In commemoration of the 2014 protests in Ferguson, this evening presents multiple approaches to the soundscape of politics and the political. Surround sound and stereo works by Donia Jarrar, Lyn Goeringer, Jazmin (JT) Green, Chris DeLaurenti, and others engage the politics of the personal and “the art of the possible” along with the possibility of restructuring the web in which we live. R. Murray Schafer proposed three questions for locating the political audible: “Who is heard?” “What are they listening to?” and “What are they ignoring or refusing to listen to?”
Encompassing personal testimonies, visceral documents of protest, sonic meditations, and other pathways into utopian listening, this evening includes a portrait of a checkpoint on the West Bank; a collage of recordings made during the 2014 protests in Ferguson; satirical cut-ups; and more.
Agitprop is a contraction of “agitate” and “propaganda.” In his Handbook of Revolutionary Warfare, Kwame Nkrumah believes propaganda “serves two different but essential functions in our war: To subvert the enemy and to awaken and mobilize our people.” At the outset of World War II, James R. Angell wryly noted that propaganda “has been defined as something the other fellow does, while education is what you do.” But this evening offers an approach inspired by Salomé Voegelin who writes in The Political Possibility of Sound, “Sound generates a possible reality that does not represent a singular actuality but renders… a mobile and unseen complexity… and sounds the minor, the suppressed, the hidden and the ignored.”
