Spectral Memories: the Aesthetics of the Phonographic Recording. Dugal McKinnon [It is] in the phonograph record as a thing that its potential significance--and also its aesthetic significance--resides
Adorno, 'The Form of the Phonograph Record' This paper is an attempt to divine a medium's message, that medium being the phonographic recording, primarily but not only in the form of the record. There are, of course, a plethora of excellent studies of recording and the record, but these have tended to examine the effect of recording on music (the work of Michael Chanan, Mike Katz and others), the cultural meanings and practices associated with recorded music (the seminal essays that form Eisenberg's The Recording Angel), or the wider sociocultural history of sound technologies (Stern's Audible Past for example). What remains less explored are the aesthetics of the record itself: how is the record, as a technology with a well-documented history, also a signifying medium that has generated certain meanings, and modes of aesthetic production and reception? Adorno's suggestive but scant writings on the relationship between music and the phonograph come closest to initiating such a project. So, Adorno-like, it is with the thingness of the record that I'll begin, initiating a series of epigrams linked by a somewhat associational chain of thought. more... http://www.hz-journal.org/n12/mckinnon.html _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
