Re: [-empyre-] to empire subscribers: messages sent in an attachment
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- On 18/Jun/14 19:06, Renate Terese Ferro wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- I'm not receiving any attachments, and several blank emails... perhaps it might be good to request folks to email only plain-text to the mailing list... John -- ++ Dr. John Hopkins, BSc, MFA, PhD taking Manhattan as Berlin isn't possible right now http://tech-no-mad.net/blog/ ++ ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Wednesday, 18th: Sound Art, Technology and Innovation
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- This is in response to Anna's question: I have not been on juries that deal strictly with sound art but my experience on Canadian visual arts peer evaluation has generally addressed the category of artistic merit to weigh more heavily on the conceptual and content side than what I would call the formal side (technical finesse as innovation). I'm curious as to what you are thinking of in terms of problematizing the term innovation. Do you feel sound artists have become slaves to their own technology? Is it paradoxical that such an avant garde format is actually less conceptually and critically focused because of a reliance on more complex technology? It seems a far cry from the era of early video art for example where visual artists had much more freedom and I feel innovation with their media because of its directness and low level of technology. On 14-06-18 3:08 PM, Christoph Cox wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Questions about technology (about sonic production, recording, circulation, etc.) surely have some importance in the consideration of sonic (and any other) art. But I confess that, as a critic and philosopher, I almost entirely tune out when the conversation (especially among artists) turns to gear and tools rather than sensual/conceptual content. Factual talk about gear too often substitutes for the more difficult and, to my mind, infinitely more important, talk about aesthetic and historical value. Take, for example, /Leonardo Music Journal/. Though I serve on the journal's editorial board, I'm rarely interested in the essays, which so often concern the how? instead of the why?. This is relevant to Anna's question: In my experience, grants and academic positions so often seem to go not to the most interesting or important artists (by my lights, of course) but to much less interesting artists who can tell a story about their innovative use of hardware and software. On 6/18/14, 10:43 AM, Paul Dolden wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- First,I like to thank Jim for inviting me, and have greatly enjoyed the discussion so far. Well I will start today, since I have not participated yet.( I am responsible for question #2, about opera using recorded signals. N.B. my question was more a joke i sent out to alot of friends with some sarcastic comment about concert hall practice and its contemporary relevance.) If you look at the many comments for the New York Times article, people are scandalized that an opera company would think of using samples to replace the orchestra to keep costs down. One thinks immediately of Foucault's discussion of authenticity in the arts. But I do not want to go in that direction please. As much as I would like to discuss that the depth of Wagners' timbres are not possible with the Vienna Symphonic library in which all instruments were recorded with the same small diaphragm microphones, which creates bad phasing when huge densities of instruments are used. I will repress the gear geek in me and proceed. The story, of the opera, came out while reading last week's highly theoretical discussions, which were amazing, but left me still thinking that we as cultural workers have created almost no shift in how people think about the art of sound reproduction and music consumption. For your average person recordings are their experience of music. They consume recordings in their car, home and office. If they are walking down the street and are not wearing ear buds, they are confronted with street musicians, most of whom are jamming to a pre-recorded tape! By contrast when we try to interest the public in just listening whether in the art gallery or concert hall with nothing to see, people think they are being ripped off. And yet our use of technology is far more interesting and subtle than the new Celion Dion album. (n.b. and please: nothing to see-I am thinking of more than electroacoutic music and its diffusion ideas!-even though i live in Quebec!) Where do we go from here, in making the audio format, (which may or may not involve some type of live performance) to be more understood and appreciated for your average person? Or to put the question in even simpler terms,and make it personal(indulge me for a moment, the people who know me at this forum know my dry wit): Why can i always interest and amaze your average person with my guitar wanking, than the extreme detailed work i have to do to mix and project 400 tracks of sound? For bio, music excerpts, recordings,reviews etc go to: http://www.electrocd.com/en/bio/dolden_pa/ To see a video of a chamber orchestra work go to: http://vimeo.com/channels/575823/72579719 On Wednesday, June 18, 2014 9:29:12 AM,
[-empyre-] Thursday, 19th: Sound Art, Technology and Innovation
--empyre- soft-skinned space--On the point of grants and innovation for innovation’s sake, take an academic department that is trying to create time and space for creative practitioners doing their thing at doctorate and post-doctorate level, it needs to somehow legitimise its activities in a context that can be understood by people in suits who control cash-flow. For instance, if you are at a Russell group university, and there is unending rhetoric about striving for “excellence,” it’s simply very difficult to justify spending money on “research” (much of which is essentially people noodling with art/music technology) if it doesn't appear to be “innovative.” It’s a game, a veneer, and it doesn't just apply to academia, prospective funding bodies of one kind or another can more easily be convinced of a project's merits if the proposal is spun as “new and innovate” but it is unfortunate that too much money seems to go to work that is often little more than yawn-worthy (novelty does not guarantee quality). I’m not sure how this will change because the technocratic imperative (and the influence of trends within the “creative industries”) that forms part of the rationalisation process of determining where the money goes, means that certain hoops will have to be jumped through, hence the need to big-up the “innovation” component. I also see a couple of commentators here stating that they switch off when discussion turns to technology (the “how” instead of the “why”). This is short-sighted really, it’s not an either or situation, it’s possible to maintain a healthy balance. One can be engaged in technologically mediated creative practice and still enjoy the how” while not letting this aspect of things dictate the value of a work. Having said that, I find all this pseudo-philosophical international art-speak waffle tiring; so many emperors, so many new clothes, seriously, enough already. I’m not adverse to conceptual art but we have reached overkill with this stuff, and I’m loath to see sound/sonic/audio arts adopting this jargon in an effort to validate itself. There are so many artists out there now working with sound, it seems like everyone is a “sound artist” these days, it kind of reminds of the explosion in DJ culture that we saw back in the mid-90s (overnight everyone was a DJ, all they needed was a set of CDJs and an auto-sync button, now it’s a Zoom H4 and some artspeak). ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
[-empyre-] Thursday, 19th: Hearing and Listening
