080018 UE Course: Voices in Art and Archives (2025W)

The human voice, as a carrier of emotion, identity, and history, plays a central role not only in interpersonal communication but also in the arts. In contemporary artistic practice, the voice has increasingly become a subject of engagement with the body, belonging, memory, and cultural heritage. Capturing and preserving fleeting voices raises fundamental questions about how we relate to sound, memory, and archival practices. Acoustic archival material is often closely linked to historical power structuresparticularly in the context of colonial knowledge production, where voices were frequently recorded without consent and archived as objects of scientific interest. The voice thus appears both as a trace of absence and as a testimony of political presence. Its reproducibility not only alters its aesthetic perception but also raises questions of representation, ownership, and the relationship between visibility and erasure.
In this course, students actively participate in the conference Fleeting Voices. Preserving Acoustic Heritage in the Archives and the Arts, organized in collaboration between SONIME and the Chair of Cultural Heritage Studies at the University of Vienna. The conference brings together international artists, archivists, and scholars from the fields of art and cultural history, media studies, and heritage studies.
At its core, the conference explores the (human) voice as cultural heritageespecially in relation to its recording, preservation, and reception in historical and artistic contexts. Both the conference and the accompanying course address the specific challenges of preserving intangible, ephemeral heritage. Political, epistemological, and technical questions will be discussed, alongside artistic and curatorial strategies.
Core topics of the conference and therefore also of the course include:
- Voice in visual art: How do contemporary artists use voice(s) to engage with memory, identity, or (post)colonial heritage?
- Voice as medium: How does the medialization of the voice affect intimacy, proximity, and remembrance?
- Politics of listening: Who is heard, who remains unheardand why? How do acoustic sources shape our understanding of history?
- Technology and materiality: What kinds of sound carriers have historically been used, and what conservation and restoration challenges do they pose?
Students will engage with these questions through structured preparation and follow-up work, observation tasks, short analyses, and reflections on selected panels or presentations. The course not only deepens students’ understanding of current transdisciplinary debates in art history and heritage studies, but also offers practical insight into artistic strategies, media approaches, and archival practices in working with sound, voice, and memory.
The students deepen the specialized knowledge acquired during their previous studies.