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.

POM Beirut Tracks

(based on the call for topics)

Based on the first call for topics, the call is now open for individual submissions within the following tracks:

01.Track: Arab revolutions: Refugees, Communication technology, Mobile connectivity.
02.Track: Terrorism machines: Art production, Sociopolitical implications.
03.Track: Fourth Industrial Revolution (IR 4.0): Art, Cyberphysics, Automated creativity.
04.Track: The Battlefield of Vision: Perceptions of War and Wars on Perception.
05.Track: Internet of things: Dystopian Artificial Intelligence, Black Boxes.
06.Track: Living machines: Wars within living organisms.
07.Track: Artificial intelligence for art AIA: Computational creativity, Neural networks, Simulating human activity.
08.Track: Permanent Telesurveillance: Privacy, data protection, panopticon.
09.Track: The Politics of Evidence: Refugees, Frictions, Sound-representation.
10.Track: Body-politics of the machines: Troubles WITH/IN/OUT art, body, perception, politics, and technology.
11.Track: The Ecosystem Analogy: Machinery of Nature, Borrowed landscapes, Anthropology of the near.

Submission information

last updated January 8th, 2019

Notification of acceptance will be announced by the end of March 2019.

Individual proposals should consist of a 300-word abstract.

All submissions will be reviewed, according to the highest international academic standards.

Submitters should also upload a short bio file, no longer than a ½ page per person.

Please note that there will be a conference fee payable by all participants and delegates of the conference (Fees and packages will be announced in January 2019).

POM Beirut 2019 committees

last updated January 8th, 2019

POM Series executive committee
Dr. Morten SØNDERGAARD and Dr. Laura BELOFF.

POM Beirut 2019 Steering Committee
Dr. Morten SØNDERGAARD, Dr. Laura BELOFF, Dr. Hassan CHOUBASSI, Mr. Joe ELIAS, and Mrs. Sahar CHARARA.

POM Beirut 2019 Organizing Committee
Dr. Hassan CHOUBASSI, Mr. Joe ELIAS, Mrs. Sahar CHARARA, Dr. Fadi YAMMOUT, Dr. Walid RAAD, Ms. Fatima ABOU NASSIF, and Mr. Tarek Mourad.