Inquiry

While current crises drive us toward increasingly networked communication systems, it’s equally vital to re-examine our modes of speaking, listening, broadcasting, and consuming. Whose voices are loudest? Who is heard in moments of crisis and upheaval? Who is amplified? Who is silenced? How do we contend with the distorted and fragmentary testimonies we encounter in increasingly mediated space? We ask these questions as we grapple with legibility, communicability, empathy, misinformation, disinformation, and the urgency of making ourselves understood. While this need is uniquely challenging in the gatekept worlds of streaming, social networks, and news media, it also begins offline. Embodied and collective actions can defy silencing by inventing new ways for being heard, amplified, and circulated. We find urgent reminders in artistic and research practices that insist on the value of sense, sensation, perception, dissent, witnessing, gathering, and imagining in the face of inequitably distributed information systems.