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Budhaditya Chattopadhyay


Short Biography
Budhaditya Chattopadhyay is a media artist, researcher, and writer. Incorporating diverse media, such as sound, text, and moving image, Chattopadhyay produces works for large-scale installation and live performance addressing contemporary issues of climate crisis, human intervention in the environment and ecology, urbanity, migration, race, and decolonization. Chattopadhyay holds a PhD in artistic research from the Academy of Creative and Performing Arts, Leiden University, The Netherlands, an MA in new media from Aarhus University, Denmark, and a Diploma in cinema from SRFTI, India; he has recently completed a one-year postdoctoral fellowship. Chattopadhyay has received numerous fellowships, residencies and international awards. His works have been widely exhibited, performed or presented across the globe, and published by Gruenrekorder (Germany) and Touch (UK). His writings on sound regularly appear on peer-reviewed journals, magazines, and other publications internationally; Chattopadhyay authored three books: The Nomadic Listener (2020), The Auditory Setting (2021) and Between the Headphones (2021).

https://budhaditya.org/


Listening Session Abstract
Nomadic Listening

A live listening session and reading from the book The Nomadic Listener introduces an augmented book on migration, contemporary urban experience, and sonic alienation. The work critically engages with the idea of sensing the city through a mode of poetic and contemplative listening. The book is composed of a series of texts stemming from psychogeographic explorations of major contemporary cities, such as Copenhagen, Berlin, Brussels, Leipzig, The Hague, Graz, London, Kolkata, Vienna, Delhi, Hong Kong, Mumbai, Amsterdam, New York, Paris, and others, through situated writing and field recording. Each text is an act of contemplative listening, where the artist/author records his surrounding environment and attempts to attune to the sonic fluctuations of movement and the passing of events. Each corresponding sound attempts to trace these nomadic interactions in unedited field recording. What surfaces is a collection of meditations on the minutiae of life movingly interwoven with the author’s own memories, associations, desires and reflections. The listening session and reading from the book are entwined to augment urban sensing and sonic experience that draw up a tender map of contemporary cities, and the often lonely, surprising, and random interactions found in urban navigation and place-making.

https://errantbodies.org/nomadic_listener.html

Budhaditya Chattopadhyay will hold the Listening Session I: Nomadic Listening.