Theodore Teichman

You would probably recognize me as the person lying in the mud with a microphone pressed into the ground.
Iceland (residence), United States (citizenship)
research interests: embodiment, environmental art, environmental sound, environmental stewardship, environmental artistic research, environmental humanities, environmental ethics, ecology, eco-art, ecocriticism, ecopsychology, artistic research, landscape, landscape art, land-art, Landscape.Body, sound art, soundwalk, soundscape composition, soundscape, psychogeography, psychoacoustics, phenomenology, materiality, vibrant matter, material perception, material ontology, body extended, performance, site, Site-specific, place, Place and time, placemaking, time, time based media, time ecology, Film-making, photographic practice
affiliation: University of Virginia
en

In my practice and life, I am interested in understanding time and its materialization. I employ the lens of transcorporeality and a practice-based approach to investigate and reflect on questions of ecological restoration, urbanization, and social change. The microphone and the camera are particular ways of encoding time and these are some of my most preferred tools for studying time. However, the landscape and the body as well are ways to encode time in the same way: taking time and making it material. I am currently based out of the Agricultural University of Iceland and I am a Master of Landscape Architecture candidate at the University of Virginia. I hold a Bachelor of Science and Arts  from Carnegie Mellon University in interdisciplinary arts-based research integrating neuroscience, environmental studies, and sonic arts and was a 2018-2019 Fulbright Research Fellow in soundscape studies and practice with the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts for my project Listening Against (the) “Transition” and the social-practice project Workshop for Listening. At present, I am living in Hvanneyri, Iceland as a Fellow with the Leifur Eiriksson Foundation for my multimedia project: Soil Stories, Land Healers, and Dwelling in Damaged Worlds.

research

research expositions

  • Montages/Монтаже/Montaže/Montazhe (last edited: 2023) author(s): Theodore Teichman This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
    In this project, I aim to challenge the stereotyped imaginaries and captivating iconography that renders Ex-Yugoslavia as the balkan other to Western modernity. This project is not merely concerned with an alternate imaginary for the Balkans but to disturb the concept of “moderntity” vis-à-vis modernism(s). I make audio recordings of a moment in time at iconographic sites that have generally been cast as the backdrop to the narratives of socialist modernism and the telegenic collapse in the 1990s. Instead, I put the backdrop in the foreground; I record and montage the room noise, unsettling these stagings with a more distanced—rather than seemingly immediate—auditory image. By playing with the fidelity and proximity of the sound picture, this study unsettles the captivatingly simplified, politically potent imaginaries of “capitalist realism” and “Yugonostalgia” that are staged against—and currently reshape—the “backdrop” of Ex-Yugoslavia’s built environment.
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  • Listening against "The Transition" (2022) author(s): Theodore Teichman published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
    This is an archive of places, but it is even more an archive of the materiality of listening. This constitutes a larger inquiry and fascination with the listening as performance and the various “instruments” and “scores” that shape or encode this sonic event of the performance of the image. In particular, this project uses this arts-based research approach to engage critically with the concept of "The Transition," which has shaped the geography and imaginary of Ex-Yugoslavia. This is a collection of recordings made and then composed into soundscapes between September 2018 and May 2019 in Serbia, Bosnia & Herzegovina, and Kosovo. Through these techniques I propose an approach soundscape practices to engage materially the constitutive world of listening and the narration of time-worlds.
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