The dominant idea of territories and borders today is marked by the Westphalian paradigm of linear divisions amidst nation-states. Through international treaties such as the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) (1982), a similar idea was also inscribed on the maritime boundaries of states, with defined zones for territorial control and economic activity. The subsurface ocean, however, presents a different picture of militarization and territorialization. As the subsurface ocean is navigable primarily through sound, the emergence of anti-submarine warfare and underwater sonic monitoring are deeply intertwined technological histories. This presentation will focus on the mediatization of subsurface ocean through a history of sonars (Sound and Navigation and Ranging) and underwater acoustics in postcolonial India. It will propose two interrelated ideas: 1) aqua audibilis, which in tandem with concepts such as terra/aqua nullius/incognito, refers to the sonic territorialization of the previously unknowable deep ocean as well as an oceanic imagination of global sovereignty beyond the purview of maritime law, and 2) sound as border, which places sonic mediatization at the centre of border-making and unmaking in the subsurface netherworlds.

Sounding Out The Labour Archive is a sonic documentation of the ship-breaking yards at Alang and an early engagement with forms of labour involved in the large scale operations at site. The visual tropes associated with shipbreaking usually miss other scales of engagement with the site. This work seeks to acknowledge and document those other reverberating registers within the shipbreaking industry through an aural landscape. These registers for labour conditions are offered as an alternate mode to record conditions at the yard that don’t “sound” incriminating. The heterotopic space induced by these elemental conditions mark a specific moment; when objects (that were pulled together and fused to form a ship) again begin to come apart to be redistributed.

GROTESKKBASILISKK! MINERAL MIXTAPE looks at online subcultures that perform anti-egalitarian politics by endorsing a technologically accelerated view of the world, specifically those that display an affinity towards Asian futurisms. Through a corruption of 3D real-estate renderings, Bollywood sounds, martial-arts games, and mythological comics, the video explores apolitical techno-subjectivity on the internet and its duplicitous mockery of social institutions, historical progress and cultural freedom. The curious entanglement of such subcultures with literary genres like science fiction and horror also highlights the strange historical complicity between technological fictions and anti-rationalist ideas in the public sphere.

As both a standalone video work and a philosophy of enquiry, DIGGERMODE highlights the environmental impact of our digital world on Indigenous peoples who most intimately feel the growing impacts of Capitalism and climate change on their lands and ways of being. Think how mining and images of mining have shaped the way we imagine and view the world, how historical museums operated as proto-databases and how today most cultural production is now subject to metaphors that deal with software-mediated transactions.

This presentation examines voice clones as material, symbolic, cultural, and political phenomena, and sites of critical and creative potential. It draws on artworks by Machine Listening, including Environments 12 (2023), which is narrated by an ensemble of clones and the human voices on which they were trained, and Machine Listening Songbook (2023), a series using clones to explore compositional and decompositional strategies in poetry and songwriting. These works attempt to shift the conversation from prevalent industry concerns over ‘vocal deepfakes’—highlighted by incidents like @ghostwriter977’s viral ‘fake Drake’ song and the 2017 ‘deepfake’ of Obama—to the clones’ intrinsic properties, their eerie unfamiliarity, their performative nature, and their innate dualities. What can we learn from intensive listening to voice clones? Might their peculiar articulations reveal insights into the ‘pathologies’ of their neural network structures and the broader social frameworks they emerge from?

This session is about making, carrying, thinking sound through recounting experiences of running a self-hosted internet radio station from a shared studio in Delhi. radio roohafza began in 2021 as an experiment with livestreaming homemade mixes and neighbourhood noises on the internet. It has since become a vehicle for broadcasting various conversations, gatherings, zoom meetings, playlists, and jam sessions. I’d like to begin by thinking through how radio roohafza has changed my own understanding of listening in (as) a social sense.

