From January 11 to 13, Hong Kong’s Tai Kwun Contemporary will present the first edition of the art-book fair Booked, which will feature Triple Canopy. In addition to hawking as many printed materials and screen-based commodities as can fit in our suitcases and on our hard drives, we’ll be making and facilitating presentations related to sound and publication. These are manifestations of our ongoing research on the role of listening and the settings in which speech and sound have a meaningful effect. (We’re doing this research as part of the magazine’s yearlong residency at the Hammer Museum, which will lead to the publication of works in the forthcoming issue Two Ears and One Mouth, examining how we speak and listen and who has the right and capacity to be heard.)
Triple Canopy’s editor, Alexander Provan, will be in residence at Tai Kwun for the week. He’ll deliver a lecture, illustrated with chart-topping music, on the use of consumer-behavior data and neurobiology research in the production of pop songs that are guaranteed to be pleasing to as many listeners as possible—and to avoid confronting listeners with songs they haven’t already been conditioned to like. He’ll also participate in a discussion about the publication of sound and the differences between listeners and readers.
We’ve also invited Hardworking Goodlooking—a “studio and publishing hauz” devoted to tropical aesthetics, vernacular artisanship, and the value of the invisible—to do a series of events that ask how listening and publishing shape the way we write and make use of history. (We recommend “Tropico Vernacular,” an essay published by Hardworking Goodlooking’s cofounder Lobregat Balaguer in Triple Canopy in 2016.)
Come to Tai Kwun for the Triple Canopy commodities and fellowship, stay for Hardworking Goodlooking’s phone-call lecture, deep listening workshops, and publishing sprint! And navigate to Booked for additional details.