Re: [-empyre-] Thursday, 19th: Hearing and Listening
--empyre- soft-skinned space--Rule and Levine's analysis of International Art English http://canopycanopycanopy.com/issues/16/contents/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: http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2013/jan/27/users-guide-international-art-english/ //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 mailto: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 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
Re: [-empyre-] Thursday, 19th: Hearing and Listening
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- One last comment on this general epistemological and metaphysical issue which, while not about sound per se, bears on methodologies of sonic inquiry: The (non-human) world is not an other from which we are somehow cut off. Human beings are OF the world, not ABOVE it or BESIDE it. And human processes of perceiving and knowing are simply variants of the processes of selection, incorporation, assimilation, etc. through which the entire world (inorganic, organic, animal, human . . .) operates. Pace Salome, it is precisely exoticist to think otherwise: to think that the non-human world is a mysterious and ineffable something that, despite our efforts, forever eludes us. And it is precisely anthropocentric and narcissistic to endorse a species solipsism that locks us in our own epistemological bubble. We can know the world because we are not other than it, because we are continuous with it. Nietzsche proposed a middle position between Salome's and mine. He agrees with Salome that knowledge is a will to power, a will to capture the not-human and transform it into the human. But he strongly qualified this claim with a metaphysical monism that utterly rejected species solipsism. Knowing may be a will to power; but so is the entire inorganic and organic world. As he famously put it: The world is will to power and nothing besides; and you yourselves are also this will to power and nothing besides. On 6/20/14, 5:32 AM, Salomé Voegelin wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Chris, in relation to the dumb world: absolutely of course I would never suggest that the world is a dumb vessel we sit within. However, the answer to humanism and idealism that sets itself above this world and its things, is not to pretend we can know what the other in this case nature, the chair, the bird, etc. is thinking and know its agency, that would be just another exoticism and thus just as colonial and humanist as the 19th Century admiration and collecting of plants and butterflies. In fact to deny the factors and consequences of human agency, and the quite unique blame and responsibility that at least ecologically speaking we have to level at ourselves, through the slight of hand of a theoretical equivalence with nature and things, seems an enormously anthropocentric and idealist move if not down right narcissistic. Therefor, to get back to listening, what interests me is the philosophical, musical, artistic as well as theological 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
Re: [-empyre-] Thursday, 19th: Hearing and Listening
--empyre- soft-skinned space--Semitransgenic: If you disagree, then explain yourself and offer an alternative position, instead of taking cheap, short potshots at anyone whose thought and writing has any philosophical content. Your quick dismissal of such views is not conducive to genuine intellectual discussion. Present some content of your own, change the topic of discussion to something you prefer to discuss, or back off. On 6/20/14, 11:18 AM, Semitransgenic wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- /...And human processes of perceiving and knowing are simply variants of the processes of selection, incorporation, assimilation, etc. through which the entire world (inorganic, organic, animal, human . . .) operates.../ / / sorry, I just can't help myself, but this kind of vague reductive assessment is itself an epistemological bubble. On 20 June 2014 14:03, Christoph Cox c...@hampshire.edu mailto:c...@hampshire.edu wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- One last comment on this general epistemological and metaphysical issue which, while not about sound per se, bears on methodologies of sonic inquiry: The (non-human) world is not an other from which we are somehow cut off. Human beings are OF the world, not ABOVE it or BESIDE it. And human processes of perceiving and knowing are simply variants of the processes of selection, incorporation, assimilation, etc. through which the entire world (inorganic, organic, animal, human . . .) operates. Pace Salome, it is precisely exoticist to think otherwise: to think that the non-human world is a mysterious and ineffable something that, despite our efforts, forever eludes us. And it is precisely anthropocentric and narcissistic to endorse a species solipsism that locks us in our own epistemological bubble. We can know the world because we are not other than it, because we are continuous with it. Nietzsche proposed a middle position between Salome's and mine. He agrees with Salome that knowledge is a will to power, a will to capture the not-human and transform it into the human. But he strongly qualified this claim with a metaphysical monism that utterly rejected species solipsism. Knowing may be a will to power; but so is the entire inorganic and organic world. As he famously put it: The world is will to power and nothing besides; and you yourselves are also this will to power and nothing besides. On 6/20/14, 5:32 AM, Salomé Voegelin wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Chris, in relation to the dumb world: absolutely of course I would never suggest that the world is a dumb vessel we sit within. However, the answer to humanism and idealism that sets itself above this world and its things, is not to pretend we can know what the other in this case nature, the chair, the bird, etc. is thinking and know its agency, that would be just another exoticism and thus just as colonial and humanist as the 19th Century admiration and collecting of plants and butterflies. In fact to deny the factors and consequences of human agency, and the quite unique blame and responsibility that at least ecologically speaking we have to level at ourselves, through the slight of hand of a theoretical equivalence with nature and things, seems an enormously anthropocentric and idealist move if not down right narcissistic. Therefor, to get back to listening, what interests me is the philosophical, musical, artistic as well as theological 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 mailto: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
