The lecture of Paul Feigelfeld traces the evolution of media, technology and cybernetics from ancient China to the Baroque to today, and probes the different material, economic and political layers, biologies and geologies that make up the constellations of reality. Today’s paradigms of cloud computing, darknet, deep learning machines, ubiquitous computing and smart materials already incubate a near future in which technology becomes organic and thus evolutionary and intelligent. The sonic plays a significant role in this: In the difference between spoken and written language and its systems, in the neurons named after the strings on the Greek kithara, in immortal voices from beyond the grave on Edison's first phonograph records, in the frequencies of radio transmissions, microprocessors and screens, or in the communication systems of slime molds and plants, sound and the sonic perform reality, yet we still rely on our eyes.

Founded in 2013 by Grégory Castéra and Sandra Terdjman, and animated by a network linked to the arts, science and social engagement, Council develops an artistic institution born out of the art of council. Today, Council brings together artistic research laboratory (the inquiries), a program for the production of artworks, and a fellowship. Council acts in the long-term and on an international scale, modulating its structure according to the necessities of its activity. In accordance with these conditions, Council seeks to observe situations where human nature is reexamined, and to experiment with radical alterity - "the way I do not understand the other is different from the way he does not understand me". Grégory Castéra brings specific speech liked to the current research of COUNCIL on the diversities of hearing abilities—the Tacet, or the Cochlear Vertigo—a project initiated in 2013 which arose out of our encounter and experience with a school for deaf and hard of hearing children in Sharjah (United Arab Emirates). The project aims to offer new dimensions to listening by exploring sound perception among profoundly deaf persons. The essay traces the history of Council’s research through written accounts and interviews, reproductions of texts and commissions, as well as artworks designed for online exhibition. The essay will be regularly updated and expanded, concluding with an exhibition scheduled for 2016. Over the course of Council’s research two artistic productions were developed: a choreographic work by Noé Soulier and Jeffrey Mansfield and a sound installation by Tarek Atoui.

This lecture is an introduction of a future exhibition, Tacet, on politics of listening and the diversity of hearing abilities (Bergen Biennial, September 2016). It is mostly composed of excerpts of fictional and non-fictional texts selected for their approach to the un- or para- hearing worlds, wether they are biological or technical. The text are read aloud while a sign language interpreter is interpreting them.

www.houseofcouncil.org

Paul Feigelfeld is the academic coordinator of the Digital Cultures Research Lab at the Centre for Digital Cultures at Leuphana University Lüneburg. He studied Cultural Studies and Computer Science at Humboldt University in Berlin. Between 2004 and 2011, he worked for German media theorist Friedrich Kittler and is one of the editors of Kittler’s Collected Works. From 2010 to 2013, he was a teacher and researcher at Humboldt’s Institute for Media Theories with Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Ernst. He is currently working in his PhD the­sis tit­led "The Great Loop Forward. Incompleteness and Media between China and the West" and has been a visiting fellow at the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Institute for the History of Natural Science in Beijing in early 2013. Besides his academic work, he works as a curator, writer, translator and editor in the fields of art, architecture, design, theory, and philosophy, with publications like 032c, frieze, Texte zur Kunst, Novembre, PIN-UP, or Modern Weekly China, and publishers like Merve, Sternberg Press, and Spector Books. He is also a contributor to the collective endeavours of #60pages. In early 2014, he was the first guest curator of the Museum of Post Digital Cultures. He teaches at Institut Kunst in Basel and UdK Berlin.

Grégory Castéra is co-director of Council, an agency for research and artistic production that explores the relations between arts, sciences, philanthropy and politics. He served as co-director of Les Laboratoires d'Aubervilles, Paris from 2010 to 2012. Over this period he conducted various research projects on discourse formation within artistic practices, giving rise to publishing projects, shows, events and exhibitions. In 2010, he initiated On Ecologies of Art Practices (awarded the Hors les Murs grant by the Institut Français in 2013). He holds a Bachelor degree in Economics (University of Tours) and a Masters in Design and Implementation of Cultural Projects (Sorbonne, Paris 1).