Re: [-empyre-] Welcome to Week 2: Sonic Paths
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- I think that notion of energy and its relation to the arts is an important one. I was just browsing through the empyre archive and reading Alex Galloway's comments about the Excommunication book, and his interest in finding ways of talking about media that aren't predicated on communication or networks in their various reified forms. Earth Sound, Earth Signal offers a start at finding vocabularies and practices for thinking about and engaging with energy qua energy. But it's true that energy can be an incredibly vague word, when used by artists or other non-scientists. And then there's the various New Age framings of energy, which the book acknowledges, while insisting on some kind of concrete practice of engagement with energy, however esoteric the theory. I wonder how the work of someone like Wilhelm Reich (who's mentioned a couple of times in ESER) fits into the argument: he has a theory of universal energy (the orgone), various practices for mobilizing it (including the infamous cloud busters that were attempts to manipulate geophysical energies) ... and an influence on the arts that is probably still uncharted (I think of Burroughs with his orgone accumulator ...). Doug mentioned that he mostly bracketed the issue of the body, as a complex and subtle field of energetic forces. I'm definitely interested in the body in my own work, because the kinds of manipulation of energy, vibration, and sound that happen say in a dancehall, are very much tuned to the capabilities or possibilities of the human body. Julian Henriques' Sonic Bodies is a marvellous attempt to fully catalog what that force field of the dancehall is composed of. I'd also say that it's difficult to avoid the issue of psychic energy when talking about subcultural scenes which are often concerned with what Goodman calls affective mobilization. The emphasis in Doug's book on transduction is very helpful to me ... I'm interested in what constitutes affective transduction. I know that folks like Brian Massumi have done some elegant work on this ... but I'm increasingly drawn to thinking it through in terms of psychoanalysis, and the ways in which the psyche is structured to accept, reject, seek to repeat or seek to block internal and external energy. But of course it gets tricky because the status of energy, or libido, within psychoanalysis today is pretty shaky. On 2014-06-09, at 8:00 PM, Douglas Kahn wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Hello everyone. Thanks to Tim and Renate, and thanks to Marcus for inviting Nina and myself to empyre. It's now Tuesday morning here in Sydney; it's nice to wake up to this discussion. My book Earth Sound Earth Signal took many years to research and write. Like the genesis of books for many people, I was not planning to write it; instead it grew out of trying to understand a few works by the composer Alvin Lucier and the artist Joyce Hinterding that involved natural radio. Investigating natural radio turned out to be the natural place to start unpacking the relationship between two energies, sound and electromagnetism, especially the historical trade between the two starting in 19th C. telecommunications. Natural radio, it turned out, was heard on telephone lines nearly two decades before Marconi's wireless telegraphy device and about a decade before Hertz verified the existence of electromagnetic waves. Thus, the catch phrase: radio was heard before it was invented. Sound is considered first of all a physical energy in the major classical physics branch of mechanics, electromagnetism as the other; with their relations falling within moments and means of transduction (which I break down into two very general categories in-degree and in-kind). So the expansion of sound studies that Marcus mentions is based upon the generalization of sound among other energies. It was a dual task layed out methodologically by trying to understand what artists do on the terms upon which they work (rather than through received canonical or theoretical lenses) and going wherever the sound leads. The expansion of sound studies was how sound studies got going in the first place. It is also the mode of operation in much of the avant-garde and experimental arts that I study; they have in the past been thought to be reduced acts of transgression when they can be seen more generatively as proposing or enacting possibility. Those two opening ups coupled with what Michel Serres says about collectivist reciprocation (too many scientists, he says, take knowledge from nature and give nothing back) is what animates my own work. In this sense, I've boiled it down to: John Cage opened music to sound; it's time to open sound to energy. Of course, it has always been open; only our analyses have been lacking. In theory and philosophy when energy is discussed,
Re: [-empyre-] Welcome to Week 2: Sonic Paths
