----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
Thanks for the great responses to yesterday's questions! Definitely much to
muse over and consider as we participate in, curate, or just experience the
next sound exhibition.
Tuesday, 17th: Sound Art and Its Cultural Context
For the rest of today, we will shift focus from curating to cultural context,
which picks up on several comments about the questionable nature of sound's
autonomy. Three issues raised by the core participants addressed the
inevitability of sound being embedded in a cultural, socio-political or
national context:
1) Kevin deForest asks: Is it necessary for the cultural context in the
production of audio art to be acknowledged as an aspect of the work? I am
thinking about the cultural tourism involved in some hobbyist field recordings
and the problematic of a cross-cultural capturing of sound.
2) Marc Couroux: Music’s amenability to cybernetics is underlined by
information theory pioneer Claude Shannon, who defined a “singing condition” as
the inability of an automata to recognize its loopy entrapment. Music’s
particular affordances, vitalities, and teleological necessities could serve as
a model to help ensure a preordained future through the transformation and
regulation of extra-musical sound, channelling the impersonal, inhuman death
drive (positive feedback) into homeostatic equilibrium (negative feedback).
Noise, far from being a nuisance to such cybernetic systems, is in fact
essential to periodically restart them. How might an effectively transgressive
practice operate given a resolutely alien, invasive
neuro-military-entertainment avant-garde? What hyperstitional, paradromic
methods might hijack and mutate uncommitted affective excess, escaping the
reach of capitalist territorialization? How might the viral propensities of the
earworm-servitor be leveraged in order to more effectively catalyze broader
phonoegregoric operations?
3) John Oswald presented a cryptic koan: Canada hear? [Among the several puns
offered by this succinct phrasing, I took it to imply a question about national
identity in sound art. Given the technological basis underpinning much sound
production, does it make sense to consider national histories or conventions in
sound art, or is it by nature an internationalist movement and sensibility?]
Regards,
Jim
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