17 december 2009

Towards an Ethical Audio-Vision

Tereza Havelkova’s talk will start from the contention that it is in terms of multisensory and embodied experience that alternatives may be offered against the dominant modes of representation on the Western stage and screen, and against the distanced and disembodied kinds of spectatorship such modes elicit. She is particularly interested in the suggestion that by means of a turn to sensory engagement a more ethical relationship between the perceiver and the perceived may be brought into being. While this proposition has mainly been formulated in terms of visual strategies, she seeks to transpose it into the context of mixed media, and reformulate it as an issue of audio-vision. She will revisit classic texts by Adorno and Benjamin to address, on the one hand, the problem of sensory manipulation exemplified by the Wagnerian conception of the Gesamtkunstwerk and to explore, on the other hand, some alternative strategies of mixed-media construction potentially productive of a more ethical mode of audio-vision.

Tereza Havelkova is Assistant Professor in the Department of Musicology at Charles University in Prague. Her dissertation, entitled “Opera as Hypermedium,” is a theoretical inquiry into contemporary encounters of opera and media. Her work has appeared in such publications as Sonic Mediations (Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2008) and Inside Knowledge (Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2009). She is also the founder of a Czech journal for contemporary music called His Voice.