Alan Licht, author of Sound Art Revisited, will be in discussion with sound studies and resonance scholar, Julie Beth Napolin. They will discuss the implications of Licht’s new book for the history of sound art/sound art history, which constantly has to be “revisited,” not only because it is still largely unknown but because it depends upon the reiteration of the old. What does it mean to revisit sound art today and think sound beyond music?

This program is co-presented by the ICA, Price Lab for Digital Humanities, Penn History of Art, and the Department of Music.

Captioning will be provided in-person and Zoom for by Caption Access. Please contact Natalie Sandstrom, Program Coordinator, at nsand@ica.upenn.edu with any questions.

Bios

Alan Licht has lectured widely on sound art and served on faculty in the Music/Sound department at the Bard College Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts. He is a contributing music editor at BOMB magazine and writes frequently for Artforum, Art Review, Parkett, Organised Sound, and the WIRE. He is the author of Common Tones: Selected interviews with artists and musicians 1995-2020 (Blank Forms, 2021), Sound Art: Beyond Music, Between Categories (Rizzoli, 2007) and the editor of the book Will Oldham on Bonnie Prince Billy (Faber & Faber/ W.W. Norton, 2012). Licht is a practicing musician and sound artist who appears on over 100 recordings and whose sound installations have been mounted in the U.S. and Europe.

Julie Beth Napolin is a scholar, musician, radio producer, and the author of The Fact of Resonance: Modernist Acoustics and Narrative Form (Fordham UP, 2020), shortlisted for the 2021 Memory Studies Association First Book Award. Her work on vibration and the colonial beginnings of American experimental music has received multiple awards, published alongside of dialogues with Marina Rosenfeld and Mendi + Keith Obadike, and essays on literary modernism, sound, feminism, and race. These have appeared in such venues as in Vibratory Modernism, Sounding Modernism, Social Text, Conradiana, qui parle, continent, and The Wire. A member of the editorial board of Sound Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, she’s currently editing the Bloomsbury Handbook of Sound Studies and Listening.

Support

Programming at ICA has been made possible in part by the Emily and Jerry Spiegel Fund to Support Contemporary Culture and Visual Arts and the Lise Spiegel Wilks and Jeffrey Wilks Family Foundation, and by Hilarie L. & Mitchell Morgan.