--empyre- soft-skinned space--For today, Thursday, 19th, our focus will be on Hearing and Listening. While these topics may have been addressed in the past through perceptual or phenomenological methods, the questions by Jennifer Fisher, Eldritch Priest and Salomé Voegelin hint at the affective, bodily and political forces implicitly at work during this activity. Too often it is assumed that hearing or listening merely involves a passive transfer of sensory data, as if the ear were merely a conduit for information. But it's clear that the ear is subject to socialization and bias, training and discipline, personal idiosyncracies, and influence by the surrounding environment. The 3 questions today, then, seek to reflect upon the effects of such influences when attending to audio art: 1) Jennifer Fisher: What is the significance of spatial resonance and affect when listening to sound art? How do hearing and proprioception combine in formations of resonance? How might the resonances of ambient space -- whether a museum, concert hall or other venue -- operate contextually in curating sound art? My sense is that resonance operates somewhat differently from vibration: if vibration stems from the tactile sensing of a discrete object (or its emission from a particular point in space), might resonance afford more delocalized, contextual, intensification of hearing and proprioception? 2) Eldritch Priest: Through tropes such as the often cited “the ears are never closed,” artists and theorists alike routinely posit audition as form of “exposure,” a veritable faculty that lays us open and vulnerable to the world. But as Steven Connor notes, the ear is not submissive; it actively connives to make what it takes to be sense out of what it hears.” This means that the ear not only refuses to entertain an outside -- “noise” -- but its operations seem to entail a kind of deterrence of sound” such that to hear is always to mishear. But if all hearing is mishearing, audition can only be a fundamental hallucination that works for the powers of the false. From this premise we might ask whether hearing is (in both its ordinary and Peircean sense of the term) an abduction of the “outside.” What would it mean or do, then, for sound studies—specifically sound studies in its humanistic phase -- that its organ of concern (l’oreille) is steeped primarily in “guesswork”? Does studying sound mean studying what is effectively a connivance? And if so, if audition is always making sense up, then with what, or as Neitzsche would say, with “whom” is it complicit? 3) Salomé Voegelin: What is the relationship between listening and sound art? Jennifer, Eldritch and Salomé, please feel free to further elaborate or extend your initial thoughts! Best, Jim ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Thursday, 19th: Hearing and Listening
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Dear Jim thanks for inviting me to pose a question to this list. my question is rather short: What is the relationship between listening and sound art? and in many ways so self evident that it truly baffles me, and any suggestions, opinions, debates as to this relationship will be received with great interest. By way of expanding it I have no explanation but only a further question: Where does listening to sound art come from, what legacies does it carry, produce or try to rid itself of? thanks for all your ideas on this topic salomé On Jun 19, 2014, at 2:09 PM, Jim Drobnick j...@displaycult.com wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- For today, Thursday, 19th, our focus will be on Hearing and Listening. While these topics may have been addressed in the past through perceptual or phenomenological methods, the questions by Jennifer Fisher, Eldritch Priest and Salomé Voegelin hint at the affective, bodily and political forces implicitly at work during this activity. Too often it is assumed that hearing or listening merely involves a passive transfer of sensory data, as if the ear were merely a conduit for information. But it's clear that the ear is subject to socialization and bias, training and discipline, personal idiosyncracies, and influence by the surrounding environment. The 3 questions today, then, seek to reflect upon the effects of such influences when attending to audio art: 1) Jennifer Fisher: What is the significance of spatial resonance and affect when listening to sound art? How do hearing and proprioception combine in formations of resonance? How might the resonances of ambient space -- whether a museum, concert hall or other venue -- operate contextually in curating sound art? My sense is that resonance operates somewhat differently from vibration: if vibration stems from the tactile sensing of a discrete object (or its emission from a particular point in space), might resonance afford more delocalized, contextual, intensification of hearing and proprioception? 2) Eldritch Priest: Through tropes such as the often cited “the ears are never closed,” artists and theorists alike routinely posit audition as form of “exposure,” a veritable faculty that lays us open and vulnerable to the world. But as Steven Connor notes, the ear is not submissive; it actively connives to make what it takes to be sense out of what it hears.” This means that the ear not only refuses to entertain an outside -- “noise” -- but its operations seem to entail a kind of deterrence of sound” such that to hear is always to mishear. But if all hearing is mishearing, audition can only be a fundamental hallucination that works for the powers of the false. From this premise we might ask whether hearing is (in both its ordinary and Peircean sense of the term) an abduction of the “outside.” What would it mean or do, then, for sound studies—specifically sound studies in its humanistic phase -- that its organ of concern (l’oreille) is steeped primarily in “guesswork”? Does studying sound mean studying what is effectively a connivance? And if so, if audition is always making sense up, then with what, or as Neitzsche would say, with “whom” is it complicit? 3) Salomé Voegelin: What is the relationship between listening and sound art? Jennifer, Eldritch and Salomé, please feel free to further elaborate or extend your initial thoughts! Best, Jim ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Thursday, 19th: Hearing and Listening
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Hello All Nice to be with you and thanks, Jim, for the invitation to participate. Art that engages sound is not a special case. The same obligations obtain, and the same privileges too. The fetishization of audio technology hearkens back to half-century-old discussions of the material support of visual artworks. Why should we care if the painting is on canvas or linen? Likewise, should we know or want to know if it's Supercollider or Max or a CD? Similarly, why is listening isolated, idealized, and idolized? Ultimately, the interactions that sustain interest and importance are not those between sound waves and eardrums, but between ideologies and economies, between societies and subjects, between history and concentrations of power. The fatigue with the language of conceptual art expressed by Semitransgenic strikes me as a response to the very difficult and neverending work of resisting the dominant vocabularies of our times and places. Such vocabularies are so pervasive as to operate transparently and to be adopted unproblematically as natural. The best international art-speak of the past fifty years has taken it upon itself to sprinkle sand in the gears of the cultural-industrial machinery. Of course, the machinery constantly recoups this sand as raw material for further manufacture. This recuperation produces both our collective fatigue and the demand for further innovation (I use the term cautiously) in the strategies and modes of alternative meaning-making. I fear - genuinely, I do - that our collective recourse to technology, to listening, to mute materiality, is a signal of retreat from the ubiquity of cultural-ecnomic hegemony. Sound schmound. Let's think about the relationships artworks create between audiences, institutions, conventions, ideas, and philosophies. Then we're on