Re: [-empyre-] Friday, 20th: The Sonic Work, New Media, and Theory
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Hello again Moving on... I want to take up David's question, specifically this: (quoting Hansen) 'for the first time in our history, media […] has become distinct from its own technical infrastructure' (p. 172). What novel affordances are offered by aural practices—in the broadest sense—in the context of this second, singular, newness? Having been significantly persuaded by Craig Dworkin's arguments in his book No Medium (MIT 2013), I'm not sure what media might mean as or distinct from its own technical infrastructure.” Dworkin shows that every time we try to form the thought, a medium is x we create rules which the medium in question cannot obey. Ultimately, medium cannot be merely technical infrastructure, it cannot be the material support, it cannot be the genre or the form... At least, it's fair to say, it cannot be any of these things alone. Dworkin gives the example of Broodthaers' Pense Bete (http://armathrop.wikidot.com/mise-en-page). Copies of Broodthaers' own book of poems are encased in plaster. In the process, the books relinquish their claim on the medium of literature, at the same time, the plaster surrenders its status as a sculptural medium, because it now functions as an - admittedly poor - binding material for the book(s). Ultimately, the problem isn't that each medium swaps itself out for the status of another, but that each material and each medium slips into an ambiguous position between mediums, and I would argue, beyond mediality itself. To connect this argument to my question, the same basic logic applies to the status of the work. To say the work is x is inevitably to leave some feature or function of the work out of the equation (not to mention the fact that what the work is or does will change based on its time, place, and situation of audition). I would agree, then, with Dworkin who says that medium is a relational construct, a nexus of temporary and contingent forces brought together as a matter of convenience and convention to help corral the meaning and effect of a work or set of works. This is equally true of how we use the word work. What the work is, where it begins and ends, what other entities it rightly interacts with, are all open questions to be contingently located at the crossroads of various concerns, audiences, interactions, histories, psychologies, intentions, politics, and desires. This is a messy pain in the ass for the artist, audience, and critic alike. And I wouldn't have it any other way. Have a nice weekend! Seth www.kim-cohen.com On Jun 20, 2014, at 4:36 AM, Jim Drobnick wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Thanks for the discussion yesterday -- it feels like we've just scratched the surface! For today, the topic is The Sonic Work, New Media, and Theory, and will involve questions by David Cecchetto, Christoph Cox and Seth Kim-Cohen. This series of inquiries address the ontological and/or socially-constructed aspects of sound art, how its works are circumscribed by or reconfigure the genre of media art, and how it may generate new theoretical paradigms: 1) David Cecchetto: Mark Hansen notes that the term “new media” has both a plural and singular sense: plural in that the novelty of every medium waxes as an incipient innovation before waning into the sedimented form of the medium itself; and at the same time singular in that for the first time in our history, media […] has become distinct from its own technical infrastructure” (p. 172). What novel affordances are offered by aural practices—in the broadest sense—in the context of this second, singular, newness? Might aurality, for example, conjure alternative sensitivities to these ubiquitous data flows and rhythms of change? Or does such a claim slide too easily into an essentialized understanding of sound? (Mark Hansen, “New Media,” in Critical Terms for Media Studies, ed. by Mark Hansen and W.J.T. Mitchell, University of Chicago Press, 2010). 2) Christoph Cox: How can we move beyond the phenomenological and poststructuralist approaches that have thus far dominated thinking about sound? 3) Seth Kim-Cohen: In “What Is An Author?” Foucault writes, “A theory of the work does not exist, and the empirical task of those who naively undertake the editing of works often suffers in the absence of such a theory… The word work and the unity that it designates are probably as problematic as the status of the author's individuality.” Let’s take this problem seriously. Thinking the work as always otherwise suggests a certain wisdom in regard to the other: to be wise regarding the other is to be otherwise. The other, in this case, is, of course, not necessarily another subject, or even another sonic object, but a host of forces beyond the material or formal aspects of the sonic work: politics, economics, history, intention
Re: [-empyre-] Friday, 20th: The Sonic Work, New Media, and Theory