This session looks at ways in which programming of language shapes social relations, where programming is understood in the sense of applying a set of rules to carry meaning, information and signs between subjects and objects. By sampling stories from different technological histories, everyday incidents, reality TV excerpts and prevalent cultural myths, one listens for breaks in the attitude of hearing with displaced words, speech and sounds produced by mediatic environments.

I imagine Sonic Thinking as the act of paying attention to the instances when data-objects talk from within the black-box of computational infrastructures. Early October 2023 saw a massive data breach surface on the darknet. It is rumoured to have revealed sensitive information of more than 800 million Indians. Starting from this incident, this presentation will move to certain moments within Karthik’s creative practice to identify instances where data-objects talk.

This presentation will cover the folk songs of the Jhonda along with an overview of their artefacts. Numerous curious figures in Indian history including the music critic JS Saxena and the amateur archaeologist and mathematician DD Kosambi have encountered the Jhondas. The talk will focus on these encounters, construction of the archive, its history and possible futures.

Quantitative Collapse is a lecture-performance extending upon Narrative 001: The Things We Like, and a more recent sequel Narrative 002: Disaster (Jackson). These works imagine a future where the production and consumption of entertainment media is dominated by a single platform, Worldio. In this future, the distinction between quantitative and qualitative data has collapsed to the point where all manner of user impressions, aesthetic preferences and responses can be measured, collated into discrete profiles, and leveraged as prompts in the automated production of media tailored to individual desires. The work and lecture-performance together expands upon present computational techniques and tendencies to imagine a ‘long term’ or telos in relation to platformed media production and consumption. What might media be in the future if we take the uncon-scious desires of platform designers seriously? Where do the many and varied techniques of platform capitalism and so-called AI converge?

Engaging with the form of the document and its truth claim, this presentation will explore speculative entry points for fictional forms to arise. The initial document is the National Geospatial Policy 2022 that aims to liberalise the geospatial sector and additionally create virtual replicas of major cities and towns in India by the year 2030. The presentation will consist of excavated excerpts and artefacts, through a reading of ongoing research, providing a glimpse into potential portals for exploration.

Can waste speak beyond ecological equality and ecosystems? Deep augmented association of identities end up making new breaks and parts within our fragmented social system. Contradictions in life sound like something and act like something, theory or laws are not enough, something more is needed maybe to reduce the gap between thinking and speech.

This is an extension of my 2022 work from Disclaimer journal, ‘Echoic Memory Song: listening for loss, grief and possibility through கீழடிKeeladi Objects’. I will be sharing a hybrid of dialogue and live soundscape performance as part of a desire to use sound as a conduit for connection, collapsing colonial bounds of time and a queering of violent, nationalist narratives. I will be attempting to delve into intimate realms of knowledge and expression, and moving through questions of archiving in relation to cultural domination and erasure, parasocial grief, and the embodiment of memory. This session invites a sensorial and affective approach to sound and ideas, and ways of engaging that are often systematically-marginalised but relate a lot to the poetic and fragmented way I comprehend the world.

“Noise Reduction” became a popular phrase in the last decade, owing to the proliferation of the digital image and the “noise” that came with it. The noise, a uniquely volatile structure threatened the actualizable basis of the image, and thus, softwares were created to forego this liminal entity. This “systematic erasure” of noise occurred at a time when I struggled to find an archival basis to my own frustrations around my marginalised identity. Without any readily accessible basis in explicitly anti-caste aesthetics, I saw the philosophical structure of noise as a possible point of reflection, and as a metonym for my own anarchivic existence. “Noise Reduction” was to be alternatively interpreted in a Hegelian spirit, with Reduction as meaning aufhebung or synthesis, and “noise” as referring to the proliferations of margins that can’t but be done away with for the stability of the image to persist. Working through my series of video works, Noise Reduction 1-3, I try to “remember” this moment and the anarchivic overtures that I tried to make into the questions of identity, memory, and the archive fever that surrounded our zeitgeist.

