Budhaditya Chattopadhyay is a multidisciplinary artist, researcher, and writer. Chattopadhyay produces works for exhibition, installation, and live performance that address contemporary issues of environment and ecology, migration, and decoloniality. His works have been widely exhibited, performed, or presented globally. Chattopadhyay has an extensive body of scholarly publications in media art history, sound studies, artistic research, media theory, and aesthetics, published in leading peer-reviewed journals. He is the author of five books, including The Nomadic Listener (2020), The Auditory Setting (2021), Between the Headphones (2021), and Sound Practices in the Global South (2022). Chattopadhyay holds a PhD in Artistic Research and Sound Studies from the Academy of Creative and Performing Arts, Leiden University. He was a former Visiting Professor at the IXDM, Basel Academy of Art and Design (FHNW), Switzerland. Currently, he is a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design (KMD), University of Bergen, Norway.

Seminar III

Archival Intelligence: Epistemic Shifts from Sound to Listening

The third and final seminar from the MSCA Postdoctoral Project Connecting Resonances

Organised by project leader Budhaditya Chattopadhyay (KMD University of Bergen)

Seminar: 23 - 24 May 2026, Bergen Assembly 

Exhibition opening: 22 May 2026, Lydgalleriet

Performances: 23 May 2026, BEK

Sounds are energies and social impulses that defy capture, control, categorization, and inscription. Post-colonial and Decolonial theorists and critics of archiving read large institutional archives and museums in the West as potential sites of conflict for centralizing capture and storage of ephemeral experiences, recorded, technologically mediated, and objectified with an extractive relation to colonized lands and people as resources. They produce stagnant, often inaccessible, repositories of cultural capital through forced collection, quantification, and legislation that reduce experiences to scientific categories. The seminar “Archival Intelligence: Epistemic Shifts from Sound to Listening” departs from this critical position to offer diverse perspectives on the roles of archives, museums, and other institutional spaces of power today with control over narratives of culture and history. Broader questions are posed about the recordability of ephemeral experiences, such as sound as an object, proposing a multiplicity of listening positionalities and suggesting an epistemic shift from sound to listening and from production to reception. The seminar pertinently questions the roles of technologies like AI, the extraction of data from archives and museums under neo-colonial power, and the affordances of corporations. As FIAT admits, today’s AI systems are trained on datasets derived from European institutional archives (“We are neck-deep in digital oil”), suggesting an ominous nexus between institutional archives and corporate AI. The seminar emerges from the artistic research project Archival Intelligence as a discursive assembly that intervenes in archives of recorded sounds through situated listening acts of transgression, advocating the liberation of incarcerated sonic impulses through participatory storytelling aided by poetic and artistic interventions enabled by technologies such as AI. The project manifests as an exhibition at Lydgalleriet, Bergen, opening on 22 May and running until 19 June 2026, a seminar at Bergen Assembly on 23 – 24 May 2026, and live acts at Bergen Senter for Elektronisk Kunst on 23 May 2026. 

Seminar II: https://kmd.uib.no/en/Calendar/seminar/ears-to-the-ground

Ears to the Ground: Ecology, Environment and (Sonic) Media Technologies (beyond Eurocentric models)

5th - 6th June 2025, at KMD, UiB, in collaboration with BEK

The second seminar from the MSCA Postdoctoral Project Connecting Resonances (2023–2026) at KMD explores the cultural and spatiotemporal limitations of “technology,” often understood as a Western anthropogenic concept that facilitates linear progress, control, and profit within a capitalist model. Technological modernity is celebrated as an outcome of the European Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution, and wartime innovations in electronics, such as transistors, sound recording, and photography, which were often thought to originate from Europe and traveled to other parts of the world, were received without resistance and impacted the modernization of non-Western societies. This view is propagated within a colonial narrative of Europe’s superiority. Within this narrative, Premodern technologies and tools, especially those born outside of Europe, are not considered or recognized. However, technological innovations in the vast regions of the Global South, spanning broader fields such as agriculture, disaster management, and geoengineering, as well as cultural practices like musical instrumentation, tuning, and design, were as intricate and sophisticated as their global counterparts. This seminar will demonstrate how these premodern and precolonial sound-producing technologies were more integrated and embedded in natural systems, considering both ecological and material aspects, as well as temporal and spatial contexts. The seminar will not only facilitate a reassessment of media technological history but also de-modernize Western-born technologies on a global scale, thereby democratizing the field of electronic arts.

Seminar I: https://kmd.uib.no/en/Calendar/seminar/sonic-proximity

Sonic Proximity: Studies in Interpersonal and Cultural Encounters in the Field of Sound

4th - 5th October 2024, at KMD, UiB, in collaboration with BEK

Sound travels from one body to another, and from one geography to another. On its paths, it makes a myriad of connections. An utterance connects a voice to its listener based on its manifold positionalities; thus, knowledge is shared in a society. This social capacity for listening is significant when we consider sound in terms of the intricacies of communication and engaging in everyday contexts, thereby enhancing our capacities to connect and build a relational world. Recently, Peruvian scholar Marisol de la Cadena suggested in a talk that ‘there is no singular world, or many discreet worlds. There are only connections and relations.’ Resonating with these relational dynamics and potentialities embedded in (co-)sounding and listening, this first seminar from a series of critical gatherings around the topic of sonic relationality and confluence, engaging with thoughts and perspectives on sonic interactions across a diverse range of scenarios and experiences, from personal to collective, and from social to political. The gathering examines interpersonal and cultural encounters in the field of sound and listening from a micro-scale (interpersonal exchanges through intimacies of listening) to a macro-scale (acoustic communication between critical regions of a planetary society, e.g., between Global Norths and Global Souths). This more comprehensive range and scalability of the discourse aims to shed light on the fundamental issues in sonic exchanges, contributing to the studies of globalization concerned with intercultural encounters and media technological transmissions between Global North and South as a two-way process of confluence, as well as the listening that unfolds between peoples impacted by the larger socio-political forces of co-sounding. 

