The floated feeling of music: Weaving Histories of Art, Technology, and Disability

We warmly invite you to join us for “The ‘floated’ feeling of music”: Weaving Histories of Art, Technology, and Disability, a lecture from Dr Jaipreet Virdi (Associate Professor, University of Delaware) on Dorothy Brett's The Stokowski Symphony. 

This hybrid event is free to attend and your space can be reserved via Eventbrite.

Abstract:

An intimate embrace of music, art, and technology, The Stokowski Symphony is painter Dorothy Brett’s most underrated portrait series. An expressionist experimentation featuring surrealist images of conductor Leopold Stokowski, the portraits are designed to evoke a mood analogous to the musical composition of an orchestra. The process of producing the series, moreover, required Brett to hear and understand music—a challenging endeavor given her deafness, but made possible by her use of various sound technologies and hearing aids. The series, I argue, encapsulate Brett’s acoustemology, a phrase coined by Steven Feld to define a way of knowing and being in the world through sonic sensibilities. The abstractionism of The Stokowski Symphony not only resembles an orchestral interlude, but also captures the ways in which Brett’s hearing aids mediated her experiences of music, providing newfound approaches for historicizing disability histories with art history and the history of technology.

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