Please join us on Friday, November 30, 2018 at 11:00 AM in Cobb 311 for the next meeting of the Mass Culture Workshop. We are delighted to have Liz Hopkins, PhD Candidate in the Department of Music at The University of Chicago. She will be presenting a chapter in-progress from her dissertation entitled “Sonic Seascapes, Science, and the Chthulucene.”
**This workshop is co-sponsored with the Sound & Society Workshop.**

Liz’s chapter is available for download here.
Please do not circulate without permission.

Please email either Gary [gkafer@uchicago.edu] or Cooper [cooperlong@uchicago.edu] for the password.

Lunch with be provided.

We look forward to seeing you!

Yours in Mass Cult,

Gary and Cooper

Sonic Seascapes, Science, and the Chthulucene
This paper looks at two oceanographic documentary soundtracks — Jacques Cousteau’s use of Maurice Ravel in his 1976 Voyage to the Edge of the World, and Pierre Henry’s musique concrète score for Jean Painlevé and Geneviève Hamon’s 1965 film, The Love Life of the Octopus — as sites where midcentury poetics of science traversed ways of knowing and feeling. Here, wave forms engender a turbulent flow of aesthetic and historical metaphors: Greek mythology meets science fiction futurism, pastoral ballet gestures to space travel, colonialist politics meet conservational ethics. Following Donna Haraway, I ask whether sound—that “uneasy ocean of air”—might provide a way of understanding the “(s)cenes” in which we find ourselves: Cousteau’s “Capitalocene,” the single-player (Western) story of world relations against Painlevé’s “Chthulucene,” a way of understanding our historical epoch through “multispecies stories and practices of becoming-with.”