Apr.24.08 Jonathan Stern, Dissecting the Ear
Jonathan Stern
Installation by Iratxe Jaio & Klaas van Gorkum
Tao Sambolec and Bojan Fajfric
Tao’s installation
Bojan’s installation
Text from our mailing list:
Lecture by Jonathan Sterne, writer of The Audible Past and catalog launch of Dissecting The Ear featuring installations and talks by participating artists
Date: Thursday, April 24
Venue: STEIM, Utrechtsedwarsstraat 134, Amsterdam
Time: 20.30 hrs.
Entrance: FREE
Reservations and more information: knock@steim.nl or 020-6228690
Jonathan Sterne (US)
Jonathan Sterne writes about sound and music, communication technologies old and new, contemporary cultural studies, and a range of other matters. His work is characterized by a taste for archival esoterica, unusual combinations of objects or approaches, big intellectual and political questions, and a sense of humor. Current projects include a study of digital audio technologies; a history of decline, failure and obsolescence in 20th century media; a special issue of Social Epistemology entitled “After Social Construction” and an edited reader in sound studies. In addition to his scholarship, Prof. Sterne is also interested in more public-directed intellectual work: since 1994, he has been an editor of Bad Subjects: Political Education for Everyday Life (http://badsubjects.org), the longest-running publication on the internet.
http://sterneworks.org/
Topic of Lecture;
“Today, more recordings exist in MP3 form than in any other form in the world. What difference does it make? Arguments about sound quality abound in scholarship and the popular press, but much less has been said about the format as itself a cultural phenomenon. This is not entirely accidental, as scholars are more often in the habit of conceiving of technology in terms of hardware. In this paper, I consider the historical significance of format as a defining feature of recent audio media history, and argue that the history of the MP3 reveals otherwise hidden dimensions of 20th century audio history.”
Selected publications:
The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003.
“Bourdieu, Technique and Technology,” Cultural Studies 17:3/4 (May/July 2003): 367-389.
“A Machine to Hear for Them: On the Very Possibility of Sound’s Reproduction.” Cultural Studies 15:2 (Spring 2001): 259-294.
“Television Under Construction: American Television and the Problem of Distribution 1926-1962.” Media, Culture and Society 21:3 (July 1999): 503-530.
“Sounds Like the Mall of America: Programmed Music and the Architectonics of Commercial Space.” Ethnomusicology 41:1 (Winter 1997): 22-50.
“The Burden of Culture.” In The Aesthetics of Cultural Studies, ed. Michael Bérubé, 80-102. Malden: Basil Blackwell, 2004.
“The Internet Race Goes to Class.” In Race In Cyberspace, eds. Beth Kolko, Lisa Nakamura, and Gilbert Rodman, 191-212. New York: Routledge, 2000.
“Thinking the Internet: Cultural Studies vs. The Millennium.” In Doing Internet Research, ed. Steve Jones, 257-288. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1998.
Dissecting The Ear (Concept by Tao G. Vrhovec Sambolec and Bojan Fajfric)
“While living in a predominantly visual/written culture, there are certain moments in which auditory communication becomes crucial. It is, on the one hand, much faster than the process of written communication, while on the other hand lends itself largely to interpretation, since it is bound to vanish in time if not recorded. Dissecting The Ear is a group exhibition investigating and exploiting the ambiguities of intentional listening and hearing in different cultural contexts. (text taken from catalogue introduction)