--empyre- soft-skinned space--Hello again Moving on... I want to take up David's question, specifically this: (quoting Hansen) 'for the first time in our history, media […] has become distinct from its own technical infrastructure' (p. 172). What novel affordances are offered by aural practices—in the broadest sense—in the context of this second, singular, newness? Having been significantly persuaded by Craig Dworkin's arguments in his book No Medium (MIT 2013), I'm not sure what media might mean as or distinct from its own technical infrastructure.” Dworkin shows that every time we try to form the thought, a medium is x we create rules which the medium in question cannot obey. Ultimately, medium cannot be merely technical infrastructure, it cannot be the material support, it cannot be the genre or the form... At least, it's fair to say, it cannot be any of these things alone. Dworkin gives the example of Broodthaers' Pense Bete (http://armathrop.wikidot.com/mise-en-page). Copies of Broodthaers' own book of poems are encased in plaster. In the process, the books relinquish their claim on the medium of literature, at the same time, the plaster surrenders its status as a sculptural medium, because it now functions as an - admittedly poor - binding material for the book(s). Ultimately, the problem isn't that each medium swaps itself out for the status of another, but that each material and each medium slips into an ambiguous position between mediums, and I would argue, beyond mediality itself. To connect this argument to my question, the same basic logic applies to the status of the work. To say the work is x is inevitably to leave some feature or function of the work out of the equation (not to mention the fact that what the work is or does will change based on its time, place, and situation of audition). I would agree, then, with Dworkin who says that medium is a relational construct, a nexus of temporary and contingent forces brought together as a matter of convenience and convention to help corral the meaning and effect of a work or set of works. This is equally true of how we use the word work. What the work is, where it begins and ends, what other entities it rightly interacts with, are all open questions to be contingently located at the crossroads of various concerns, audiences, interactions, histories, psychologies, intentions, politics, and desires. This is a messy pain in the ass for the artist, audience, and critic alike. And I wouldn't have it any other way. Have a nice weekend! Seth www.kim-cohen.com On Jun 20, 2014, at 4:36 AM, Jim Drobnick wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Thanks for the discussion yesterday -- it feels like we've just scratched the surface! For today, the topic is The Sonic Work, New Media, and Theory, and will involve questions by David Cecchetto, Christoph Cox and Seth Kim-Cohen. This series of inquiries address the ontological and/or socially-constructed aspects of sound art, how its works are circumscribed by or reconfigure the genre of media art, and how it may generate new theoretical paradigms: 1) David Cecchetto: Mark Hansen notes that the term “new media” has both a plural and singular sense: plural in that the novelty of every medium waxes as an incipient innovation before waning into the sedimented form of the medium itself; and at the same time singular in that for the first time in our history, media […] has become distinct from its own technical infrastructure” (p. 172). What novel affordances are offered by aural practices—in the broadest sense—in the context of this second, singular, newness? Might aurality, for example, conjure alternative sensitivities to these ubiquitous data flows and rhythms of change? Or does such a claim slide too easily into an essentialized understanding of sound? (Mark Hansen, “New Media,” in Critical Terms for Media Studies, ed. by Mark Hansen and W.J.T. Mitchell, University of Chicago Press, 2010). 2) Christoph Cox: How can we move beyond the phenomenological and poststructuralist approaches that have thus far dominated thinking about sound? 3) Seth Kim-Cohen: In “What Is An Author?” Foucault writes, “A theory of the work does not exist, and the empirical task of those who naively undertake the editing of works often suffers in the absence of such a theory… The word work and the unity that it designates are probably as problematic as the status of the author's individuality.” Let’s take this problem seriously. Thinking the work as always otherwise suggests a certain wisdom in regard to the other: to be wise regarding the other is to be otherwise. The other, in this case, is, of course, not necessarily another subject, or even another sonic object, but a host of forces beyond the material or formal aspects of the sonic work: politics, economics, history, intention
Re: [-empyre-] Thursday, 19th: Hearing and Listening
biases that are involved in this mode of engagement with the world and in what why sound art negotiates, critiques, augments and challenges, reaffirms or indeed ignores such biases and legacies. Not to pretend that I listen to the inanimate, dumb sound work, sound world, but because I am humbly aware of the fact that I am me and not that chair, and I will never become that chair, but understanding my modes of engagement with it I can come to appreciate its autonomy and complexity without subsuming it into an equivalence that is powered by my agency: creating an über-human post-humanism. On Jun 20, 2014, at 4:11 AM, Christoph Cox c...