This paper will focus on soundscapes of films made by contemporary independent directors who have tried to address the changing political landscape with a carefully constructed sound design. Marking a shift in acoustic territories through the use of music, acousmatic sounds, ambient noise and silence, these films show how a familiar place can feel strange and disorienting. Films like Aisee Hee (2019) by Kislay Bhattacharjee, Eeb Allay Oooo (2019) by Prateek Vats and Nasir (2020) by Arun Karthick, use immersive soundtracks that force us to listen to the shifting contours of both public and private spaces, with their characters. Geographical markers of filmed places are highlighted not just through the camera but non-human voices, sonic bodies and media infrastructures. The promiscuous quality of sound becomes a forcefield to think about the way subaltern bodies get marked or silenced in the public domain, or the way sonic practices can unsettle the public/ private distinction. How can we then rethink the formulation of the figure/ ground relationship in terms of the sonic (as opposed to the visual) especially when we consider the sharpening of gender, religious and ethnic identities amidst the rise of violent majoritarianism and its performative presence in the “everyday?” Through these discussions Jhingan will attempt to open up the debate on how attention to sound can unravel questions of the political and their entanglement with the troubled questions of belonging and citizenship.

Different voices offer different meanings, sentiments, and consequences in the creative process. Choral voices are usually situated within the Christian musical tradition. India poses the challenge of situating complex colonial encounters in particular socio-historical conditions. The latter shaped the interplay between the global and vernacular discourses around choral singing both within church spaces and other secular spaces. This presentation discusses ethnographic illustrations between 2013 and 2018. It addresses three central questions: 1) How to categorise choral voices? What do choral voices inform us about specific communities? Are choral voices formulating novel musical templates? Spanning Goa and Shillong, the paper explores the peculiarity of genres maintaining a balance between tradition and transformation.

This session traces the notion of the “sound object” in historical, material and ontological terms, interrogating the fluctuating relations between the source and listening body in the course of the movement of the idea. Through a collection of recent works (in progress), concerns and questions, a map is laid out of the attributes that could possibly be assigned to the sound object in a way that destabilises the objecthood or thingness of sound, opening it up to a field of relational yet situated listening rather than affixing it to a defined form, experience or process. At the same time what needs to be ascertained are the processes of production, mediation and distribution of sonic matter and the thresholds that constitute it.

We know the colour of politics, from saffron to red and from green, white to blue and black. But do you know how they sound? Like rock or Jazz or folk or pop? Do they have different rhythms and a sense of participation? Sound is becoming a major mobilizing force in the contemporary politics of India and South Asia. Sound can no longer be sidelined in our approaches. Sound is mobilizing the body and senses at the most visceral level. Before we can recognize politics, we get its vibes. It is recognizable that from rhetoric and speech, the language of politics is moving towards sound. From mind games, it is moving towards the senses. From voice, it is moving to noise. It is not a dialogue but the decimal level—the volume decides the winnability of a debate. It is taking us in a trance. The emerging contexts show that sound is exerting its immense power on our contemporary politics. In this talk, I will discuss the visceral formation of the Hindutva Pop or what I have termed as the Disc Jockey Hindutva, I also discuss its alternative politics that not only challenges but also complicates a position that only power can play on the DJ or the DJ is necessarily a sign of aestheticization of politics. I argue that the DJ is only a sign of an intensification of politics. If the power is coming on DJ, so the alternatives, silence is the only casualty that will suffer.

Examining multiple valences of “audible” and “inaudible”, the presentation will unfold in two parts: exploring mobilisation of sound and silence towards extraction and control through an inquiry into Hindutva pop songs and music videos – released mainly over YouTube and other social media platforms – in celebration of the revocation of Article 370 in 2019. Drawing from my doctoral research on women’s sonic praxis and sovereignty in Kashmir, the presentation will also focus on examining songs as evidence of violence and as “transcripts of resistance”– delving into women’s intimate songworlds as archives and enactments of alternate spatio-temporal imaginaries.