In Place: The Ecologies of Sound in the Southwest

In Place: The Ecologies of Sound in the Southwest features sound, video, and new media artists Jennifer Nev-Diaz and Dylan McLaughlin in conversation with Dr. Steven Feld exploring sound as placed-based knowledge. They will discuss how sonic and visual art combined can convey the spirit or psyche of place; how technology, community, and ethics shape their work in the Southwest; and how sound can forge emotional, cultural, and physical connections to place. See Biographies below.


This is the third in SciArt Santa Fe’s three-part series titled In Place: Recentering Eco-critical knowledge of the Natural World, in which diverse humanities scholars, artists, and scientists consider regional land-use histories and ethics of place.

Recorded: August 19, 2021, 5:30 PM MT

This was the third in SciArt Santa Fe’s three-part LASER series In Place: Recentering Ecocritical Knowledge of the Natural World in which humanities scholars, artists, and scientists consider regional land-use histories and ethics of place.

This series was made possible by the generous support of the New Mexico Humanities Council and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Dylan McLaughlin Dylan McLaughlin is a sound and video artist, storyteller, and educator currently living and working in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Looking to sites of extraction, his work explores forms of witness and implication. In his multi-media installation, interactive, and performative works, McLaughlin looks to engage the poetics and politics of landscape formation and human affect. McLaughlin has exhibited solo and collaborative works across the country including at the Denver Art Museum and Smack Mellon in Brooklyn, NY. McLaughlin is born of the Diné people. He received his BFA in New Media Art from the Institute of American Indian Arts, and his Master of Fine Arts in Art and Ecology at the University of New Mexico.


https://coverground.org/work

Jennifer Nev-Diaz is a new media artist, based out of Albuquerque, focused on creating immersive, interactive environments. She was born in Los Angeles and lived in South Central well into her teens before spending a few years in rural New Mexico. By blending various mediums such as photography, programming languages, video, sound, and more she invites the viewer to create unique experiences. Her work focuses on themes of memory, trauma, nature, curated spaces, and self awareness within the art of interaction. She is heavily influenced by surveillance art, feminism, and the intersection of art and technology. Nev-Diaz currently holds a Bachelor’s of Fine Art from the University of New Mexico.


https://nevdiaz.com/

Steven Feld, Ph.D. Steven Feld is an anthropologist, filmmaker, musician, and sound artist. He is a Senior Scholar at the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fé, and Distinguished Professor of Anthropology Emeritus at the University of New Mexico. Recipient of a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 1991, he was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1994, and in 2003 received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. Feld's academic research principally concerns the anthropology of sound, a term he coined in 1972 to extend the anthropology of music and language into a more critical sensory and aesthetic focus on voice and poetics, all-species sound relations, media and technologies, and environmental and ecological acoustics.


Feld's work ranges around the world from the anthropology of sound studies in the Bosavi rainforest region in Papua New Guinea, where he researched the relations of environmental ambient sounds, bird calls, weeping, poetics, and song, to a research project on the global anthropology of “world music,” researching equity, representation, ethics, and power disparities between indigenous musicians and in the world of rock stars and the music industry, and on to studies of urban diasporic acoustemology and jazz history in Accra, Ghana, focusing on Ghanaba, the man who introduced the African “talking drum” to African American jazz drummers in the 1950s. Based on the Bosavi research, Feld expanded the framework of the anthropology of sound in the early 1990s to acoustemology, a term coined at the conjunction of acoustics and epistemology to refer to sound as a way of knowing.


www.stevenfeld.net