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If you walk into David Cecchetto ‘s classroom, you might find people wearing audio devices that simulate hearing with a thousand-foot wide head. Or gadgets that swap their ears so that the left ear hears what the right should and vice versa. David is a media theorist who draws on his background as an artist/musician, to create what he calls “engagements,” strange sonic experiments that help him—and his students—understand the nature of our computer-driven lives. 

In this episode, we feature an extended chat with David about his recent book, Listening in the Afterlife of Data (Duke University Press). It’s a book about the eternal impossibility of communication and the texture of that impossibility in our current computer-mediated age. David says we live in the afterlife of data, by which he means we know that our data-driven representations of the world don’t really capture the reality of our inner or outer lives, and we know that algorithms perpetuate injustices of all sorts—and yet, we still live our lives as if we do believe in the data. And this is where his engagements come in, the sonic experiments that confront the distortions and fallacies and textures of a data-driven life. 

David Cecchetto is Professor of Critical Digital Theory in the Department of Humanities at York University in Toronto, Director of the Graduate Program in Social and Political Thought, he’s President of the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts. He wrote the book Humanesis: Sound and Technological Posthumanism (2013) and he’s co-authored and edited several others. 

For patrons, there’s an extended version of our interview, complete with some outstanding recommendations for reading, listening, and doing. You can get access to that at patreon.com/phantompower.

Transcript

Ethereal Voice: This is Phantom Power.

[Robotic Music]

David Cecchetto: The world is not coherent with itself. 

There’s no single world. 

Any theorizing needs, I think, to start by acknowledging that

[Robotic Music]

Mack: And welcome to another episode of Phantom Power, where scholars and artists and musicians tell stories about sound. I’m Mack Hagood and my guest today is David Cecchetto, someone who qualifies as a scholar and an artist and a musician, but he draws on his musical and artistic skills in a very unusual way, creating what he calls engagements, these strange sonic experiments that help him and his students understand the nature of our computer driven lives.

David Ceccheto is Professor of Digital Critical Theory in the Department of Humanities at York University in Toronto. He’s also the director of the Graduate Program in Social and Political Thought there. He’s President of the Society for Literature Science and the Arts or S.A.L.S.A. He wrote the book, Humanesis: Sound and Technological Posthumanism back in 2013, and he’s co-authored and edited several other books.