Abstract:

In this talk I discuss the recent art projects I have collaborated with Taiwanese and Finnish sound artists, focusing on sonic sensing of multispecies worldliness. Anthropologist Deborah Bird Rose has called our epoch of human-made mass extinction as a time characteristic of the phenomenon of “double death,” which denotes the way environmental devastation and developmentalism have led to unintended consequences of death for more-than-human beings. It further interrupts the ecological web of life wherein one death could become gifts to another life, thus the phenomenon of double death. The question of how the life and death of the more-than-human others become legible and sensible thus has been the central issue in many approaches to Anthropocene art. Drawing on sonic arts’ engagement in hearing more-than-human beings, I ask whether this mode of sensing arouses pity more effectively than by way of the visual.

 

Speaker’s Bio:

I-Yi Hsieh is a Researcher at the International Center for Cultural Studies, Taiwan NYCU. Her research interests are inter-Asia art practices, multispecies Anthropology, and Anthropocene art. She served as dramaturgist for the adaptation of “A Play for the Living in a Time of Extinction” at the Taiwan National Theater (2022). Her curatorial practice include “Ocean Encountering River: Aquatic Aesthetics of an Island” (C-LAB, 2022), Critical Collaboration (NYU Tisch School of the Arts, 2017-2018), “Performa” (NYU Shanghai, 2017) and “Diaspora Visual Art” (NYU Shanghai, 2016).