to something. Kindest regards to you all Seth www.kim-cohen.com On Jun 19, 2014, at 9:09 AM, Jim Drobnick wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- For today, Thursday, 19th, our focus will be on Hearing and Listening. While these topics may have been addressed in the past through perceptual or phenomenological methods, the questions by Jennifer Fisher, Eldritch Priest and Salomé Voegelin hint at the affective, bodily and political forces implicitly at work during this activity. Too often it is assumed that hearing or listening merely involves a passive transfer of sensory data, as if the ear were merely a conduit for information. But it's clear that the ear is subject to socialization and bias, training and discipline, personal idiosyncracies, and influence by the surrounding environment. The 3 questions today, then, seek to reflect upon the effects of such influences when attending to audio art: 1) Jennifer Fisher: What is the significance of spatial resonance and affect when listening to sound art? How do hearing and proprioception combine in formations of resonance? How might the resonances of ambient space -- whether a museum, concert hall or other venue -- operate contextually in curating sound art? My sense is that resonance operates somewhat differently from vibration: if vibration stems from the tactile sensing of a discrete object (or its emission from a particular point in space), might resonance afford more delocalized, contextual, intensification of hearing and proprioception? 2) Eldritch Priest: Through tropes such as the often cited “the ears are never closed,” artists and theorists alike routinely posit audition as form of “exposure,” a veritable faculty that lays us open and vulnerable to the world. But as Steven Connor notes, the ear is not submissive; it actively connives to make what it takes to be sense out of what it hears.” This means that the ear not only refuses to entertain an outside -- “noise” -- but its operations seem to entail a kind of deterrence of sound” such that to hear is always to mishear. But if all hearing is mishearing, audition can only be a fundamental hallucination that works for the powers of the false. From this premise we might ask whether hearing is (in both its ordinary and Peircean sense of the term) an abduction of the “outside.” What would it mean or do, then, for sound studies—specifically sound studies in its humanistic phase -- that its organ of concern (l’oreille) is steeped primarily in “guesswork”? Does studying sound mean studying what is effectively a connivance? And if so, if audition is always making sense up, then with what, or as Neitzsche would say, with “whom” is it complicit? 3) Salomé Voegelin: What is the relationship between listening and sound art? Jennifer, Eldritch and Salomé, please feel free to further elaborate or extend your initial thoughts! Best, Jim ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
Re: [-empyre-] Thursday, 19th: Hearing and Listening
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Thanks for giving me the opportunity to participate in the discussion, Jim. I think Seth's post is bang on, and it actually unearths this strange tendency to treat sound and listening as extra-discursive somethings that are often propounded in numinous terms, if not directly, then in the deployment of rhetorical gestures that invoke ideas of ephemerality, ubiquity, and resonance. I'm not certain if this is expressive of a retreat from the ubiquity of cultural-economic hegemony, insofar as the isolation of sound fetishizes it (the something) and therefore turns it into, as Marx wrote, a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties. In this sense, the recourse to technology, to listening, to mute materiality, is not a withdrawal but an expansion or intensification of the logic that drives late-capitalist economies. This is why I framed listening as a hallucination and agent for the powers of the false. Listening, like any other activity, is a technique, and techniques are ways of bringing forces into effect. Bringing something into effect, however, is a wholly pragmatic affair and will always entail matters of interest and power. (I think this was intimated in the conversation from earlier this week about curation and the issues of bleed. For instance, David Cecchetto's noting the bind of certain sound art exhibitions and his call for examples of shows that highlight or pressure the concept of aurality was explicitly calling attention to the relational and political work that any staging of (sound) art might do.) The idea that listening is a type of originary conniving strikes me then as a powerful place to start, because it immediately turns thought and experience of it into a form of creative complicity. Eldritch On 19-06-2014, at 10:27 AM, Seth Kim-Cohen wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Hello All Nice to be with you and thanks, Jim, for the invitation to participate. Art that engages sound is not a special case. The same obligations obtain, and the same privileges too. The fetishization of audio technology hearkens back to half-century-old discussions of the material support of visual artworks. Why should we care if the painting is on canvas or linen? Likewise, should we know or want to know if it's Supercollider or Max or a CD? Similarly, why is listening isolated, idealized, and idolized? Ultimately, the interactions that sustain interest and importance are not those between sound waves and eardrums, but between ideologies and economies, between societies and subjects, between history and concentrations of power. The fatigue with the language of conceptual art expressed by Semitransgenic strikes me as a response to the very difficult and neverending work of resisting the dominant vocabularies of our times and places. Such vocabularies are so pervasive as to operate transparently and to be adopted unproblematically as natural. The best international art-speak of the past fifty years has taken it upon itself to sprinkle sand in the gears of the cultural-industrial machinery. Of course, the machinery constantly recoups this sand as raw material for further manufacture. This recuperation produces both our collective fatigue and the demand for further innovation (I use the term cautiously) in the strategies and modes of alternative meaning-making. I fear - genuinely, I do - that our collective recourse to technology, to listening, to mute materiality, is a signal of retreat from the ubiquity of cultural-ecnomic hegemony. Sound schmound. Let's think about the relationships artworks create between audiences, institutions, conventions, ideas, and philosophies. Then we're on to something. Kindest regards to you all Seth www.kim-cohen.com On Jun 19, 2014, at 9:09 AM, Jim Drobnick wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- For today, Thursday, 19th, our focus will be on Hearing and Listening. While these topics may have been addressed in the past through perceptual or phenomenological methods, the questions by Jennifer Fisher, Eldritch Priest and Salomé Voegelin hint at the affective, bodily and political forces implicitly at work during this activity. Too often it is assumed that hearing or listening merely involves a passive transfer of sensory data, as if the ear were merely a conduit for information. But it's clear that the ear is subject to socialization and bias, training and discipline, personal idiosyncracies, and influence by the surrounding environment. The 3 questions today, then, seek to reflect upon the effects of such influences when attending to audio art: 1) Jennifer Fisher: What is the significance of spatial resonance and affect when listening to sound art? How do hearing and
Re: [-empyre-] Thursday, 19th: Hearing and Listening
