Keynote 2: Interfaces

Abstract

Drawing inspiration from Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart’s The Hundreds as well as Matthew Goulish’s 39 Microlectures: In Proximity of Performance, Tara Rodgers and Jonathan Sterne have been playing interface writing games together. In this talk, we will explore interfaces through bite-sized forays. We will reflect on what an interface is in the age of electronic and digital instruments; the pleasures and pitfalls of knobs, menu diving and unmarked button combinations; whether relationships between physics and acoustical experience can truly be arbitrary; tech industry imperatives; and the different political axes that cut across interfaces as cultural techniques and technologies. 

Biographies

Tara Rodgers (Analog Tara) is a multi-instrumentalist composer, mix engineer, and historian of electronic music. She is the author of Pink Noises: Women on Electronic Music and Sound (2010) and numerous essays on sound and music technologies. Pink Noises is recognized as “an absolutely singular undertaking… changing the ways we think about electronic music” (Cycling ’74). Her music is described as “assertive work, bold in the precision and subtlety it takes to mix such signals with thrill and grace and restraint” (NPR Music). Originally from New York, she is now based in the Washington, DC, area.

Jonathan Sterne teaches in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University.  He is author of Diminished Faculties: A Political Phenomenology of Impairment (Duke 2021); MP3: The Meaning of a Format (Duke 2012), The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Duke 2003); and numerous articles on media, technologies and the politics of culture.  He is also editor of The Sound Studies Reader (Routledge 2012) and co-editor of The Participatory Condition in the Digital Age (Minnesota 2016).  He is working on a series of essays on artificial intelligence and culture, and with Mara Mills, he is writing Tuning Time: Histories of Sound and Speed.