Re: [-empyre-] Thursday, 19th: Hearing and Listening
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- I agree with much of what Seth says. As for much of what Salome says, a proper response would require a much bigger contribution than I'm able to make right now and a different forum than this one. Suffice it to say: (1) I accept a materialist monism not because so-and-so says so, but because /the //arguments//for that position are the most convincing/ (for reasons too many to number), (2) that this position absolutely acknowledges the uniqueness of the human (as a difference in degree, not of kind), (3) that it's a bizarre stretch to suggest that this materialist position absolves human beings of the responsibility for global warming (it's the exact reverse, I'd argue), (4) that feminism and materialism are absolutely compatible (see, e.g., Elizabeth Grosz, Luciana Parisi, Rosi Braidotti, perhaps even Karen Barad, etc. etc.) This forum seems to have fostered more misunderstanding than illumination. My too-quick comments have no doubt contributed to that. My apologies for that. Here's hoping for another occasion on/in which to explore all of this more fully, more sonically, and with more generosity and intellectual charity. On 6/20/14, 3:04 PM, Salomé Voegelin wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- On Jun 20, 2014, at 7:23 PM, Seth Kim-Cohen s...@kim-cohen.com wrote: Why can't we accept our anthropomorphized and anthropomorphizing position without succumbing or surrendering to an anthropocentric privileging of the human (all too human)? I agree with the pickle most definitively, and to try to come out of it by pretending there is a equivalence and egalite because Nietzsche and Deleuze says so, kind of does not work for me. I have yet to see a monkey who is responsible for global warming for example, so there definitively is something terribly human about the current state of the world: human and non-human all together, up shit creek and no paddle in sight, but maybe we can hear one that we never dreamt of seeing. I am not so worried that we anthropomorphize in perception. I think as you say, Seth, what else can we do, we are human, it is rather how, with what awareness and ethical responsibility, we do the morphising that is important to me. Since the what else is more worrying as the options seem to focus on erasing the human (and with it his responsibility) by apparently becoming nature, non-human or whatever it is we want to be equivalent with without truly considering the power position we have leveraged ourselves into in philosophy, in art and in fact. There is a feminist argument here too in that I do not want man to become woman, I want woman to have her own voice not re-utter Nietzsche et all, to fit in at the margins. I think it is a bit late for pretending there is no bias to our carving visually or sonically! ___ 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
Re: [-empyre-] Thursday, 19th: Hearing and Listening
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- I think a false dichotomy is being drawn here between sound waves and mute materiality [sic], on the one hand, and ideologies, economies, societies, subjects, history, power, on the other. This dichotomy maps on to other false dichotomies: physical/cultural, extra-discursive/discursive, passive hearing/active listening, etc. The world is full of differences of degree but no such dichotomies or differences of kind. It forms a single plane. And, whatever the human, the social, the ideological, the discursive, etc. are, they are continuous with the physical, the material, etc. As Steve Goodman, Marcus Boon, and I myself have argued, there is a politics of vibration that does not require the philosophically bankrupt division of the world into the non-human/human, physical/cultural, etc. I'm curious what Eldritch means with the claim that all hearing is mishearing and that audition can only be a fundamental hallucination. If by that he means that hearing is selective, then of course that's true. But such selection does not mark out human listening as different from any other form of biological or mechanical registration: a thermostat is selective, too, concerned only with temperature thresholds and nothing else. Materiality is not inert or mute. It is fundamentally active and responsive. (I apologize for the quick and sometimes brusque nature of my comments this week, which I'm spending with a sick parent in the hospital, which makes thoughtfulness and sustained attention nearly impossible.) On 6/19/14, 10:27 AM, Seth Kim-Cohen 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 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
Re: [-empyre-] Thursday, 19th: Hearing and Listening
