Ewé is a theorist and experimental art historian. He is currently writing a doctoral dissertation on inhuman psychoacoustics in the Department of Art History at UBC. His research focuses on the epistemology of listening in modernity, and its symptoms in the sonic arts at the nexus between vibrational inhumanism and speculative aesthetics. His most recent work appears in Holger Schulze, ed (2019), Handbook of Sound Art, London: Bloomsbury, and the Danish translation of Laboria Cuboniks’ Xenofeminism: A Politics of Alienation. Tobias has exhibited/performed diagrams and sonic fictions in Germany, Canada, Denmark, Italy, and online.
Sandra Boss is a composer and sound artist based in Denmark. Her work often evolves in the intersection between performance and installation, where machines and instruments becomes sculptures of sound. She explores the overheard sounds of various sound sources: both familiar musical instruments as well as instruments that was not originally intended for music-making, such as hearing test machines, bird flutes, sound therapy instruments, and test equipment. She has made works for home-built or rebuilt instruments – such as a MIDI-controlled pipe organ and an elongated accordion – and written works for solo musicians, ensembles and choirs.
Boss has a background in classical music and studied electronic music at The Royal Academy of Music in Denmark. In 2019, she finished an artist-based PhD on sound art at Aarhus University, Denmark, where she explored the conception of hearing through the application of so-called dead technologies that had previously been used to optimise hearing.
She has performed at numerous international venues including Cafe Oto (UK), KRAAK Festival (Be), Detritus Festival (GR), Super Deluxe (JP), Klangkunst Festival (DE) and LAK – Festival for Nordic Sound Art (DK). In 2017, she was awarded the Carl Nielsen Talent Prize.
For this episode of the Critical Image Forum Dialogue Series, Tobias Ewé talks with Danish sound artist Sandra Boss about her practice-based research into mid-century German hearing machines, conceptions of hearing and how these shape the listening subject. The discussion takes its outset in Boss’s dissertation, Tuning the Ear: Exploring Conditions and Conceptions of Hearing, which is much more than a collection of textual chapters, but a sound art object in and of itself. Artworks like The Acoustic Appraiser, Maskinel Terapi and Shouting Out Loud! lead to a discussion of Boss’s media archaeological approach to audiometers, sound therapy and their special access to the hauntological ghost in the machine. The last section of the conversation focuses on Boss’s organ works, which imagine the organ as a living entity that must be freed from the heavy cultural-historical confines of the church and the concert hall.
Critical Image Forum is a collaboration between the Belkin and the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory with funding from the UBC Public Humanities Hub.
Recorded on 4 November 2020.
Ewé is a theorist and experimental art historian. He is currently writing a doctoral dissertation on inhuman psychoacoustics in the Department of Art History at UBC. His research focuses on the epistemology of listening in modernity, and its symptoms in the sonic arts at the nexus between vibrational inhumanism and speculative aesthetics. His most recent work appears in Holger Schulze, ed (2019), Handbook of Sound Art, London: Bloomsbury, and the Danish translation of Laboria Cuboniks’ Xenofeminism: A Politics of Alienation. Tobias has exhibited/performed diagrams and sonic fictions in Germany, Canada, Denmark, Italy, and online.
Sandra Boss is a composer and sound artist based in Denmark. Her work often evolves in the intersection between performance and installation, where machines and instruments becomes sculptures of sound. She explores the overheard sounds of various sound sources: both familiar musical instruments as well as instruments that was not originally intended for music-making, such as hearing test machines, bird flutes, sound therapy instruments, and test equipment. She has made works for home-built or rebuilt instruments – such as a MIDI-controlled pipe organ and an elongated accordion – and written works for solo musicians, ensembles and choirs.
Boss has a background in classical music and studied electronic music at The Royal Academy of Music in Denmark. In 2019, she finished an artist-based PhD on sound art at Aarhus University, Denmark, where she explored the conception of hearing through the application of so-called dead technologies that had previously been used to optimise hearing.
She has performed at numerous international venues including Cafe Oto (UK), KRAAK Festival (Be), Detritus Festival (GR), Super Deluxe (JP), Klangkunst Festival (DE) and LAK – Festival for Nordic Sound Art (DK). In 2017, she was awarded the Carl Nielsen Talent Prize.
Critical Image Forum is a research project that focuses on the political, ethical, aesthetic and social dimensions of expanded documentary practices. The Forum's primary medium of research is photography, with an interest in how the proliferation of moving images, performance, sound and digital networks have challenged and complicated the veracity of the visual document.
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