@hampshire.edu wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Rule and Levine's analysis of International Art English was brilliant and hilarious (AND, it should be mentioned, a project of Triple Canopy, one of the key purveyors of contemporary art discourse, or IAE, I suppose). It's also certainly worth doing anthropological/cultural anthropological analyses of cultural discourses. But roundly condemning any conceptual or technical discourse about art is, I think, simply anti-intellectual. There are certainly bad and obfuscating writers of art discourse but also brilliantly illuminating ones. Of course, that's true in any field. Why should we expect (or want) art (or humanistic) discourse to be more jargon-free than any other discourse? Should we equally condemn hepatologists or quantum physicists or epistemologists for having peculiar insider discourses? That would be dumb, I think. Salome remarks: 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. I understand what she means, of course. But I think we need to be wary of that sort of distinction, as though the world is inert and meaningless until we impose meaning and value on it. Again, this sort of world/human, fact/value distinction easily slides into idealism and a theological inflation of the human. The world is vast array of forces, human and non-human, that impose themselves on us and vice versa, and that, each in their own way, are selective, evaluative, etc. It's not some dumb thing waiting for me to make (or not make) meaning and politics out of it. On 6/19/14, 12:06 PM, Semitransgenic wrote: --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: 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
Re: [-empyre-] Thursday, 19th: Hearing and Listening
, critiques, augments and challenges, reaffirms or indeed ignores such biases and legacies. Not to pretend that I listen to the inanimate, dumb sound work, sound world, but because I am humbly aware of the fact that I am me and not that chair, and I will never become that chair, but understanding my modes of engagement with it I can come to appreciate its autonomy and complexity without subsuming it into an equivalence that is powered by my agency: creating an über-human post-humanism. On Jun 20, 2014, at 4:11 AM, Christoph Cox c...@hampshire.edu wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Rule and Levine's analysis of International Art English was brilliant and hilarious (AND, it should be mentioned, a project of Triple Canopy, one of the key purveyors of contemporary art discourse, or IAE, I suppose). It's also certainly worth doing anthropological/cultural anthropological analyses of cultural discourses. But roundly condemning any conceptual or technical discourse about art is, I think, simply anti-intellectual. There are certainly bad and obfuscating writers of art discourse but also brilliantly illuminating ones. Of course, that's true in any field. Why should we expect (or want) art (or humanistic) discourse to be more jargon-free than any other discourse? Should we equally condemn hepatologists or quantum physicists or epistemologists for having peculiar insider discourses? That would be dumb, I think. Salome remarks: 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. I understand what she means, of course. But I think we need to be wary of that sort of distinction, as though the world is inert and meaningless until we impose meaning and value on it. Again, this sort of world/human, fact/value distinction easily slides into idealism and a theological inflation of the human. The world is vast array of forces, human and non-human, that impose themselves on us and vice versa, and that, each in their own way, are selective, evaluative, etc. It's not some dumb thing waiting for me to make (or not make) meaning and politics out of it. On 6/19/14, 12:06 PM, Semitransgenic wrote: --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: 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
Re: [-empyre-] Thursday, 19th: Hearing and Listening
, critiques, augments and challenges, reaffirms or indeed ignores such biases and legacies. Not to pretend that I listen to the inanimate, dumb sound work, sound world, but because I am humbly aware of the fact that I am me and not that chair, and I will never become that chair, but understanding my modes of engagement with it I can come to appreciate its autonomy and complexity without subsuming it into an equivalence that is powered by my agency: creating an über-human post-humanism. On Jun 20, 2014, at 4:11 AM, Christoph Cox c...@hampshire.edu wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Rule and Levine's analysis of International Art English was brilliant and hilarious (AND, it should be mentioned, a project of Triple Canopy, one of the key purveyors of contemporary art discourse, or IAE, I suppose). It's also certainly worth doing anthropological/cultural anthropological analyses of cultural discourses. But roundly condemning any conceptual or technical discourse about art is, I think, simply anti-intellectual. There are certainly bad and obfuscating writers of art discourse but also brilliantly illuminating ones. Of course, that's true in any field. Why should we expect (or want) art (or humanistic) discourse to be more jargon-free than any other discourse? Should we equally condemn hepatologists or quantum physicists or epistemologists for having peculiar insider discourses? That would be dumb, I think. Salome remarks: 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. I understand what she means, of course. But I think we need to be wary of that sort of distinction, as though the world is inert and meaningless until we impose meaning and value on it. Again, this sort of world/human, fact/value distinction easily slides into idealism and a theological inflation of the human. The world is vast array of forces, human and non-human, that impose themselves on us and vice versa, and that, each in their own way, are selective, evaluative, etc. It's not some dumb thing waiting for me to make (or not make) meaning and politics out of it. On 6/19/14, 12:06 PM, Semitransgenic wrote: --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: 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
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: 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
