Epistemic Media
The text, composition, film, museum installation, and performance are all epistemic media – they consist of vital means of insight and discovery of new experiences and knowledge. In this course, we will be interested less in epistemology (from Greek episteme ‘knowledge’, from epistasthai ‘know, know how to do’) as a synonym for the theory of knowledge but in epistemology as an inquiry into what it is that makes knowledge. Epistemic media consist of forms and practices, which not only communicate knowledge but also generate new knowledge. We will inquire and reflect on historical, technological and societal conditions under which and the means with which, things are made into objects of knowledge. The media—and particularly media for sound reception, transformation and synthesis—are objects of knowledge. They emerge from a process of research, invention and creation within particular historical and technical contexts. They also produce new insights, data and representations of the phenomenal world; for example as instruments for listening, analysis and feature extraction.
Artists dramatize, modulate, amplify and transform the concept but also bring it to the realm of intuition. Artistic practices can play an active function within the overall process of knowledge formation and expand our understanding of the world around us.
In the class we will interrogate different aspects of listening and audio technology, its histories, representation of sound as data, conversion of analog to digital, spectral and temporal domains of sound. The class will take multiple forms, depending on the week we will have a lecture, seminar, demonstration, collective listening session or a combination of all. The class will focus broadly on:
interactions between disciplines and work at the interface between art and science
inquiring the art as an epistemic endeavor
processes of translation and integration of sound into other media (image, light, haptics)
aesthetics of data perceptualisation (visualisation and sonification)
You will learn methods of media archaeology, critical media analysis and fundamental concepts of digital audio.
Instructor: Dr. Marcin Pietruszewski