Sonophagia – Eating Sound

Artists and researchers will present short contributions on a diverse range of topics related to sonophagia:

The neologism Sonophagia (or Sound Cannibalism) serves as a guiding principle for the various aesthetic and theoretical contributions to this event, drawing on sound studies, cultural theory, and postcolonial aesthetics. Sonophagia originates from ‘antropofagia’ in Brazilian modernism, where a total and radical engagement with other cultures – consuming, absorbing, and assimilating them – creates new forms of resistance and identity formation. Inspired by Oswald de Andrade’s Anthropophagic Manifesto, Sonophagia applies similar principles to auditory practices.

Sonophagia can be understood as ‘sonic ingestion’, where sounds, voices, and auditory practices are consumed, transformed, and re-contextualized to subvert dominant narratives, particularly in a postcolonial context.

More broadly, sonophagy explores the speculative reciprocity of the (spiritual, political, physical) representation of one medium within another.

Sonophagia emanates from indigenous Amazonian cosmologies, where the states of the Other – both prey and predator – are consumed in order to assimilate the signs of their alterity. In these cosmologies, singing or speaking is understood as a practice akin to killing, both of which serve to become the Other. The singer or speaker perceives themselves as a subject at the moment they declare their uniqueness by hearing their own voice through the voice of the Other, thereby de-hierarchizing difference. The term that aligns with the Other, or the enemy, is ‘future music’.

Sonophagia extends beyond sound to include words, things, bodies, and non-humans. It is found in the devouring of animal and corporeal sounds by humans for poetic purposes, aiming to undermine the alphabetical and capitalist order. Sonophagia also explores how certain human sound frequencies are consumed by non-humans for their growth, and how language parasites – both literally and metaphorically – bring about humans being ‘spoken’.

Can we imagine a futuristic, parasitic being that preys on speech and sound vibrations, including the sounds of battle, screams, and environmental noise, thriving on them as a energy source?

Such disruptions of referentiality lead to a biological, poetic, sonic, and linguistic entanglement in which postanthropocentric interests become audible.

• With:

• Tristam Vivian Adams (Cultural Theorist, ‘Vocal Semiocapitalism’)

• Sean Braune (Cultural Theorist, ‘Language Parasites‘)

• Emanuel Gollob (Artist, ‘Eating Caruso’) 

• Jens Hauser (Cultural Theorist, Moderator, ‘BioMedia’)

• Svenja Kratz (Artist, University of Tasmania, ‘Bone Breath‘)

• Matthias Lewy(Prof., Basel University,’Indigenous Sonorism‘)

• Ana Maria Ochoa (Prof., Tulane University, ‚Acoustic Multinaturalism‘)

• Theresa Schubert (Artist, ‚mEat Me‘)

• Klaus Spiess (Prof., Vienna Medical University. ‘Eating Caruso’)

• Melanie Strasser (Cultural Theorist, Vienna University, ‚Tupi or not Tupi‘)