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- I think a false dichotomy is being drawn here between sound waves and mute materiality [sic], on the one hand, and ideologies, economies, societies, subjects, history, power, on the other. This dichotomy maps on to other false dichotomies: physical/cultural, extra-discursive/discursive, passive hearing/active listening, etc. The world is full of differences of degree but no such dichotomies or differences of kind. It forms a single plane. And, whatever the human, the social, the ideological, the discursive, etc. are, they are continuous with the physical, the material, etc. As Steve Goodman, Marcus Boon, and I myself have argued, there is a politics of vibration that does not require the philosophically bankrupt division of the world into the non-human/human, physical/cultural, etc. I'm curious what Eldritch means with the claim that all hearing is mishearing and that audition can only be a fundamental hallucination. If by that he means that hearing is selective, then of course that's true. But such selection does not mark out human listening as different from any other form of biological or mechanical registration: a thermostat is selective, too, concerned only with temperature thresholds and nothing else. Materiality is not inert or mute. It is fundamentally active and responsive. (I apologize for the quick and sometimes brusque nature of my comments this week, which I'm spending with a sick parent in the hospital, which makes thoughtfulness and sustained attention nearly impossible.) On 6/19/14, 10:27 AM, Seth Kim-Cohen wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Hello All Nice to be with you and thanks, Jim, for the invitation to participate. Art that engages sound is not a special case. The same obligations obtain, and the same privileges too. The fetishization of audio technology hearkens back to half-century-old discussions of the material support of visual artworks. Why should we care if the painting is on canvas or linen? Likewise, should we know or want to know if it's Supercollider or Max or a CD? Similarly, why is listening isolated, idealized, and idolized? Ultimately, the interactions that sustain interest and importance are not those between sound waves and eardrums, but between ideologies and economies, between societies and subjects, between history and concentrations of power. The fatigue with the language of conceptual art expressed by Semitransgenic strikes me as a response to the very difficult and neverending work of resisting the dominant vocabularies of our times and places. Such vocabularies are so pervasive as to operate transparently and to be adopted unproblematically as natural. The best international art-speak of the past fifty years has taken it upon itself to sprinkle sand in the gears of the cultural-industrial machinery. Of course, the machinery constantly recoups this sand as raw material for further manufacture. This recuperation produces both our collective fatigue and the demand for further innovation (I use the term cautiously) in the strategies and modes of alternative meaning-making. I fear - genuinely, I do - that our collective recourse to technology, to listening, to mute materiality, is a signal of retreat from the ubiquity of cultural-ecnomic hegemony. Sound schmound. Let's think about the relationships artworks create between audiences, institutions, conventions, ideas, and philosophies. Then we're on to something. Kindest regards to you all Seth www.kim-cohen.com On Jun 19, 2014, at 9:09 AM, Jim Drobnick wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- For today, Thursday, 19th, our focus will be on Hearing and Listening. While these topics may have been addressed in the past through perceptual or phenomenological methods, the questions by Jennifer Fisher, Eldritch Priest and Salomé Voegelin hint at the affective, bodily and political forces implicitly at work during this activity. Too often it is assumed that hearing or listening merely involves a passive transfer of sensory data, as if the ear were merely a conduit for information. But it's clear that the ear is subject to socialization and bias, training and discipline, personal idiosyncracies, and influence by the surrounding environment. The 3 questions today, then, seek to reflect upon the effects of such influences when attending to audio art: 1) Jennifer Fisher: What is the significance of spatial resonance and affect when listening to sound art? How do hearing and proprioception combine in formations of resonance? How might the resonances of ambient space -- whether a museum, concert hall or other venue -- operate contextually in curating sound art? My sense is that resonance operates somewhat differently from vibration: if vibration stems from the tactile sensing of a discrete object (or its emission from a
Re: [-empyre-] Thursday, 19th: Hearing and Listening
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- At a talk tonight at the Chelsea College of Art in London I was reminded that John Berger wrote his seminal Ways of Seeing in 1973. That is a good 40 years ago, and it is 40 year of acknowledging and working with the fact that seeing is ideological, political, cultural and social; that it is inflected by class, gender and economics. And yet, when 40 years later it comes to Ways of Listening, we pretend, or some of us do at least, that scrutinizing the ideological and political aspects of listening or sound, which are bizarrely and uncritically mixed up at times, it is somehow either not possible or desirable or manifests a betrayal of a purer state. I see Seth's desire to sprinkle sand in the gears of the cultural-industrial machinery also as my desire to critically consider listening maybe not to hear better, but to get to understand the gears that drive listening and make us hear a truth that is just another word for bias. Then listening becomes a socio-political tool not just to listen but to make a different sound. On Jun 19, 2014, at 8:14 PM, Christoph Cox c...@hampshire.edu wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- I think a false dichotomy is being drawn here between sound waves and mute materiality [sic], on the one hand, and ideologies, economies, societies, subjects, history, power, on the other. This dichotomy maps on to other false dichotomies: physical/cultural, extra-discursive/discursive, passive hearing/active listening, etc. The world is full of differences of degree but no such dichotomies or differences of kind. It forms a single plane. And, whatever the human, the social, the ideological, the discursive, etc. are, they are continuous with the physical, the material, etc. As Steve Goodman, Marcus Boon, and I myself have argued, there is a politics of vibration that does not require the philosophically bankrupt division of the world into the non-human/human, physical/cultural, etc. I'm curious what Eldritch means with the claim that all hearing is mishearing and that audition can only be a fundamental hallucination. If by that he means that hearing is selective, then of course that's true. But such selection does not mark out human listening as different from any other form of biological or mechanical registration: a thermostat is selective, too, concerned only with temperature thresholds and nothing else. Materiality is not inert or mute. It is fundamentally active and responsive. (I apologize for the quick and sometimes brusque nature of my comments this week, which I'm spending with a sick parent in the hospital, which makes thoughtfulness and sustained attention nearly impossible.) On 6/19/14, 10:27 AM, Seth Kim-Cohen wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Hello All Nice to be with you and thanks, Jim, for the invitation to participate. Art that engages sound is not a special case. The same obligations obtain, and the same privileges too. The fetishization of audio technology hearkens back to half-century-old discussions of the material support of visual artworks. Why should we care if the painting is on canvas or linen? Likewise, should we know or want to know if it's Supercollider or Max or a CD? Similarly, why is listening isolated, idealized, and idolized? Ultimately, the interactions that sustain interest and importance are not those between sound waves and eardrums, but between