Books/Monographs:

2026: Sonic Perspectives from the Global Souths: Unheard Reciprocity, Resonant Relationality, and Aural Confluence. New York: Bloomsbury Academic (forthcoming).                   

Book chapters:

2026: “Sharawadi Effect”. In Bull, M, and Verma, N. (eds.), The Bloomsbury Encyclopaedia of Sound Studies. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. (In progress).

2025: “Against Soundscape: Musings on Auditory Situationism and Adaptive Perception”. In Waterman, Ellen (ed.), R. Murray Schafer’s Ecologies of Music and Sound Re-examined. McGill-Queen University Press. (In press).        

2025. “Letting Sounds Go: Field Recording, Location Sound, and Climate Change”, in Bennett, A. et al (eds.), Soundtracks of Climate Change. New York: Bloomsbury. (In press).   

2025. “Unlistening”. In Zinovieff, Søndergaard, et al (eds.), Situated Listening: Attending to the Unheard, pp. 52 - 72. London: Routledge.

2025. “Sonic Disjunctions: Critical Listening to Ashish Avikunthak’s Filmworks,” in Paunksnis, S. and O’Donnell, E.(eds.), The Epistemic Archaeology of Ashish Avikunthak: Cinema and Religiosity of Everyday Life. NY: Bloomsbury.

2025. “Mise-en-sonore: Placemaking in Fiction Film versus Audiovisual Media Artwork.” In Roche, D. and Gaudin, A. (eds.), Sound and Space in Film: Craft, Aesthetics, Theory. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

2025. “Technologies of Capture and the Global Souths.” In Rudi, J. and Adkins, M. (eds.), The Routledge Handbook to Rethinking the History of Technology-Based Music. London: Routledge.        

Journal articles:

2025: "A Sonic IndoFuturism", Organised Sound, Cambridge University Press.  

2025. “Post-immersive Listening”, Revista Vortex Journal 12 “New Sound Ecologies”.   

Exhibitions:

2026: Archival Intelligence, Lydgalleriet, Bergen, May - June. 

2025: Connecting Resonances, Hear Here Festival, Leuven, April – May.

https://hearhere.be/ 

2024: Swār from Dhvāni project, House of Digital Art, Mauritius, April.

https://houseofdigitalart.io/toutes-les-iles-sont-des-arbres/

2024: Co-sounding: Towards a Sonorous Land, Errant Sound gallery, Berlin, February

https://errantsound.net/2024/02/co-sounding-towards-a-sonorous-land-budhaditya-chattopadhyay/

2023: Co-sounding: Towards a Sonorous Land, Polyphonic Landscapes, Zone2Source, Amsterdam, October – December. https://polyphoniclandscapes.artez.nl and https://zone2source.net/en/tentoonstelling/polyphonic-landscapes-2/

Conference presentations, talks, etc.:

2025 “Dhvāni/Atomspheres/Datafiction”, Entangled Visions, OsloMet.

2025 “Auralizing Archives” Austrian Science Academy, Vienna.

2025 “Artificial Consciousness: Regenerating AI Ethics and Aesthetics”, Panel, Media Art History Conference 2025, Manizales.

2024 “Unmedia”, Keynote, Weibel Institute for Digital Cultures, University of Applied Arts Vienna.

2024 “Machine Learning with Ancestral Memory from the Global Souths: Decolonial Aesthesis and Pluri-Narratives in AI,” International Conference: Artificial Atmospheres and UnexpectedMedia: Exploring Media Art and Machine Learning, NOVA University Lisbon.

2024 “Listening from the Margin”, Keynote, International Conference: OUTCASTS: Theories andPractices, Academia Nacional de Belas Artes, Lisbon.

2024 Talk, SCMS Sound and Music Scholarly Interest Group.2024: “Co-sounding: Towards an environmental coalescence,” Politics of the Machines: Lifelikeness & beyond - Aachen 2024.

2024: “Skin-Tone,” Whiteness and Sound Studies, University of Arts, Helsinki.

2024: “Audio Leakage Community,” Panel, in Leakage: The Inaugural Conference of stsing, TU Dresden, 19^th – 22^nd of March 2024.

2024: “Listening Across the Souths.” Monday lectures, KMD, UiB. 8 January.

2023: “Post-immersive Listening: Perspectives on the Mediation of Sonic Environments,” Keynote, in Beyond Listening: Agency, Art and the Environment International Symposium on Sonic Ecologies, Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design Budapest (MOME), 22 – 25 November.