conscient podcast

e175 sabine breitsameter - an aesthetic of care

Episode Notes

• Listening can teach us to appreciate our environment in a critical sense, but also in a kind of admiration for it. If we admire something because we think it has a depth or it has a beauty or some interesting aspects, we want to keep it, we want to foster it.

I first met Sabine at the Tuning of the World Conference in Banff, Alberta in 1993.

Sabine's work focuses on media art, listening culture, cultures of perception, experimental audiomedia, media history, media ecology, acoustic ecology as well trans- and intercultural studies. 

She has worked as an experimental audio media maker, working as director, author, curator and dramaturg for the cultural departments of the German public radio and was co-founder of the Master‘s program Sound Studies at the University of the Arts in Berlin and worked there as a professor for Experimental Audiomedia from 2004-2008.

Since 2006 Sabine teaches and researches as a professor for Sound and Media Culture at the Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences in Germany where she is director of the Soundscape & Environmental Media Lab and 3D Audio Lab.

As a scientific and artistic director she has curated numerous art projects, symposia and festivals. I was a guest speaker at one of these events in 2018, The Global Composition in Dieburg, Germany where I spoke about the origins of the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology in 1993.

While on a trip to Canada in May 2024 Sabine stopped by my home in Ottawa to talk about her work and share her thoughts on art and the ecological crisis with a focus on listening and sound. 

I was struck by Sabine’s observation about how artists are always careful with what they do, which Sabine defines as :

• a consciously shaped relationship with the world in a mindful attitude and with high appreciation for the phenomena of this world and its values.

I was impressed by the parallel she draws between the poly-crisis of today and Frederich Schiller’s On the Aesthetic Education of Man, written in 1795, which addresses the dehumanization and alienation of industrial labour through aesthetic education and the arts.

I was also interested in this quote because my father’s relatives emigrated from Germany to North America right around that period in the early 1800’s. 

At the end of our conversation Sabine gave me a copy of the 2nd edition of Die Ordnung der Klänge (The Ordering of Sounds), her German translation of R. Murray Schafer’s The Tuning of the World.

Sabine suggested books were:

• On the Aesthetic Education of Man by Frederich Schiller
• Aesthetics of Care: Practice in Everyday Life by Yuriko Saito

Episode Transcription

excerpts from episode:

• Listening can teach us to appreciate our environment in a critical sense, but also in a kind of admiration for it. If we admire something because we think it has a depth or it has a beauty or some interesting aspects, we want to keep it, we want to foster it.
• a consciously shaped relationship with the world in a mindful attitude and with high appreciation for the phenomena of this world and its values.