ideologies and economies, between societies and subjects, between history and concentrations of power. The fatigue with the language of conceptual art expressed by Semitransgenic strikes me as a response to the very difficult and neverending work of resisting the dominant vocabularies of our times and places. Such vocabularies are so pervasive as to operate transparently and to be adopted unproblematically as natural. The best international art-speak of the past fifty years has taken it upon itself to sprinkle sand in the gears of the cultural-industrial machinery. Of course, the machinery constantly recoups this sand as raw material for further manufacture. This recuperation produces both our collective fatigue and the demand for further innovation (I use the term cautiously) in the strategies and modes of alternative meaning-making. I fear - genuinely, I do - that our collective recourse to technology, to listening, to mute materiality, is a signal of retreat from the ubiquity of cultural-ecnomic hegemony. Sound schmound. Let's think about the relationships artworks create between audiences, institutions, conventions, ideas, and philosophies. Then we're on to something. Kindest regards to you all Seth www.kim-cohen.com On Jun 19, 2014, at 9:09 AM, Jim Drobnick wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- For
Re: [-empyre-] Thursday, 19th: Hearing and Listening
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Salome: Whom do you have in mind with the claim that some of us . . . [pretend] that scrutinizing the ideological or political aspects of listening or sound [ . . .] is somehow either not possible or desirable or manifests a betrayal of a purer state? Does anyone actually hold that position? Seems like a straw man argument to me. In this conversation, at least, what's at stake is not WHETHER there is a politics of sound but what politics MEANS and how we CONSTRUE it. Sound is a power, a force that is imposed and resisted in multiple forms, ways, and regimes. And so of course there's a politics of sound. The false notion is that politics ought to be separated from sonic materiality more generally. Left politics is deeply rooted in materialism. It seems to me that anyone committed to left politics (as I am) should reject the cultural idealism that (explicitly or implicitly) insists on dichotomies between nature/culture, physics/politics, etc. On 6/19/14, 5:18 PM, Salomé Voegelin wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- At a talk tonight at the Chelsea College of Art in London I was reminded that John Berger wrote his seminal Ways of Seeing in 1973. That is a good 40 years ago, and it is 40 year of acknowledging and working with the fact that seeing is ideological, political, cultural and social; that it is inflected by class, gender and economics. And yet, when 40 years later it comes to Ways of Listening, we pretend, or some of us do at least, that scrutinizing the ideological and political aspects of listening or sound, which are bizarrely and uncritically mixed up at times, it is somehow either not possible or desirable or manifests a betrayal of a purer state. I see Seth's desire to sprinkle sand in the gears of the cultural-industrial machinery also as my desire to critically consider listening maybe not to hear better, but to get to understand the gears that drive listening and make us hear a truth that is just another word for bias. Then listening becomes a socio-political tool not just to listen but to make a different sound. On Jun 19, 2014, at 8:14 PM, Christoph Cox c...@hampshire.edu wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- I think a false dichotomy is being drawn here between sound waves and mute materiality [sic], on the one hand, and ideologies, economies, societies, subjects, history, power, on the other. This dichotomy maps on to other false dichotomies: physical/cultural, extra-discursive/discursive, passive hearing/active listening, etc. The world is full of differences of degree but no such dichotomies or differences of kind. It forms a single plane. And, whatever the human, the social, the ideological, the discursive, etc. are, they are continuous with the physical, the material, etc. As Steve Goodman, Marcus Boon, and I myself have argued, there is a politics of vibration that does not require the philosophically bankrupt division of the world into the non-human/human, physical/cultural, etc. I'm curious what Eldritch means with the claim that all hearing is mishearing and that audition can only be a fundamental hallucination. If by that he means that hearing is selective, then of course that's true. But such selection does not mark out human listening as different from any other form of biological or mechanical registration: a thermostat is selective, too, concerned only with temperature thresholds and nothing else. Materiality is not inert or mute. It is fundamentally active and responsive. (I apologize for the quick and sometimes brusque nature of my comments this week, which I'm spending with a sick parent in the hospital, which makes thoughtfulness and sustained attention nearly impossible.) On 6/19/14, 10:27 AM, Seth Kim-Cohen wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Hello All Nice to be with you and thanks, Jim, for the invitation to participate. Art that engages sound is not a special case. The same obligations obtain, and the same privileges too. The fetishization of audio technology hearkens back to half-century-old discussions of the material support of visual artworks. Why should we care if the painting is on canvas or linen? Likewise, should we know or want to know if it's Supercollider or Max or a CD? Similarly, why is listening isolated, idealized, and idolized? Ultimately, the interactions that sustain interest and importance are not those between sound waves and eardrums, but between ideologies and economies, between societies and subjects, between history and concentrations of power. The fatigue with the language of conceptual art expressed by Semitransgenic strikes me as a response to the very difficult and neverending work of resisting the dominant vocabularies of our times and places. Such vocabularies are so pervasive as to operate transparently and to be adopted
Re: [-empyre-] Thursday, 19th: Hearing and Listening
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Chris: I am sorry if I was not as clear as I would like to be. I do not think sound is necessarily political, and a vista is not per se political either, but listening and looking are. Sound is sound and a chair is a chair, but how I look at it or listen to it is political. There is a difference and it is vital.The notion of sonic materialism is important as a critical lever, but materialism is, for me at least, paradoxically a philosophy of the material at the same time as it is a philosophy of perception and reflection, and that paradox or coincidence, dissolves the dichotomy that you rightly say should not be evoked: it is not a matter of human/non-human, culture/ nature but the compounding of all of it and thus gives us an insight into the make-up, bias, balance of that comound. So I think, or hope at least, we are on the whole in agreement, if not in the details or in how we get there. I do not mean to build a straw man or woman and neither do I mean to point a finger at any body in particular, but the focus, as seen in these discussions, on the one hand towards technological clarify, and on the other hand the celebration of unspeakable states of the heard (mishearings and hallucinations) that need to be bracketed off if we want to make sense within critical language confuses me. It at once suggests that sound is a pre-critical inarticulable state that needs to be framed if we mean to hear anything valuable and talk about it, while at the very same time celebrating that inarticulable state. Neither position seems useful to me as it avoids considering the socio-political particularity of listening. hope that makes a bit more sense. On Jun 19, 2014, at 10:55 PM, Christoph Cox c...