Full conference programme announced Friday 17th October.
Keynote: Jose Luis de Vicente - Deep Sound Histories
Between 600 and 1,200 meters deep beneath the ocean, there is a layer of water where sound behaves differently. In the SOFAR channel, sound waves can travel thousands of kilometers without losing their strength; a whale in South Africa can hear the songs of another off the coast of Ireland. At the beginning of the Cold War, the two world powers began systematically capturing and analyzing underwater acoustic signals to extract sensitive information.
In this acoustic territory, the voices of sperm whales, orcas, and dolphins intersect with submarine sonar, the murmur of storms, and the creaking of icebergs and mining drills.
This lecture performance is a visual journey through seven decades of attentive listening to the complex ecologies of underwater sound, exploring its scientific, military, political, and artistic dimensions.
The talk investigates the origins of hydroacoustics and the physics of sound under water; military hydrophone networks, cetacean hearing anatomies, whale corridors and technologies plotting whale geographies, anthropogenic sound pollution, new applications of AI for marine audio analysis, and underwater recordings in sound art and experimental music.
José Luis de Vicente is a curator, cultural researcher, and artistic director based in Barcelona and working internationally. He is the co-founder of FAST, a new transdisciplinary creative unit addressing current and future challenges through the convergence of culture, technology, architecture, and design. Previously, he served as director of Barcelona’s Design Museum, DHUB, and was the founder and artistic director of Sónar+D, the culture and arts program of the acclaimed Sónar Festival. His work explores the intersection of social innovation, new ecological practices, and the aesthetics and politics of computation. He has curated more than 25 exhibitions in institutions around the world, including CCCB (Barcelona), ArtScience Museum (Singapore), Somerset House (London), MIT Museum (Cambridge, US), DOX (Prague), Museo Reina Sofía, and Espacio Fundación Telefónica (Madrid), among many others. He teaches at Columbia GSAPP (New York).