--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 aspects of listening or sound, which are bizarrely and uncritically mixed up at times, it is somehow either not possible or desirable or manifests a betrayal of a purer state. I see Seth's desire to sprinkle sand in the gears of the cultural-industrial machinery also as my desire to critically consider listening maybe not to hear better, but to get to understand the gears that drive listening and make us hear a truth that is just another word for bias. Then listening becomes a socio-political tool not just to listen but to make a different sound. On Jun 19, 2014, at 8:14 PM, Christoph Cox c...@hampshire.edu wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- I think a false dichotomy is being drawn here between sound waves and mute materiality [sic], on the one hand, and ideologies, economies, societies, subjects, history, power, on the other. This dichotomy maps on to other false dichotomies: physical/cultural, extra-discursive/discursive, passive hearing/active listening, etc. The world is full of differences of degree but no such dichotomies or differences of kind. It forms a single plane. And, whatever the human, the social, the ideological, the discursive, etc. are, they are continuous with the physical, the material, etc. As Steve Goodman, Marcus Boon, and I myself have argued, there is a politics of vibration that does not require the philosophically bankrupt division of the world into the non-human/human, physical/cultural, etc. I'm curious what Eldritch means with the claim that all hearing is mishearing and that audition can only be a fundamental hallucination. If by that he means that hearing is selective, then of course that's true. But such selection does not mark out human listening as different from any other form of biological or mechanical registration: a thermostat is selective, too, concerned only with temperature thresholds and nothing else. Materiality is not inert or mute. It is fundamentally active and responsive. (I apologize for the quick and sometimes brusque nature of my comments this week, which I'm spending with a sick parent in the hospital, which makes thoughtfulness and sustained attention nearly impossible.) On 6/19/14, 10:27 AM, Seth Kim-Cohen 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
Re: [-empyre-] Thursday, 19th: Sound Art, Technology and Innovation
--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
Re: [-empyre-] Wednesday, 18th: Sound Art, Technology and Innovation
--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 9:29:12 AM, Jim Drobnick j...@displaycult.com wrote: Hi Folks, Yesterday's questions about sound in its cultural context didn't seem to gain much traction with the group -- or were there comments that didn't get through? If the former was the case, then we'll move on to the next topic, which is Sound Art, Technology and Innovation. Ryan Diduck, Paul Dolden, Anna Friz and Lewis Kaye have offered questions that address the influence of technology on sound art production, along with the pressures of artists themselves to develop new technologies. *1) Ryan Diduck*: What is the relationship between users and innovations? This is an important question to consider for music making, as well as its reproduction. How are sound or music technologies -- such as formats like LPs and MP3s, or instruments like pianos and electronic synthesizers -- and their users mutually produced? To what extent do users stimulate technological innovations, or vice versa, in the sonic realm?
Re: [-empyre-] curating sound art
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Mash-ups, orchestrations, audio ecologies, and the like are good strategies for sound curation. And some of the best sound shows I've seen/heard have treated sound bleed as a positive rather than a negative feature: e.g., the Treble show that Regine Basha curated at SculptureCenter in 2004 or so, In Resonance, curated by Fionn Meade at Seattle Center in 2005, Allora Calzadilla's Never Mind that Noise that You Heard' at the Stedelijk in 2008, etc. But that sort of orchestration is difficult, requiring either a group commission or very close coordination between artists, which can strain budgets and relationships. Visual (and sonic) artists are often annoyed by sound bleed. And the professed acceptance/affirmation of sound bleed can be a lazy way to solve a problem, patting oneself on the back for an exhibition that, in truth, sounds like shit. (Perhaps that's the case with the Chris Marker show Denise describes.) To Renate's earlier question, Brandon LaBelle's book (and Seth Kim-Cohen's) provide valuable beginnings at telling the story of the co-evolution of sound art and visual art in the late 1960s and 1970s. From my p.o.v. (or p.o.a.), the historical connection is deeper than both LaBelle and Kim-Cohen present and also reveals deeper rifts (particularly between conceptuality and materiality) in subsequent artistic practice and critical discourse. On 6/17/14, 11:03 AM, Lewis Kaye wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Online curation does open up some new possibilities, however there is a problem with the exclusivity it imposes. MP3s are a very finicky format, and a lot of audio work just sounds terrible when compressed this way. Such work, for example some of the compositions I do with crowd sounds, could never be presented this way. Basically, the format is not a neutral part of the signal chain. Sterne's book on the subject makes this abundantly clear. best, Lewis On 2014-06-17, 10:22 AM, Jim Drobnick j...@displaycult.com wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Online curating definitely has advantages and disadvantages, doesn't it? While the technology of mp3s and the like certainly make soundworks more easily distributable and accessible, the problems are evident in the 2 shows I mentioned in my intro yesterday -- ICA's Soundworks and Berlin's Zeigen (which wasn't an online show technically, but it functions like one when distributed on CD). Both had an overwhelming number of artists, and most of the clips were short, a minute or less. Beyond the limited expectations of what can be done in such a short time frame, I found something else arose in the listening experience. While flipping through so many contributions one after another, either in the space or at home, I found myself judging the works by how much immediate impact they offered. Works that had an emphatic oomph to them, something like on the order of Dick Higgins' Danger Music, drew my attention more than subtler works. Nuance seemed to lose out by comparison. My patience was practically non-existent when going through all the files to find the most interesting one or the next hit. Even though I knew my experience was being biased, and I had the opportunity to control it, it felt like the technology coerced