Trace Reddell

Presentations

DC23 Opening keynote: “Other Kinds of Mind There: Sonic Substance in Extended MindMachine-Music Systems”

On October 19, 2023, I delivered the opening keynote to the first in-person Dancecult conference at the University of Huddersfield, UK.

My performance lecture included live dj/vj and spoken word, taking the audience through the main works and themes discussed in my recent Dancecult feature article, “Other Kinds of Mind There: Echologies of Psychedelic Sonic Substance.”

DC23: After the Pandemic
Dancecult Conference 2023
University of Huddersfield, UK
Oct. 19-20, 2023

Psychedelic Praxis: Integrating Transformational Experiences in the Liberal Arts Classroom

I approach the liberal arts classroom as an opportunity for transformational experiences that integrate a creative and critical praxis rooted in psychedelic processes. This presentation will introduce four different course models I have delivered at the University of Denver. These courses reflect differences in student populations; content, modalities, and materials; and learning goals and outcomes. Most involve collaboration with units from across the university system in larger interdisciplinary clusters. “Psychedelia in the Age of Artificial Intelligence” surveys the history of psychedelic music alongside interdisciplinary research and scholarship in psychedelic studies. This class engages writers with “spontaneous get-with-it” improvisation (Jack Kerouac, Neil Cassady, Syd Barrett, Tommy Hall), sound observations (Pauline Oliveros), and small group writing jams (Robert Hunter). The graduate-level “Pharmakomedia Seminar” examines the histories of drugs, media, and critical theory since the 19th century. This course integrates confessional journaling (Thomas De Quincey, Diana Slattery) with the creation of protocols for critical media interventions (Walter Benjamin, Bernard Stiegler). “Making Media Matter” brings a new materialist approach to critical praxis for students and faculty from emergent digital practices, philosophy, and literary studies. Initially a colloquium for doctoral candidates in religious studies, then a studio think-tank in EDP, “Spiritual Technologies” prompts students to design speculative spiritual artifacts, augment and manifest them during an amulet-making workshop, engage each other through collaborative world-building and role-play, and collectively curate an exhibition of spiritual technologies. Since I am not in any position to administer psychedelics in or outside of the classroom, I approach the psychedelic by way of proxies and adjuncts developed through a personal creative practice partly rooted in surrealist games, beat improvisation, situationist intervention, media jamming, remixing, speculative fantasy, and extrapolation. The “psychedelic praxis” used in each learning context involves the development of techniques and technological supports for extended cognition, which in art and design involves manifesting some form of material affordance. As class facilitator and lead experience designer, I encourage students to approach technologies through a lens of ethical obligation: development of “entheomedia” that support the compassionate stewardship of the planet’s biosphere (realm of being), emosphere (realm of feeling), and noosphere (realm of knowing).

Psychedemia 2022 (Aug 12-14, 2022, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH)

Psychedemia brings together scholars and thinkers from across disciplines to evaluate the progress of the psychedelic renaissance with the goal of forging an inclusive and evidence-based path forward.

RE:SOUND 2019 TRACK: The Return of The Sonic Real

I will be co-chairing a track of three sessions exploring the emergence of the sound object as a vital sonic/material hybrid engaging the phenomenology of human affect, posthuman and alien ontologies, sonic realisms, and mental health — in theory and sonic practices. My session on “Sonic Materialisms” calls for presentations exploring the intersection of sound studies and new materialist philosophies. I would like to facilitate further consideration of the characteristic “thingness” of sonic innovation in ways that grapple with converging machinic, technical, organic, acoustic, and imaginary materials. From glitch to vibration, circuit-bending to analog synthesis, interactivity to installation, sonic materialism should help us apprehend the sound object.

Media Art History: RE:SOUND 2019 (Aug 19-23, 2019, Aalborg, Denmark)
The 12th Anniversary International Conference on the Histories of Media Art, Science and Technology will take place at Aalborg University, CREATE (School of Communication, Art, Technology and Music in collaboration with Research Laboratory of Art & Technology.

Decoding the Sonic Xenomorph

This paper presents my work on sonic science fiction in cinema and philosophy, blending Pierre Schaeffer’s work on concrete music with the alien phenomena of speculative materialism to apprehend the emergence of the sound object as a vital sonic/material hybrid. I introduce the concept of sonorous object-oriented ontologies through a few cinematic models. The electronic tonalities created by Louis and Bebe Barron for Forbidden Planet (1956) are product of a sonic autopoeisis but also a ritualistic cybernetic biomedia programming that involves the Barrons’ systematic torture and autopsy of alien sound beings.

Two SF/horror hybrids, Alien (1979) and The Thing (1982), tap into earlier golden age paranoia while taking advantage of the expanded spatiality of surround sound reproduction, a psychotechnological adjunct of affect. As the sonic “thing” that resides outside of what Kember & Zylinska call the “instrumental dimension of technology,” synthetic heartbeats in both films constitute an alien point-of-audition occulting the unstable biotechnologies of the sonic xenomorph.

Given the affective resonance that noises accrue in the context of SF/horror, diegesis becomes highly unstable, gravitating between arbitrary aesthetic differentiations of the expressive capacity of composed music and plausible sound effects; this points sonorous ontological instabilities toward interior, unknowable gulfs of abject alien technicities.

The last film I discuss aims this instability toward political bodies. A dystopian film from the West German postpunk underground, Decoder (1984) is concerned with the ambient sonic programming of human consciousness. The sonorous object’s capacity for blurring the contours of history and memory is rendered as a technocultural strategy by which musique concrète combines with black noise magic against the media-saturated culture of consumption, surveillance, and mind control.

TUNING SPECULATION VI: Auscultations | Occultations, Listening to the Occult (Nov 2-4 2018, Bloomington IN)
The 6th annual interdisciplinary conference dedicated to bringing insights from speculative sound studies to bear on critical questions about contemporary media ecologies.