[-empyre-] Sunday, 22nd: Sound Art: Curating, Technology, Theory
--empyre- soft-skinned space--Today we have an opportunity to revisit any of the questions or comments that have been posted over the past six days. Also, what topics deserve more discussion? What topics have been left out? Here is a look at what we've addressed so far over the past week: -- Monday, 16th: Sound Curating and Exhibitions -- Tuesday, 17th: Sound Art and Its Cultural Context -- Wednesday, 18th: Sound Art, Technology and Innovation -- Thursday, 19th: Hearing and Listening -- Friday, 20th: The Sonic Work, New Media, and Theory -- Saturday, 21st: The Disciplinarity of Sound Art Are there any final thoughts from the core participants? Best wishes, 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-- Hi, everyone, thanks for great week. Hope you'll continue to chime in through the rest of the month, as well. Regarding, Salome's question, I'm wondering whether she would exclude participatory vibrancy as a critical condition of the auditory. This, for instance, is what I experienced a few weeks ago during the June 4 demonstrations in Hong Kong where the generation of disruptive noise constituted a critical act of Hong Kong resistance to mainland centralization. Or last night, as Renate and I enjoyed the Fete de la Musique in Paris, we reveled in the non-directional vibrancy of the multifarious sounds of the public sphere. Cheers, Tim Sent from my iPad On Jun 19, 2014, at 6:39 PM, Salomé Voegelin m...@salomevoegelin.net wrote: --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
Re: [-empyre-] Thursday, 19th: Hearing and Listening
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Dear Tim I am sure participatory vibrancy has a criticality, or at least has the potential for criticality in both the instances you mention, it depends however on your interpretation of the auditory and of criticality as to whether we agree on what that might be. Criticality or rather the articulation and valuation of criticality is for me a matter of interpretation and thus of human agency and political choice making. In other words a matter of contingency and context. I am sure the marches in the third reich had a participatory vibrancy too, and yet it clearly meant something so very different. Sound, listening and revelling are difficult things, I think, and not per se positive. :-) best salomé On Jun 22, 2014, at 2:46 PM, Timm750 timm...@gmail.com wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Hi, everyone, thanks for great week. Hope you'll continue to chime in through the rest of the month, as well. Regarding, Salome's question, I'm wondering whether she would exclude participatory vibrancy as a critical condition of the auditory. This, for instance, is what I experienced a few weeks ago during the June 4 demonstrations in Hong Kong where the generation of disruptive noise constituted a critical act of Hong Kong resistance to mainland centralization. Or last night, as Renate and I enjoyed the Fete de la Musique in Paris, we reveled in the non-directional vibrancy of the multifarious sounds of the public sphere. Cheers, Tim Sent from my iPad On Jun 19, 2014, at 6:39 PM, Salomé Voegelin m...@salomevoegelin.net wrote: --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
