Earlids

“Come with me now and sit in the grandstand of life. The seats are free and entertainment is continuous. The world orchestra is always playing: we hear it inside and outside, from near and far. There is no silence for the living. We have no ear lids. We are condemned to listen.”     – R. Murray Schafer

We are often reminded that we are a culture of spectacle. If we privilege our eyes, what does it mean to return our attention to our ears and listening? As Schafer and many others have argued, our ears open us to the world. Our species once depended on the openness of the ear to shape understanding; the survival of our earliest forebears may have depended on a keen attention to the snaps, scrapes and echoes that surrounded them as signals of imminent danger. As long as there have been sensate ears to hear it, sound has been leveraged as a tool to create community, to maintain power, to please, and to punish, but have we begun to lose our appreciation for the potency of this sense that sits in the shadow of vision? How can listening and the openness of the ear help us to think through interdisciplinary work in art, philosophy, media and beyond?

In the exhibition Earlids, the research group Sound@Newschool draws attention to some of the many manifestations of sound within our own university including performance, radio documentary, sound and image, interactive installations, community-based podcasting, video, and sound art. Earlids seeks to engage the following questions: How can sound be used as a vehicle to transport meaning across different disciplines? How might a focus on our methods of listening to, generating, and studying sound, provide a feedback mechanism for shared dialogue? How might sound act as a transdisciplinary hub within the New School?

Earlids began with a call for works from students, faculty, alumni and staff, and the works seen/heard here are drawn from those submissions. Artists include:

The exhibition is accompanied by two online projects that
can be found at sound.newschool.edu:

• The Conversation Sound Showcase
  The works presented here will be available as a permanent online exhibition. We will mount a new showcase annually.
• The Conversation at 2 West 13th Street
  For this online project Sound@ invited participants from the New School and at large to respond sonically to their choice of 33 images taken within the Sheila Johnson Design Center.

You can also look for QR codes at the 2 west 13th street building
to listen to the playlists created for each specific location.