Yi Wei Chew: Circuits of Sound, Gebunden

Klappentext

In this book, Chew Yi Wei argues for the presupposition that humanity now lives in a postdigital age where digital technology is interminably and profoundly part of everyday life.

To combat the spread of Covid-19 in 2020, Singapore imposed a "Circuit Breaker" (otherwise known as a lockdown) that lasted for 54 days. While this was followed by a gradual opening of public spaces, stricter measures were also enacted when necessary, in response to changing variants of the virus. The Circuit Breaker brought with it a proliferation of online, digital theatre, dance performances, and concerts as well as productions made solely for listening where podcasts, audio drama, audio documentaries, and audio walks became wildly popular.
Chew argues living in such an age brings with it new cognitive, sensorial, embodied and affective experiences, in turn birthing new epistemologies, new ways of being in the world.

With the postdigital as a guiding theoretical framework, the author employs autoethnography as a research methodology and praxis to explore her subjective experience of listening to "mobile audio performances" during the pandemic. She discusses what such performances mean, and in turn, comes up with a heuristic of how close textual analyses of mobile audio performances can be approached.