Why are there so many sound technologies, music services and apps offering to help us look after ourselves, our families and loved ones? This talk interrogates the proliferation of « sonic surrogates » ostensibly capable of automating and enhancing the provision of care. Connecting these « promissory » technologies to sound recording’s gendered and colonial histories, and common ideological investments in aurality, Thompson suggests that sonic surrogates are emblematic of an enduring crisis of reproduction. If sonic surrogates, like other sound technologies, are social relations ‘all the way down’, then how might these be exposed, reconfigured, and reimagined?

Marie Thompson is a Senior Lecturer of Popular Music at The Open University, UK. She is the author of Beyond Unwanted Sound: Noise, Affect and Aesthetic Moralism (Bloomsbury, 2017), Sonic Surrogates: Music, Automation and the Crisis of Reproduction (UC Press, forthcoming) and, with Annie Goh, Sonic Cyberfeminisms (Goldsmiths Press, forthcoming).

In Me Di Deh (I’m here), Stuart meditates on how contemporary queer and female selectors (DJs) and music producers in Toronto, Canada–Jamaica’s third largest diaspora–actively remix Jamaica’s sound heritage by drawing on its traditions while challenging norms from within. Mi Di Deh is part-memoir, part-critical analysis. Stuart retraces her own musical experience oscillating between studios and sound system yards in Jamaica–her father’s home country and sound system’s birthplace–and Canada, where she was born. She interweaves documentary footage from her first-ever trip to Jamaica, frameworks from queer and Black feminist theory, and snippets from the personal narratives of five notable Toronto selectors and soundsystem owners: Heather « Live Wire » Bubb-Clarke, Tasha Rozez, Ace Dillinger, Nino Brown, and Bambii. Together, these ideas and experiences animate the story of Toronto’s local bass music culture, and express how female and queer Jamaican music makers are stretching the bounds of sound system–using technology and care to redraw traditionally male-dominated sonic heritages.

Alanna Stuart (pka PYNE) is Caribbean-Canadian music artist-scholar. In sound and scholarship, she is in the thick of what she dubs a ‘Femmehall’ praxis: exploring the libratory possibilities of a feminine approach to dancehall reggae music production. As producer-vocalist PYNE, Stuart has collaborated with Beverly Glenn Copeland, Bambii, U.S. Girls, Equiknoxx Music, Jeremy Dutcher, and Junior Boys. Outside of the studio, Alanna Stuart is a SSHRC Doctoral Fellow and Gender Studies PhD student at Queen’s University. Her research can be read in Socio-Economic Review, Work, Employment & Society, and the tekhnē journal.

Joost Rekveld’s experimental moving image making involves an ongoing dialogue with machines and materials. Recently, he has been re-enacting historical analogue computing and electronic simulation techniques, caring for old machines and developing new devices based on principles that have long fallen out of use. This led to a perspective on the relation between humans and machines that is not predicated on control. From this angle, he is currently focusing on the crystalline materials that underpin our electronic technology, investigating the dynamic between the exceptional homogeneity needed to make reliable semiconductors, and the fact that their functioning is based on disruptions and dislocations of the crystal lattice.

Joost Rekveld is an artist and researcher who wonders what humans can learn from a dialogue with the machines they have constructed. In a form of media archeology he investigates modes of material engagement with devices and concepts from neglected corners in the history of science and technology. The outcomes of these investigations often take the shape of abstract animated films that function like alien phenomenologies.

Moving between different scales of computational infrastructure, this contribution tries to sense the repercussions of digital practice today, feeling out possibilities for resonating otherwise with hardware, software and networks. From DIY algorithms to fiber optic coils appearing in the streets of Brussels, from day-to-day operations of open source communities to deep sea mining, and from local battery experiments to complicity in genocide, what digital constellations are we part of and how do we take care of their implications here and elsewhere?

Femke Snelting develops methods, situations and disobedient action-research on computational infrastructure and its implications. With Miriyam Aouragh, Seda Gürses, Helen Pritchard and Jara Rocha she runs The Institute for Technology in the Public Interest (TITiPI). TITiPI is an activist research formation for articulating, contesting and reimagining how computational infrastructure impacts collective life. Femke supports artistic research at MERIAN and contributes to Nubo, providing locally hosted, Open Source digital services.