08/06/2023
Dear Participants,
From a distance of several days and after returning to our private and professional realities, we would like to warmly thank everyone for participating in the symposium. We would like to thank the invited speakers Ania Mauruschat, Salomé Voegelin, Andrzej Klawiter, Anna Preis, Ryszard Auksztulewicz, the local and external institutions with which we cooperated Uniwersytet Śląski w Katowicach, Uniwersytet Marii Curie-Skłodowskiej w Lublinie, Instytut Filozofii i Socjologii Polskiej Akademii Nauk, Instytut Kulturoznawstwa UAM,Instytut Etnologii i Antropologii Kulturowej UJ, the student academic circles: Koło Naukowe Kognitywistyki UMCS i Do Góry Mózgami, the people who cooperate individually with Avant Project, and most of all we would like to thank the so-called regular participants, because it is mainly to them that the event came to fruition.
The symposium had, broadly speaking, two goals. The first goal was to present what is new and interesting in research on hearing and understanding sounds. The second goal was to create a multidisciplinary space in which representatives of a particular discipline or field would have the opportunity to learn directly about the work of representatives from other areas of research and enter into discussion. The first goal is easy and usually succeeds. The second goal required detaching oneself from one's academic community, from one's ideas about what is scientific or what is important in research - and immersing oneself in a slightly or completely different way of thinking about the topic of research. Sometimes it was possible to have a dialogue, and other times it was only possible to listen, to remain silent, and to take away a trace of that contact as a new experience, a topic for reflection or inspiration.
Our events must remain amateur to a certain extent, in the sense that professionalism breeds routine, predictability and leaves no room for experimentation (not necessarily in a scientific sense). We experiment with juxtaposing different research worlds, with questioning the naive account of interdisciplinarity, and with trying to realize the claim "Presentation of science is an art" (a slogan borrowed from another project). This symposium was born out of a combination of themes related to sound/hearing, a reaction to the crisis in communication between disciplines, and a vision of... color: the dense dirty yellow of the night light of Katowice from years ago, i.e. from the time of the brutalist architecture of the former train station, trips to rock concerts at the Katowice Spodek, and social unrest. By the way, we hope that you also felt the "touch of Katowice", already different, but still peculiar. In addition, some of you ended your stay in Katowice with a trip to the Guido Mine.
This was our last big (or rather, medium-sized) conference. We plan to stop with only small symposia of a dozen or so people. The reason is that the Avant Project is actually a small group of people who have managed to defend their PhDs or post-doctorates in a dozen years, and they no longer have as much time for time-consuming Avant activities as they used to. Therefore, on this occasion we encourage people to join our association or simply cooperate especially young people whose time is more flexible, even if they don't have much more of it :)
With warmest regards,
Organizing Committee
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