My new year news from 2021 and 2202
Dear friends and colleagues,
As always, I hope this finds you well.
I wanted to share a personal note of reflection highlighting what were for me some important achievements in 2021. Among those was the successful leadership transition on the last day of December 2021, when I passed my role as president of the World Listening Project over to my friend and a wonderful, fellow sound artist, acoustic ecologist, art + design educator, Alex Braidwood. I hope you will reach and welcome him, offer your help and keep building the organization.
If you’re reading this in 2023 or later and wonder if my counting or typing was in error, I can assure you that the count is correct. Almost everyday I begin to write an email, a “tweet,” or post on this and other blogs, but for various reasons get distracted or run out of time to finish before the next day seems to present some more interesting or more urgent task for me to address. So, this post was started and saved as an unpublished draft until now—never forgotten because it serves in part my way of personally and publicly express my deep gratitude to Alex.
The WLP is a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt nonprofit corporation based in the U.S. where donations are tax deductible. The WLP’s end-of-year fundraising campaign failed to raise enough to pay a part time professional Executive Director, something I had advocated the organization for over many years.
For the past decade, I struggled to keep the World Listening Project (WLP) mission and program viable with no funding and little operational support from its volunteer board. I made a big push in the last few years to, so to speak, “get over the hump.” I actually felt a lot of disappointment with my cohort, who all are very busy, esteemed, and talented artists with very little capacity to do the day-to-day work necessary to transition the WLP from a temporary “project” into a sustainable nonprofit organization as conceived by its original founder. Rather than walking away, as perhaps I should have in the first year, or later as many of my colleagues eventually did, I recognized the queer logic of World Listening Day, and Internet networking, including social media, and its power to rally people around a positive idea and project. This kept me going. Despite the lack of time and support, I did all I could to learn and communicate to our board of directors about the basic roles and responsibilities of board members, volunteerism, nonprofit governance, as well as networking and connecting with all my local and global friends and colleagues who were inspired by World Listening Day, the ideas and practices of acoustic ecology, and providing the evidence I needed to know that not only all of this wasn’t an illusory, dogmatic misstep, as some asserted, but rather the organized expression of a movement in the arts, sciences, and humanities that helps propel our efforts toward the understanding we seek. Handing over my role as president of the WLP to Alex Braidwood not only relieves me of a burden of responsibility for an important project, it demonstrates that the mission has the resonance and the attraction needed to compel able and willing professionals to dedicate themselves to bearing the same burdens. Because of Alex’s keens talents and experience, and with strategic thinking, I believe he has an edge that I was close but really too overwhelmed, organizationally or cognitively out of my element, to apply. And so, I am deeply relieved and grateful to Alex.
Notes from 2021
Some may recall the March 2021 call for papers in which the R. Murray Schafer (1934-2021), an award-winning Canadian composer, author, and creator of acoustic ecology was associated the with racism and settler colonialism. Dr. Rosati’s editorial statement cited my input suggesting a nuanced assessment, i.e., one that avoid dismissing a positive legacy and lifetime achievement …admitting somewhat, if I may say, in Dr. Rosati’s own words, is “potentially redeeming.”
In June 2021, while on my first vacation I presented on the role of technology in the Acoustics In Focus session organized by Birgitte Schulte-Fortkamp and Antonella Radicchi. I also completed an extensive resource document for the TERC STEM program for iSwoop.
In July through August I directed the 2021 Midwest Society for Acoustic Ecology’s Summer Soundwalks in the Parks program.
On August 14th, R. Murray Schafer died.
In October I agreed with Eve Payor, Tae Hong Park, and Nathan Wolek to propose to the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology (WFAE) holding the first international conference on acoustic ecology in the U.S., at the Atlantic Center for the Arts.
November 2021 the special issue of Media Art Study and Theory was published. Guest edited by Dr. Lauren Rosati, Assistant Curator, Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art and Department of Modern and Contemporary Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. This edition of MAST is now available for free download and reading at https://www.mast-journal.org/vol-2-no-2-2021.