To Know from the Invisible

Conventional knowledge is anchored in the visual understood as a perceptual ideology. It is based on our trust in what we see, while what we see confirms this trust through its relationship with taxonomies and lexica that verify what it is we know in referential frames, constructing a tautology between reality and its description. Thus, we are visually literate and encultured: we know how to “read” and understand the world and art through the way they look, as objects and in language.

Sound, as material and as concept, steps between the certainties of this frame. Its ephemeral variability enables a different sense of what we see and provides other possibilities for its interpretation: pluralising the seen from the invisible in-between, where there is nothing but everything sounds together; and where the body listening becomes an epistemological device for the sensory knowing of the unintelligible, the unspeakable, the irrational, the unformed and the unforming.

In this lecture/seminar we will explore the sense and form of “sonic knowledge” and discuss what it might bring to discourse and to our understanding of the world, of art and of ourselves. The aim is not to disregard the visual, but to see it in a different light; and the intention is not to ignore difficult or dangerous interpretations, but to realise the construct of every way we know.