my listening to a great degree. Any one else experience something similar? How is it possible, then, to counteract the downside of superficial online listening? best, Jim On 2014-06-17, at 9:51 AM, Salomé Voegelin wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- It's interesting that noone has yet to mention curating sound art online where many of these bleed problems are naturally contained. I am very interested in the context of work online, less as a parallel gallery opportunity and more as a radiophonic environment off schedule. I have tried to do something in that way myself (http://clickanywhere.crisap.org/) but feel that the visual pull of the net, our staring into its virtual space, makes it important the the environment the sound work is embedded in is well designed and carefully considered in relation to the sound so we get seduced to listen rather than focus on what is not there. I actually found the bleed to be fascinating and energizing, as if to suggest that the energy and volume of these radical performance events I also do not find the bleed the main problem of curating sound, and would not go on-line to avoid it. the very opposite: the overlaps and spillages are the audio-visual context the sound work is performed in, just like the architecture of the space, color of the walls, or the lighting arrangement, they form not a distraction but the focus of listening and could be exploited and used in designing the presentation/performance rather than avoided. On Jun 17, 2014, at 2:37 PM, Timothy Conway Murray t...@cornell.edu wrote:
Re: [-empyre-] start of week 3
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Thanks, Jim, for the invitation to contribute to this conversation. You, Dave, and Lewis raise important questions about the promises and pitfalls of sound exhibitions. On the one hand, group sound exhibitions are valuable for showcasing the variety of sonic practices pursued by artists today. And, whether or not they adequately solve them, they also draw attention to the unique problems involved in exhibiting sound. On the other hand, the ghettoizing problem is real; and I'm tired of sound being treated as some peculiar domain entirely apart from the visual arts and music, a domain with its own set of artists, curators, critics, etc. It seems to me that artists such as Luke Fowler and Haroon Mirza have been really important in breaking sound out of this ghetto. Both artists have a strong visual practice; yet both are also aware of the history of sound art and situate their work within it. This forces curators, institutions, and audiences to come to terms with the sonic and the visual, and to draw the former into discussions of contemporary art in general. It also seems to me that we need a clearer and more robust account of the role of sound in contemporary art history. That's something I'm trying to do in a long book chapter that considers the co-emergence of conceptual art and sound art in the late 1960s and the subsequent divergence of these two practices that led to the dominance of the former at the expense of the latter. The reasons for this divergence are complicated and, to my mind, largely philosophical and ideological. In any case, while unique in some respects, sound art shares a common history with the visual arts, a history that ought to be more widely known and considered. -- Christoph On 6/16/14, 9:28 AM, Jim Drobnick wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Dear Renate and Tim, Thank you for inviting me to coordinate week 3 of the month-long discussion on New Sonic Paths. It's been a pleasure listening in so far. For this week, the 16 core participants represent a diverse cross-section of the sound art world, and includes artists, composers, curators and theorists, from Toronto and beyond. Each day, I will introduce a few related questions that have been solicited from the core participants. Overall, the general context of the questions pertain to the post-legitimacy stage of sound practice and studies today. That is, with the “sonic turn” in art and theory secure, and its place within the worlds of museums and academia assured, what are the main issues to be discussed? This week’s discussion group will examine how innovations in sound art, curating, technology, and theory intersect and develop in the contemporary context. To start the discussion today, I draw from questions raised by Dave Dyment, Lewis Kaye and myself on curating and participating in exhibitions of sound art. 1) For myself, I've noticed how the millennium seemed to provide a watershed moment for sound art. Within the span of five years, a number of high-profile audio art shows occurred at major art institutions, such as “Voices” (1998), “Sonic Boom” (2000), “Volume: Bed of Sound” (2000), “Frequencies” (2002) and “Sonic Process” (2002). Since then, sound shows have continued to feature huge numbers of artists. Soundworks at the ICA in London (2012) included over 100 artists, and Zeigen at the Temporare Kunsthalle Berlin (2009-10) included a whopping 566 artists. While these shows operated on the premise of inclusivity, and sampled the broad diversity of audio practices, to what degree is this curatorial strategy still useful, and what might be lost or compromised in the process? 2) In a similar vein, Dave Dyment asks: How does the curation of Audio Art move forward, away from ghettoization in thematic group shows or token inclusion in larger projects (“we need something for this hallway”)? 3) Lewis Kaye's remarks echo these sentiments: At a recent conference in London, I heard David Toop suggest that curating a group sound art exhibition was impossible given the inevitable sonic conflict between the exhibited works. Such a claim, on its face, seems rather provocative. What are some strategies that curators or artists might employ to overcome the obvious challenges Toop is alluding to? [Note: Toop curated Sonic Boom at the Hayward Gallery] Dave and Lewis, please feel free to further elaborate on your questions as the conversation begins. Best, Jim ___ 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