@hampshire.edu wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Salome: Whom do you have in mind with the claim that some of us . . . [pretend] that scrutinizing the ideological or political aspects of listening or sound [ . . .] is somehow either not possible or desirable or manifests a betrayal of a purer state? Does anyone actually hold that position? Seems like a straw man argument to me. In this conversation, at least, what's at stake is not WHETHER there is a politics of sound but what politics MEANS and how we CONSTRUE it. Sound is a power, a force that is imposed and resisted in multiple forms, ways, and regimes. And so of course there's a politics of sound. The false notion is that politics ought to be separated from sonic materiality more generally. Left politics is deeply rooted in materialism. It seems to me that anyone committed to left politics (as I am) should reject the cultural idealism that (explicitly or implicitly) insists on dichotomies between nature/culture, physics/politics, etc. On 6/19/14, 5:18 PM, Salomé Voegelin wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- At a talk tonight at the Chelsea College of Art in London I was reminded that John Berger wrote his seminal Ways of Seeing in 1973. That is a good 40 years ago, and it is 40 year of acknowledging and working with the fact that seeing is ideological, political, cultural and social; that it is inflected by class, gender and economics. And yet, when 40 years later it comes to Ways of Listening, we pretend, or some of us do at least, that scrutinizing the ideological and political aspects of listening or sound, which are bizarrely and uncritically mixed up at times, it is somehow either not possible or desirable or manifests a betrayal of a purer state. I see Seth's desire to sprinkle sand in the gears of the cultural-industrial machinery also as my desire to critically consider listening maybe not to hear better, but to get to understand the gears that drive listening and make us hear a truth that is just another word for bias. Then listening becomes a socio-political tool not just to listen but to make a different sound. On Jun 19, 2014, at 8:14 PM, Christoph Cox c...@hampshire.edu wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- I think a false dichotomy is being drawn here between sound waves and mute materiality [sic], on the one hand, and ideologies, economies, societies, subjects, history, power, on the other. This dichotomy maps on to other false dichotomies: physical/cultural, extra-discursive/discursive, passive hearing/active listening, etc. The world is full of differences of degree but no such dichotomies or differences of kind. It forms a single plane. And, whatever the human, the social, the ideological, the discursive, etc. are, they are continuous with the physical, the material, etc. As Steve Goodman, Marcus Boon, and I myself have argued, there is a politics of vibration that does not require the philosophically bankrupt division of the world into the non-human/human, physical/cultural, etc. I'm
Re: [-empyre-] Thursday, 19th: Hearing and Listening
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Sorry, just to add. I do not think that a post-idealist, post-humanist materialism means to deny human agency, perception and reflection in a passive vibration, but to understand the equivalent embededness, (being centered in the world while not being at its centre) as well as the ethical responsibility that comes with being capable of human agency. Because while the bird can listen to me as much as I can listen to it, in the end my position is different and if I pretend it is not I think I am in danger or naturophilia, if such a word exists, and that will not empower the bird. On Jun 19, 2014, at 11:21 PM, Salomé Voegelin m...@salomevoegelin.net wrote: Chris: I am sorry if I was not as clear as I would like to be. I do not think sound is necessarily political, and a vista is not per se political either, but listening and looking are. Sound is sound and a chair is a chair, but how I look at it or listen to it is political. There is a difference and it is vital.The notion of sonic materialism is important as a critical lever, but materialism is, for me at least, paradoxically a philosophy of the material at the same time as it is a philosophy of perception and reflection, and that paradox or coincidence, dissolves the dichotomy that you rightly say should not be evoked: it is not a matter of human/non-human, culture/ nature but the compounding of all of it and thus gives us an insight into the make-up, bias, balance of that comound. So I think, or hope at least, we are on the whole in agreement, if not in the details or in how we get there. I do not mean to build a straw man or woman and neither do I mean to point a finger at any body in particular, but the focus, as seen in these discussions, on the one hand towards technological clarify, and on the other hand the celebration of unspeakable states of the heard (mishearings and hallucinations) that need to be bracketed off if we want to make sense within critical language confuses me. It at once suggests that sound is a pre-critical inarticulable state that needs to be framed if we mean to hear anything valuable and talk about it, while at the very same time celebrating that inarticulable state. Neither position seems useful to me as it avoids considering the socio-political particularity of listening. hope that makes a bit more sense. On Jun 19, 2014, at 10:55 PM, Christoph Cox c...@hampshire.edu wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Salome: Whom do you have in mind with the claim that some of us . . . [pretend] that scrutinizing the ideological or political aspects of listening or sound [ . . .] is somehow either not possible or desirable or manifests a betrayal of a purer state? Does anyone actually hold that position? Seems like a straw man argument to me. In this conversation, at least, what's at stake is not WHETHER there is a politics of sound but what politics MEANS and how we CONSTRUE it. Sound is a power, a force that is imposed and resisted in multiple forms, ways, and regimes. And so of course there's a politics of sound. The false notion is that politics ought to be separated from sonic materiality more generally. Left politics is deeply rooted in materialism. It seems to me that anyone committed to left politics (as I am) should reject the cultural idealism that (explicitly or implicitly) insists on dichotomies between nature/culture, physics/politics, etc. On 6/19/14, 5:18 PM, Salomé Voegelin wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- At a talk tonight at the Chelsea College of Art in London I was reminded that John Berger wrote his seminal Ways of Seeing in 1973. That is a good 40 years ago, and it is 40 year of acknowledging and working with the fact that seeing is ideological, political, cultural and social; that it is inflected by class, gender and economics. And yet, when 40 years later it comes to Ways of Listening, we pretend, or some of us do at least, that scrutinizing the ideological and political aspects of listening or sound, which are bizarrely and uncritically mixed up at times, it is somehow either not possible or desirable or manifests a betrayal of a purer state. I see Seth's desire to sprinkle sand in the gears of the cultural-industrial machinery also as my desire to critically consider listening maybe not to hear better, but to get to understand the gears that drive listening and make us hear a truth that is just another word for bias. Then listening becomes a socio-political tool not just to listen but to make a different sound. On Jun 19, 2014, at 8:14 PM, Christoph Cox c...@hampshire.edu wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- I think a false dichotomy is being drawn here between sound waves and mute materiality [sic], on the one hand, and
Re: [-empyre-] Thursday, 19th: Hearing and Listening
