Re: [-empyre-] Saturday, 21st: The Disciplinarity of Sound Art
--empyre- soft-skinned space--Thanks for the insightful commentary John. I am wary about the institutionalization of the term "sound art" because I think its presence in the academy as a department for example will have a large part in its perception on the outside too. Through this week and from catching up a bit with Douglas Kahn's Sonic Paths from last week, I am now more than willing to investigate the energy model you and he are engaged with. Within the visual arts, I tend to oversimplify and polarize the positions of those engaged in social critique versus those focused on material formalism, which I'm seeing now does not do justice to the complexity and philosophy of sound based art. I'm looking forward to reading more from Marcus Boon and his investigation of sonic ontology and its relation to subcultures. My own art practice is not trying to capture essences or beauty for its own sake, but instead loves the challenge in negotiating Seth's "messy pain in the ass" vision of making art that for me is awake to marginalization, privilege and power relations. Whether that is too much to ask from a simple a gesture as an artwork is up for further debate for another time I'm sure. I've really enjoyed being involved this week. Thanks to all for their contributions and to Jim for his organization. There were a lot of questions to consider and I felt my age as it was tough keeping up at some points over the week. Also interesting how we spent an entire week around sound working entirely with words. On 14-06-21 5:30 PM, John Hopkins wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- For those of us who have lived through several iterations of a technology 'becoming' a field of creative/'artistic' inquiry, much of the discussion here may be retroactively recognized in substituting "new media" or "network" or "internet" or even, digging back a few decades, "photographic" for "sound" in "sound art" -- all these materialist categories have once been 'outsiders' in the dogmatic hierarchy of art institutions (including magazines, academies, fairs, museums, critics, funding bodies, etc etc...). Now many of them have their own journals, departments, museums, funding schemes, and so on. Who cares? The socially-mandated relevance of a art form seems to be peripheral to the intensity and verity of a creative praxis. With schools in Europe offering degrees in Sound Art I start to wonder how the Sound Art discipline is being formulated, formalized or institutionalized. My ...snip ... as much as it might be evolving out of currents and innovative new technology. To me this temporal repetition points to a distinct poverty of thinking that relies on tired materialist paradigms and an over-riding need for career-minded folks to justify their existence and their product-oriented processes. IMHO this way of thinking is a creative dead end -- to categoirze the world according to material outcomes rather than to approach it from a more wholistic and continuous pov. (For example, an energy-based one that Douglas has suggested.) (and, at the same time recognizing that much of the language we use is so replete with materialist baggage its scarcely possible to escape the gravity of soul-killing Cartesian dominance -- we do not approach any 'thing' we are not separate from the world except in our socially-primed and abstracted imaginings). To take on an energy-based worldview is to be liberated from the underlying paradigms of Newtonian physics whose limits in modeling reality cause those following the dominant worldview to imagine themselves as the detached observers of a segmented and categorically-defined world -- this to the detriment of the whole global system ... (Physicist David Bohm proposes a powerful alternative view in his book "The Implicate Order" where he observes the effects of the Newtonian approach, for example where "from early childhood we learn to accept the notion that the world is constituted out of a tremendous number of different and separately existent things. Among which is the self as a 'physical body,' sharply bounded by the surface of the skin, and then as a 'mental entity' ... which is 'within' this physical body and which is taken to be the very essence of the individual human being. The notion of a separately existent 'self' thus follows as an aspect of the generally accepted metaphysics, which implies that everything is of this nature." It is this illusion of separation that has profound consequences in life and it needs to be understood as a convenient form of "metaphysical art that fits our general experience within certain limits, [but is] not an expression of how thing really are": that is, fundamentally *not* separated ...) so it goes. I suggest that an energy-based definition of (any particular or in total) technology is crucial for exploring the dynamics of the wide
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-] 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
Re: [-empyre-] Tuesday, 17th: Sound Art and Its Cultural Context
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Thanks Jim, And sorry for the lateness of my posting. My interest in cross-cultural difference brought me to the current glut of websites that gather soundmaps and field recordings around the world has continued the trajectory from the 1960's pioneers of acoustic ecology. At the same time that it provides more opportunity to share eccentric or personal mappings of local place, I am interested in the exploration of cultures outside of the sound collector's, that is in effect their tourist snapshots of place, a familiar exoticizing occurs. Although the intentions of these global tourists, collectors and in some cases sound artists may be honorable and empathetic towards the cultures they are traveling in, is it possible for these projects to express and reflect on the complexities of Othering, and power relationships through the recording? And as much as the listening process can broken down into wavelengths, signal and noise, I think the interpretation of sound is importantly a culturally learned process. So does this not invite the same issues of exoticism, and Othering in the presentation of cross-cultural work? I'm also interested in how a new global consciousnesstowards the environment in part through the internet has affected the reception and status of the soundscape. ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
[-empyre-] Hello, can this be added to the: Post from Kevin deForest for start of week 3
--empyre- soft-skinned space--Thanks to everyone for weighing in on the "mash-up" terminology, which I'm guessing might already be obsolete in dance and techno circles. However, my metaphorical use of the term is in terms of the unexpected pairings of sound that cross genres to produce a more unconventional mix. I like Jim's reference to Christof Migone as curator becoming more like a sound engineer/mixer in group sound art shows. I would not necessarily feel the need to negotiate too far with the artists participating in terms of permission to mix. I think the curator could own those decisions of bleeding sound and mixing as one working with a more conventional visually dominated group show would realize their spatial relationships between works. Denise, the "voice over" exhibition sounds fascinating, especially in the combination of sound art with visual art that makes reference to sound but doesn't necessarily use it as a medium.Hope to find more on it. Lewis, I'm interested to know more about what you consider the dividing line is between more pop music and sound art, because I think there is a growing amount of overlap between the two. Sound art recordings are also put out there "into the unknown" in CD and vinyl. My own bias is towards maintaining sound art as a more discrete category that is rooted in conceptual art practices from the 1960's and very conscious about the physical and theoretical space it is operating in. ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
[-empyre-] Post from Kevin deForest for start of week 3
--empyre- soft-skinned space--First of all I'd like to thank Jim for his moderation and for inviting me. I'm honoured to be able to participate with this distinguished group and will try to keep up with the pace. I'm wondering if the inevitable bleeding of sound between sound artists presented adjacent to one another might be considered as a kind of curatorial mashup? If it might be possible to simultaneously focus on one artist's installed work but following that tune in to the bleeding of the neighbouring work and considering the results of that mix? Curious to know if a curator of a group sound exhibition might organize the space in the same manner that a curator of a visually focused group show would put two artists next to one another in order to dialogue a theme or bring out certain aspects of each artist's work? ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
