hopeful Inhumanism: The Elemental Aesthetics of Ecocatastrophe, which examines strangely hopeful moments of inhuman collaboration within the elemental contexts of the lithic, the mycological, the arboreal, and the hydrological. Alongside her academic research, Caroline is also Executive Director of the Open Library of Humanities, an award-winning publisher of humanities and social sciences journals. Her research has featured in a variety of places, including the New Statesman, the Times Higher Education, the Guardian, SFX Magazine, BBC Radio 4, BBC Radio 3, BBC One South East, the Barbican Centre, the Institute of Contemporary Arts, the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, and Whitechapel Gallery.
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