ODC 2021 // Emergence/y. A sound difference

In a famous 1988 interview with Enzo Restagno, Luigi Nono recalled his trip to the Greenland Sea, pointing to the richness of its constantly mutating colours and its contrasting sonic world of silences and powerful acoustic forces. Such extraordinary acoustic events arise from a fraught texture of sound absences and sound presences – a texture in which the unexpected transits prove to be relevant and fragile at the same theme. Can these imponderable shifts in sonic behaviour be read as figures of emergence and as figures of emergency?

Similar to the case of the icebergs, what emerges is often not the totality of a thing but rather a figure of it – a figure that at the same time reveals and disguises something.

How is then emergence related to (full, or phantasmatic) visibility, stability and salvation? Is then emergence not a sheer an-archic event, something that can simply disappear under the brink showing just its own trajectory? Is emergence as exposed, naked precarity only the anticipation of a future loss, or is it the ecstatic fulfilment of a desire?

• Emergence is a space and a motion magnitude (etymologically, ex-mergo literally means I plunge upwards, I un-sink) that becomes a time category – the category of an urgent, always too compressed time span where things can be destroyed or mended: emergency.
• Emergence/y then as an urge, as appeal, as a call to assembly, to action and to resistance, as a physical action, a push, an impetus, as an interruption and as a fight - as an intervention that has to be carried out in a brief, already almost desperately elapsed time.
• Emergence/y: what stands against annihilation, resistance to a force, opposition to (cyclic/recurrent/incumbent) submersion and to merging with something politically, environmentally and technologically violent.
• Emergence/y as the richness of production, of research, of a manner of playing, composing, acting – even – or perhaps in an exemplary way– as the matter and as the experience of sound and as an occasion for artistic research.

A virtual event

In view of the current epidemiological situation, the 2021 edition of the Orpheus Doctoral Conference (ODC) will be a virtual event, hosted by Orpheus Institute Ghent, 6–7 October 2021.

The conference keynote speaker will be composer, sound artist and scholar, Agostino di Scipio.

Guest speakers: Niels Berentsen (HEMGE), David Mesquita (SCB), Catherine Motuz (SCB) and Cathy Van Eck (HKB).

Join the conference as an observer: https://forms.gle/7hmKBoyghM13hCEz8