Using sound to imagine and build worlds of resistance and affirmation. 

This workshop explores sonic worlding as a trans*feminist and queer methodology. We will approach field recording, creative mixing, and playback techniques not just as technical practices, but as radical tools for storytelling and resistance. 

Students will gain hands-on experience with a wide array of microphones and recording tools — including less conventional geophones, hydrophones, electromagnetic, and binaural microphones— and experiment with expanded listening. We will discuss foundational recording and mixing techniques — not to replicate industry standards, but to understand them well enough to refuse, rework, or subvert them. We'll rethink microphone placement, play with post-processing as a poetic form, and discuss various ways to playback and share our sonic worlds for listeners. 

Students will be invited to create a sound piece that reflects their sonic explorations — one that moves beyond traditional form and genre, and instead participates in building a world sculpted by and for them. 

This workshop is for FLINTA identifying students. It is aimed to support and uplift FLINTA participants. We seek to disrupt cis-masculinist norms in sound production and build space for alternative, collective modes of making and listening. 

The Workshop will be held in English.

Supporting Media: 

Carvalho, Mariana: ME ALIMENTO DE VOCES [I feed myself from voices/you] 

Kern, Leslie. Feminist City: Claiming Space in a Man-Made World. Verso, 2020. 

Oliveros, Pauline. Deep Listening: A Composer's Sound Practice. Deep Listening Publications, 2005. 

Schafer, R. Murray. Our Sonic Environment and the Soundscape: the Tuning of the World. Destiny Books, 1997. 

Wajcman, Judy. “The Built Environment: Women’s Place, Gendered Space.” Feminism Confronts Technology, 110–36. Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991. 

Robin Rutenberg is an interdisciplinary sound and media artist placing an emphasis on trans*feminist worldbuilding through storytelling, performance, game art, experiential sound and composition. Through an enmeshment of mediums, they build emotionally resonant and stimulating worlds which archive, imagine otherwise, and hold trans* narratives. Their work entwines poetics of reflection and resonance and manifests as immersive games, performances, publications, and sound works.

Robin holds an MA in Sound Studies and Sonic Arts from the Universität der Künste Berlin and is head of the XR Workshop at Kunsthochschule Weißensee Berlin.