--empyre- soft-skinned space--Hi Seth, not sure I can agree with this : ) The fatigue with the language of conceptual art expressed by Semitransgenic strikes me as a response to the very difficult and neverending work of resisting the dominant vocabularies of our times and places and actually, the very sentence ***a response to the very difficult and neverending work of resisting the dominant vocabularies of our times and places* is artspeak ; ) Unfortunately, like it or not, within the art-world IAE is a dominant vocabulary, it really has gone beyond a joke at this point. So: http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2013/jan/27/users-guide-international-art-english * **Will the hegemony of IAE, to use a very IAE term, ever end? Rule and Levine think it soon might. Now that competence in IAE is almost a given for art professionals, its allure as an exclusive private language is fading. When IAE goes out of fashion, they write, 'We probably shouldn't expect that the globalised art world's language will become ... inclusive. More likely, the elite of that world will opt for something like conventional highbrow English.'* On 19 June 2014 15:27, Seth Kim-Cohen s...@kim-cohen.com wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Hello All Nice to be with you and thanks, Jim, for the invitation to participate. Art that engages sound is not a special case. The same obligations obtain, and the same privileges too. The fetishization of audio technology hearkens back to half-century-old discussions of the material support of visual artworks. Why should we care if the painting is on canvas or linen? Likewise, should we know or want to know if it's Supercollider or Max or a CD? Similarly, why is listening isolated, idealized, and idolized? Ultimately, the interactions that sustain interest and importance are not those between sound waves and eardrums, but between ideologies and economies, between societies and subjects, between history and concentrations of power. The fatigue with the language of conceptual art expressed by Semitransgenic strikes me as a response to the very difficult and neverending work of resisting the dominant vocabularies of our times and places. Such vocabularies are so pervasive as to operate transparently and to be adopted unproblematically as natural. The best international art-speak of the past fifty years has taken it upon itself to sprinkle sand in the gears of the cultural-industrial machinery. Of course, the machinery constantly recoups this sand as raw material for further manufacture. This recuperation produces both our collective fatigue and the demand for further innovation (I use the term cautiously) in the strategies and modes of alternative meaning-making. I fear - genuinely, I do - that our collective recourse to technology, to listening, to mute materiality, is a signal of retreat from the ubiquity of cultural-ecnomic hegemony. Sound schmound. Let's think about the relationships artworks create between audiences, institutions, conventions, ideas, and philosophies. Then we're on to something. Kindest regards to you all Seth www.kim-cohen.com On Jun 19, 2014, at 9:09 AM, Jim Drobnick wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- For today, Thursday, 19th, our focus will be on Hearing and Listening. While these topics may have been addressed in the past through perceptual or phenomenological methods, the questions by Jennifer Fisher, Eldritch Priest and Salomé Voegelin hint at the affective, bodily and political forces implicitly at work during this activity. Too often it is assumed that hearing or listening merely involves a passive transfer of sensory data, as if the ear were merely a conduit for information. But it's clear that the ear is subject to socialization and bias, training and discipline, personal idiosyncracies, and influence by the surrounding environment. The 3 questions today, then, seek to reflect upon the effects of such influences when attending to audio art: 1) Jennifer Fisher: What is the significance of spatial resonance and affect when listening to sound art? How do hearing and proprioception combine in formations of resonance? How might the resonances of ambient space -- whether a museum, concert hall or other venue -- operate contextually in curating sound art? My sense is that resonance operates somewhat differently from vibration: if vibration stems from the tactile sensing of a discrete object (or its emission from a particular point in space), might resonance afford more delocalized, contextual, intensification of hearing and proprioception? 2) Eldritch Priest: Through tropes such as the often cited “the ears are never closed,” artists and theorists alike routinely posit audition as form of “exposure,” a veritable faculty that lays us open and vulnerable to the world. But as Steven Connor notes,
Re: [-empyre-] Thursday, 19th: Hearing and Listening
--empyre- soft-skinned space--Thanks for these questions. I am fascinated by how people listen to sound art, and find that others' listening experiences expand my understanding of sound art works. Each time I have engaged listeners in conversation about sound art, whether through handwritten, online, performed or oral forms, and whether immediately or over a longer time period, there are surprises. People listen in ways that continue to surprise me and that then lead to re-consideration of the sound art in question, as well as other areas of thinking. These encounters seem very precious and important. On Thu, Jun 19, 2014 at 9:09 AM, Jim Drobnick j...@displaycult.com wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- For today, Thursday, 19th, our focus will be on Hearing and Listening. While these topics may have been addressed in the past through perceptual or phenomenological methods, the questions by Jennifer Fisher, Eldritch Priest and Salomé Voegelin hint at the affective, bodily and political forces implicitly at work during this activity. Too often it is assumed that hearing or listening merely involves a passive transfer of sensory data, as if the ear were merely a conduit for information. But it's clear that the ear is subject to socialization and bias, training and discipline, personal idiosyncracies, and influence by the surrounding environment. The 3 questions today, then, seek to reflect upon the effects of such influences when attending to audio art: *1) Jennifer Fisher*: What is the significance of spatial resonance and affect when listening to sound art? How do hearing and proprioception combine in formations of resonance? How might the resonances of ambient space -- whether a museum, concert hall or other venue -- operate contextually in curating sound art? My sense is that resonance operates somewhat differently from vibration: if vibration stems from the tactile sensing of a discrete object (or its emission from a particular point in space), might resonance afford more delocalized, contextual, intensification of hearing and proprioception? *2) Eldritch Priest*: Through tropes such as the often cited “the ears are never closed,” artists and theorists alike routinely posit audition as form of “exposure,” a veritable faculty that lays us open and vulnerable to the world. But as Steven Connor notes, the ear is not submissive; it actively connives to make what it takes to be sense out of what it hears.” This means that the ear not only refuses to entertain an outside -- “noise” -- but its operations seem to entail a kind of deterrence of sound” such that to hear is always to mishear. But if all hearing is mishearing, audition can only be a fundamental hallucination that works for the powers of the false. From this premise we might ask whether hearing is (in both its ordinary and Peircean sense of the term) an abduction of the “outside.” What would it mean or do, then, for sound studies—specifically sound studies in its humanistic phase -- that its organ of concern (l’oreille) is steeped primarily in “guesswork”? Does studying sound mean studying what is effectively a connivance? And if so, if audition is always making sense up, then with what, or as Neitzsche would say, with “whom” is it complicit? *3) Salomé Voegelin*: What is the relationship between listening and sound art? Jennifer, Eldritch and Salomé, please feel free to further elaborate or extend your initial thoughts! Best, Jim ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre -- www.youtube.com/andrasound ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Thursday, 19th: Sound Art, Technology and Innovation
