Track 09
The Politics of Evidence:
Refugees, Frictions, Sound-representation.

Track chairs Morten Søndergaard (Aalborg University, Copenhagen), Luz Maria Sanchez, Monica Bassbous

The context of representation is essential when turning data about geopolitical conditions such as the current refugee situation, into a knowledge based on which we can relate to and negotiate that situation. We cannot access or work with pure data as it is, we need a representation of it, for instance, statistic tables, graphics, auditory displays or way of making the data appear to our senses. Data does not exist outside its mediation. Following this line of thought the medium by which data is represented is significant to both our scientific research of data and our scientific understanding of the world as well as to the common public ideas of what data is, or what ‘the world’ – for instance that of the refugee, departing and traveling – is.

The difference between visualization and sonification is therefore not a mere matter of superficial representing of ‘the same’ in different manners, but in a much more significant sense, it is a matter of conditioning both data and ‘world’. This relation is intricate and not a simple equation. The track seeks to unfold, not how sonic representations of data are made on a technological level, but how sound is constituent of our relation to data and ultimately to our ideas and understandings of the geopolitical world – and how to represent that world.

It is this intricate relation between world, data, sound, representation, and interpretation that we wish to investigate further in this track as a politics of evidence.

this track calls for proposals considering geopolitical conditions from the perspective of sound as an evidential medium. In particular, we call for proposals that investigate sound as the medium of representation of refugee and immigration crisis, as well as forced displacements of people, all over the world. We welcome audio papers, artistic papers, and academic papers, or a combination thereof.