Feminist Making, Doing, & Sensing is the 17th meeting of philoSOPHIA, a society for continental feminism. We’ll be meeting as a hybrid conference on Treaty 7 Territory in southern Alberta, hosted by Mount Royal University’s Library in Calgary, Canada on March 14-17, 2024.

Messaging the Future: Lathe-Cut Records as Time Travelling Device (w/ Owen Chapman)

In this workshop, we will work together to plan, craft and then record short messages to the future, which, using our trusty Masco RK-5 portable “suitcase cutter” record lathe, will be cut onto polycarbonate records that, fortunately and unfortunately, will persist long after “us” — some 200 years into the future (depending on storage conditions). Working through this process together, we hope to explore a range of weird philosophical questions about (all-too-linear forms of) temporality and (plastic) futurity, about the materiality of sonic expression (only some of which we can hear), and about the limits, but also potentials, of the very desire, and thus ambition, to message the future.

Making, Doing and Sensing at the Sonic Brink: Paper Presentation

This performance-lecture aims to experiment, and potentially break with, the figure of the horizon and its standardized modes of perception in order propose a counter-gesture, through a figure I call the sonic brink. Opposed to the linear, individual and correlational geometries that undergird optical horizons, the sonic brink is a speculative diagram that resituates questions of perception, thinkability and agency in relation to aural intrusions, collective resonances, immanent noise, and, ultimately, sound refusal. The aim here is to not only talk about what sound can do, but to deploy sound as philosophical material in its own right. As such, this performance-lecture aims to practice weird forms of sonic thinking as just one mode of reorienting approaches to feminist making, doing, and sensing.