No german version available, sorry. -
///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// FLOTESON SONIC SOURCES, COURSES AND REARRANGEMENTS A group show curated by Jens Maier-Rothe October 25 - November 8, 2008 KHM Gallery Nikos Arvanitis / Nate Harrison / Ralf Homann / Zoe Irvine / Andreas Kurtsson / Henning Lundkvist / Sony Mao / Tisha Mukarji / Laurence Rassel / The Tape-beatles / Terre Thaemlitz / Ultra-red ///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// Floteson - Sonic sources, courses and rearrangements“In maritime law, flotsam applies to wreckage or cargo left floating on the sea after a shipwreck. Jetsam applies to cargo or equipment thrown overboard from a ship in distress and either sunk or washed ashore.” (The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition, 2000)
When sonic culture appears in the context of contemporary art practices our ideas of listening and sound producing are shaped in a particular way. As it is with visual perception, listening situations are mostly quite different in art contexts than they are in everyday life. Precisely because of this shift in perception, it is important to take a closer look on how these moments of listening are created and what forms of participation or agency they might imply. Moreover, to investigate how listening itself is reflected within the art discourse. The omnipresence of sonic perception in most fields of art practice ought to have an enormous influence on art discourses, one might think; but can it have an influence when listening is not understood as a discrete and active mode of participation? Furthermore I would like to take an additional step toward asking what specific role does sound play in critical art practices; art practices that question the power relations at play, that challenge common criteria and any certainty of knowledge as much as their own social or political relevance. What can be a social or political intent in practices that are widely known as contemporary sound art? If listening, collectively or individually, is of specific substance for a vast amount of other visual art practices that try to develop a critical impact on social or political issues, how can this be scrutinized?
Both artists and audience often seem to struggle with the articulation and the reading of these questions when dealing with sound in art on the one hand. Which makes it even more startling on the other that whenever a social or political engagement is attached to sonic arts, it is mostly rather assumed than analyzed in theoretical terms. Hence there is something about sound that seems to be difficult to grasp or to disseminate. But which end creates the gap? Is it the sound artists? Is it the fragmentary nature of sound itself? Do audiences not know how to listen? Or should the question instead be formulated as: What creates this illusion that listening has a social and political dimension? Possible answers might be found precisely in this gap. I even want to sugesst that a potential for criticality might be situated here. This rift is where imagination meets articulation, where a translation process happens in the active mode of listening. What we hear is associated to what we know and thus creates a meaning in relation to our conscious and subconscious memory. Sonic perception can be seen as a recycling process, causing our imagination to constantly rearrange knowledge and memorized impressions, may they be of sonic, visual, haptic or olfactory origin.
Recycling is rearranging the relation between old and new, useful and useless, between property and open source. To recycle sonic source material has nowadays almost become an everyday activity. Whenever we tune into contemporary art and sound culture, sonic salvage, remix, sound collage or simple copy paste techniques include and reshape bygone, lost or thrown overboard aesthetic experiences recreating new ones from them. Music sampling renders endless permutations of a source. Chinese Whisper principles fabricate an infinite stream of new subjective meanings. Sounds split into their fragments, they travel, cross borders and shift their significance and relevance according to new listeners and contexts. While moving from one world of thought into the next and from one medium into another their interpretations alter in resonance with their surroundings. While they lose and produce critical impulses repeatedly until laws and rules interfere with their flow and turn them into either property or discarded flotsam and start their journey once again. Tracking their courses we can explore the currents and listen to the shores and landfalls in the ocean of sound.
Floteson was the Anglo-Norman precursor of the English word flotsam, nowadays used in the term flotsam and jetsam for loosely describing objects found floating or washed ashore. Combining float (Old-Fr. floter) and sound (Fr. son), the exhibition jumps on the sonic track of permanent reuse and follows the loop of sources, courses and rearrangements of sonic source material. Traveling with the flow it shows some key strategies of and instigators for recycling and transforming sound within contemporary art. It wants to shed light on those corners where a claim for critique does not merely serve as a vehicle to make a so called 'sound art' look and sound more interesting. But where instead a focus on sonics may unveil new critical perspectives on social and political issues in art and how they could be developed and thought differently through working with sound.
This group show is part of a series of practical investigations and theoretical experiments around sound and its role for strategies in critical art practice in order to ask: What specific characteristics of sound, its material behaviour so to say, are essential for which critical art practices? Where do certain conceptual strategies and modes of address derive directly from this material behaviour? Where can a critical intent be achieved uniquely through working with sound and where does it seem impossible at all? Over the course of half a year the project involves three exhibitions, based on three different sonic properties: recycling, resonance, (non)simultaneity. At the end a publication with related texts will be released during 2009.
/ Jens Maier-Rothe, 2008 -
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