[Cambridge, MA]

Sound as Knowledge: Roundtable with Holly Melgard, Matthew Battles, and others
November 6, 2019, 5:30 pm
at Mahindra Humanities Center

Sound/Text examines the intersections and interstices of language, music, and noise—from experimental poetry to sound archives, from conceptual art to psycholinguistics, from media aesthetics to neuroscience, from critical organology to sonic anthropology, from material culture to practice-based research. This seminar provides an interdisciplinary forum for conversations about the roles that sound plays in all aspects of our lives. We will consider questions around liveness, documentation, histories of interpretation, and new modes of reading and listening. In keeping with the broad umbrella of Sound Studies, the format of our meetings will explore an equally wide-ranging approach: academic talks, lecture performance, listening sessions, concerts, and roundtables.

Matthew Battles: Silence and Sight on the Far Side of the Moon

Matthew Battles is a maker and thinker whose work merges literary, scholarly, and artistic forms of inquiry. His writing on the cultural dimensions of science and technology appears such venues as The American Scholar, The Atlantic, Harper’s Magazine, and The New York Times. His most recent book, TREE, was published by Bloomsbury in 2017. At metaLAB, Matthew advances an agenda of creative research exploring the dark abundance of collections in libraries and museums; technology’s impact on our experience of art, culture, and the natural world; and the conditions of culture and experience in the context of deep time.

Holly Melgard: Echochambermusic: Holly Melgard Reads Holly Melgard

Holly Melgard is the author of the books Poems for Baby trilogy, The Making of The Americans, Black Friday, Reimbursement (Troll Thread), Cats Can’t Taste Sugar (Gaus PDF) and the chapbook Catcall (Ugly Duckling Presse). Along with Joey Yearous-Algozin, she has also co-authored White Trash (Troll Thread) and Liquidation. Having recently completed her PhD in the Buffalo Poetics Program, she is currently teaching writing at CUNY, freelance book designing, co-editing Troll Thread press, and living in Brooklyn, NY.

More on this series here.