Argos, centre for art & media in Brussels presents

David Toop lecture
Ways of Hearing, Resisting the Visual

We 17.10.2007 // 20:30 // FREE

“Seeing comes before words. The child sees and recognizes before it  
can speak.” These are the first two sentences of John Berger’s Ways  
of Seeing. Berger defines sight as the primary human sense and  
introduces the idea that we find our place in the world through  
seeing. What this premise ignores is the fact that sound comes before  
seeing, and the child listens before it looks. In this lecture David  
Toop will investigate the position of sound in the realm of the  
senses, the relationship between hearing and seeing, between silence  
and not seeing. What did Marcel Duchamp mean when he proclaimed "one  
can look at seeing; one can't hear hearing"? Are we living in a  
visual age, as the cliché goes, or rather in an aural world? What can  
words and images tell us about sonic absences and hauntings? What are  
the challenges sound artists, who work in the domain of visual arts,  
are confronted with?

As a musician, author and curator David Toop (UK, 1949) is  
particularly interested in the potential of sound as a musical  
element, free of harmonic and tonal systems; as a reflection of extra- 
musical systems from biology, geography, technology, cognitive  
processes, social relations, political models or body language. He  
traces and records how today - in the world of media and technology -  
sounds travel through time and space, meet and converge, develop and  
'live'. He documented his personal quest in several books (Rap  
Attack, Ocean of Sound, Exotica, and Haunted Weather), articles (The  
Wire, The Times and the Face, among others), exhibitions (e.g. Sonic  
Boom in the Hayward Gallery, London) and musical projects, often in  
collaboration with a wide range of artists, such as Brian Eno, John  
Zorn, Derek Bailey, Akio Suzuki, Steven Berkoff and Mitsutaka Ishii.

in the context of the ARGOS project OPEN ARCHIVE #1
the 'Ways of Hearing' programme is curated by Stoffel Debuysere


Stoffel Debuysere
www.argosarts.org
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