SONOLOGIA 2016 – Out of Phase
22. bis 25. November 2016 São Paulo, Brazil
International conference on sound studies
Katrin Köppert, Lehrende der Abteilung Medientheorien, hält den Vortrag:
The Sound of ACT UP! Aids Activism as Sound(e)scape and Sound-Escapade
Katrin Köppert, University of Art and Design Linz/Austria
In the midst of its narrative and reflection on the US-American Aids movement and the related selforganizedstructures of support, that emerged in San Francisco, the documentary film “We werehere” (David Weissman, 2011) transitions radically precisely at the moment when the internationaldirect action advocacy group AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP!) is introduced andvisualized on the screen. This turn is not just characterized by the almost iconic representation of“carried images” (Holert 2008) and graphics, that Douglas Crimp denotes as “Demo Graphics”(1990) and Gregg Bordowitz as “Imagevirus” (2010), but also by the sudden introduction of soundemerging from the discreet cascade of piano and strings.
In this talk I would like to present some initial thoughts on the unattended dimension of sound withinthe visual culture of early and current HIV/Aids activism and ask about the queer-affective potentialof sound as well as about its unintended impediments for the mobilization of protest then and now.Sound constitutes an escapade, a willful departure from popularized debates about the westernvideo-art and activism of ACT UP!. By means of this departure I would like to relate transgressivegender and sexual visual politics of ACT UP! (pro adultery/promiscuity/affective relationships andcontra monogamy/abstinence/identity-driven relations) to the movement’s willful tones, screams andnoises (Sound-Escapade ), and also to the disobedience of its silences (Sound-Escape). Based on aselection of activist videos and home videos and referring to their use within current mainstream filmproductions, I would like to ask what role the soundscape of ACT UP! might have played during theearly Aids crisis and plays for the current imagination within diverging cultures of remembrance.
