The Auditory Setting: A Sonic Ethnography in Film & Media Arts

Satyajit Ray Film & Television Institute , Alliance française du Bengale, Radio Nopal & Culture Monks are very happy to present a webcast titled The Auditory Setting : A Sonic Ethnography in Film & Media Arts by Budhaditya Chattopadhyay who is an alumnus of SRFTI, Kolkata, on Feb 13, 2021 (Saturday) from 5 pm – 6:30 pm (India time).

This program is part of our commemoration of World Radio Day, 2021.

This webcast is free and open to all.

Sonic Auto-ethnography – Traces of Listening

This talk introduces Chattopadhyay’s two books, placing them within his body of work around site, sound and sonic auto-ethnography. The Auditory Setting (2021) investigates how narrative and a sense of place are constructed in film and media arts through the reproduction and mediation of site-specific environmental sounds, or ‘ambience’. Although this sonic backdrop acts as the acoustically mediated space where a story or event can take place, there has been little academic study of sound’s undervalued role in cinematic setting and production. Drawing on theories of narrative, diegesis, mimesis and presence, and following a varied number of relevant film and audio-visual works, this book is a ground-breaking exploration of human agency in mediating environmental sounds and the nature of the sonic experience in the Anthropocene. The Nomadic Listener (2020) is an augmented book project developed between 2012 and 2019. Based on the author’s artistic research on migration, contemporary urban experience, and sonic alienation, the book is composed of a series of texts stemming from psychogeographic explorations of contemporary cities, including Copenhagen, Berlin, Brussels, London, Kolkata, Vienna, Delhi, Hong Kong, Mumbai, Amsterdam, New York, Paris, among others. Each text is an act of listening, where the author records his surrounding environment and attempts to attune to the sonic fluctuations of movement and the passing of events. What surfaces is a collection of meditations on the minutiae of life movingly interwoven with the author’s own memories, associations, desires and reflections. As readers we are brought inside a tender map of contemporary urban experience, and the often lonely, surprising, and random interactions found in traveling.

Please register using this link

About the Speaker

Budhaditya Chattopadhyay is a media artist, composer, researcher, and writer. Incorporating diverse media, such as sound, text, and moving image, Chattopadhyay produces works for large-scale installation and live performance addressing contemporary issues of climate crisis, human intervention in the environment and ecology, urbanity, migration, race, and decolonization. Chattopadhyay holds a PhD in artistic research from the Academy of Creative and Performing Arts, Leiden University, The Netherlands, an MA in new media from Aarhus University, Denmark, and a Diploma in cinema from Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute, India; he has recently completed a one-year postdoctoral fellowship. Chattopadhyay has received numerous fellowships, residencies and international awards. His works have been widely exhibited, performed or presented across the globe, and published by Gruenrekorder (Germany) and Touch (UK). Chattopadhyay is the author of The Nomadic Listener (Errant Bodies Press, 2020) and The Auditory Setting (Edinburgh University Press, 2021); his writings on various issues around media arts regularly appear in peer-reviewed journals, magazines and other publication internationally.

Website: http://budhaditya.org/

Image courtesy : Marcel and Libby