--empyre- soft-skinned space--Of course discussions of technology (the how) can be valuable (as I noted). I simply object to it as a substitution for critical and historical analysis and/or aesthetic value. Not sure what pseudo-philosophical 'international art-speak' waffle refers to. There's dumb and obfuscating critical discourse, surely; but conceptual, philosophical, critical analysis of any art form is crucial. And there's precious little of it in the sound domain (compared, e.g., to the visual arts, architecture, etc.) On 6/19/14, 6:36 AM, Semitransgenic wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- On the point of grants and innovation for innovation’s sake, take an academic department that is trying to create time and space for creative practitioners doing their thing at doctorate and post-doctorate level, it needs to somehow legitimise its activities in a context that can be understood by people in suits who control cash-flow. For instance, if you are at a Russell group university, and there is unending rhetoric about striving for “excellence,” it’s simply very difficult to justify spending money on “research” (much of which is essentially people noodling with art/music technology) if it doesn't appear to be “innovative.” It’s a game, a veneer, and it doesn't just apply to academia, prospective funding bodies of one kind or another can more easily be convinced of a project's merits if the proposal is spun as “new and innovate” but it is unfortunate that too much money seems to go to work that is often little more than yawn-worthy (novelty does not guarantee quality). I’m not sure how this will change because the technocratic imperative (and the influence of trends within the “creative industries”) that forms part of the rationalisation process of determining where the money goes, means that certain hoops will have to be jumped through, hence the need to big-up the “innovation” component. I also see a couple of commentators here stating that they switch off when discussion turns to technology (the “how” instead of the “why”). This is short-sighted really, it’s not an either or situation, it’s possible to maintain a healthy balance. One can be engaged in technologically mediated creative practice and still enjoy the how” while not letting this aspect of things dictate the value of a work. Having said that, I find all this pseudo-philosophical international art-speak waffle tiring; so many emperors, so many new clothes, seriously, enough already. I’m not adverse to conceptual art but we have reached overkill with this stuff, and I’m loath to see sound/sonic/audio arts adopting this jargon in an effort to validate itself. There are so many artists out there now working with sound, it seems like everyone is a “sound artist” these days, it kind of reminds of the explosion in DJ culture that we saw back in the mid-90s (overnight everyone was a DJ, all they needed was a set of CDJs and an auto-sync button, now it’s a Zoom H4 and some artspeak). ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Thursday, 19th: Hearing and Listening
--empyre- soft-skinned space--I think it’s relevant to question and challenge oversimplified binary constructions that might assume easy polarities, pitting the physical against the cultural for example.I am drawn to Marcus Boon’s “politics of vibration” because of it evolving out of his focus on subcultures and identity and the empowering cultural/physical space it makes. Unfortunately I feel out of my league when it comes to the rigour and complexity of philosophical argument but look forward to reading more on this approach as it could relate its argument with respect to marginalized identities. ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] Thursday, 19th: Sound Art, Technology and Innovation
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Christoph, as usual, is dead right here, when defending aesthetic critical discourse. Anything worth doing can be done badly (and often is). Just because some folks blather iridescent nonsense when talking or writing about art, doesn't mean that the discourse they emptily parrot is itself worthless. To my mind, the discourse of the art world of the past 50 years has been the most fecund single field of critical production in the history of aesthetics and art. For this reason - and here, Christoph and I disagree - I see that discourse as having important lessons to teach us, and important tools to lend us, for thinking about sound. More soon on the more substantive points recently raised. All my best Seth www.kim-cohen.com On Jun 19, 2014, at 1:51 PM, Christoph Cox wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Of course discussions of technology (the how) can be valuable (as I noted). I simply object to it as a substitution for critical and historical analysis and/or aesthetic value. Not sure what pseudo-philosophical 'international art-speak' waffle refers to. There's dumb and obfuscating critical discourse, surely; but conceptual, philosophical, critical analysis of any art form is crucial. And there's precious little of it in the sound domain (compared, e.g., to the visual arts, architecture, etc.) On 6/19/14, 6:36 AM, Semitransgenic wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- On the point of grants and innovation for innovation’s sake, take an academic department that is trying to create time and space for creative practitioners doing their thing at doctorate and post-doctorate level, it needs to somehow legitimise its activities in a context that can be understood by people in suits who control cash-flow. For instance, if you are at a Russell group university, and there is unending rhetoric about striving for “excellence,” it’s simply very difficult to justify spending money on “research” (much of which is essentially people noodling with art/music technology) if it doesn't appear to be “innovative.” It’s a game, a veneer, and it doesn't just apply to academia, prospective funding bodies of one kind or another can more easily be convinced of a project's merits if the proposal is spun as “new and innovate” but it is unfortunate that too much money seems to go to work that is often little more than yawn-worthy (novelty does not guarantee quality). I’m not sure how this will change because the technocratic imperative (and the influence of trends within the “creative industries”) that forms part of the rationalisation process of determining where the money goes, means that certain hoops will have to be jumped through, hence the need to big-up the “innovation” component. I also see a couple of commentators here stating that they switch off when discussion turns to technology (the “how” instead of the “why”). This is short-sighted really, it’s not an either or situation, it’s possible to maintain a healthy balance. One can be engaged in technologically mediated creative practice and still enjoy the how” while not letting this aspect of things dictate the value of a work. Having said that, I find all this pseudo-philosophical international art-speak waffle tiring; so many emperors, so many new clothes, seriously, enough already. I’m not adverse to conceptual art but we have reached overkill with this stuff, and I’m loath to see sound/sonic/audio arts adopting this jargon in an effort to validate itself. There are so many artists out there now working with sound, it seems like everyone is a “sound artist” these days, it kind of reminds of the explosion in DJ culture that we saw back in the mid-90s (overnight everyone was a DJ, all they needed was a set of CDJs and an auto-sync button, now it’s a Zoom H4 and some artspeak). ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