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- Thank you to Renate and Tim, and to Marcus, for the invitation to engage in this conversation with Douglas, Marcus, and the empyre community. The rabbit hole of physical energy or, vibration, opened up beneath my feet when I started to question the assumptions I had to hold in order to subscribe to the category “sound.” It was experiences within my own sustained practice of singing and inquiry other singers' vocal pieces, pieces that initially did not make sense to me, that led to my doubting and questioning assumptions around sound. So, to address Marcus’ initial question: deeply indebted to the questions and perspectives sounds studies have opened up (Alain Corbin, Veit Erlmann, Julian Henrique, Doug Kahn, Mara Mills, Jonathan Sterne, Emily Thompson, and others), the way in which my work relates to sound studies is by interrogating the very category of sound. For example, in my forthcoming book, Sensing Sound, I am interested in how the different conceptualizations of and names (say, “sound”) given that which might be thought about as vibrations-transmitted-or-transducted-through-material directs our overall experience of it. (How might this relate to Doug’s three part framework: vibration, inscription and transmission?) For example, how is subsequent aesthetics and analysis marked by the understanding that sound is understood as measureable within in time—i.e. that a given sound starts, goes on, and ends? Moreover, if it is assumed we can know sound and that it occupies a certain time-span, what else is it assumed we ought to know about it? And, if a given person is not able to recognize or name according to such parameters, what do we believe their naming or inability to name the sound tells us about that person? In other words, thinking about vibration in the form of sound seems to push into the territory of assumption about what can be known, and value and virtue around people who hold such knowledge. The assumption that we can identify a given vibration as a knowable sound, also presumes that there is something stable, or, a prior, to an iteration of vibration towards which the given iteration of vibration is compared. Moreover, thinking about sound as knowable, presumes the listener not only hears and recognizes the sound, but, prior to that assessment, holds knowledge about possible sound designations. The knowledge about these sound designations is used to subsequently compare and recognize sounds. Finally, what does thinking about a certain category of vibration as sound, presumes vis-à-vis listening, or perception thereof, more broadly? To me, it is here the body--already mentioned by Douglas and Marcus--is inextricably linked to a category such as sound. Who whom or to what (whether human, animal, object, or instrument of measurement, or other) does that energetic or vibrational field unfold as *sound*? More importantly, what is gained, or, what (political, social, ethical, etc.) work can be carried out by understanding energetic or vibrational field as sound? Nina On Jun 10, 2014, at 6:28 AM, Marcus Boon mb...@yorku.ca wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- I think that notion of energy and its relation to the arts is an important one. I was just browsing through the empyre archive and reading Alex Galloway's comments about the Excommunication book, and his interest in finding ways of talking about media that aren't predicated on communication or networks in their various reified forms. Earth Sound, Earth Signal offers a start at finding vocabularies and practices for thinking about and engaging with energy qua energy. But it's true that energy can be an incredibly vague word, when used by artists or other non-scientists. And then there's the various New Age framings of energy, which the book acknowledges, while insisting on some kind of concrete practice of engagement with energy, however esoteric the theory. I wonder how the work of someone like Wilhelm Reich (who's mentioned a couple of times in ESER) fits into the argument: he has a theory of universal energy (the orgone), various practices for mobilizing it (including the infamous cloud busters that were attempts to manipulate geophysical energies) ... and an influence on the arts that is probably still uncharted (I think of Burroughs with his orgone accumulator ...). Doug mentioned that he mostly bracketed the issue of the body, as a complex and subtle field of energetic forces. I'm definitely interested in the body in my own work, because the kinds of manipulation of energy, vibration, and sound that happen say in a dancehall, are very much tuned to the capabilities or possibilities of the human body. Julian Henriques' Sonic Bodies is a marvellous attempt to fully catalog what that force field of the dancehall is composed of. I'd also say that
Re: [-empyre-] vibration and movement
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- thanks to Nina, Marcus and Douglas for these very fascinating thoughts opening the second week, and it struck me, listening to (well, reading) Douglas trying to stay away from the body examining Lucier's Music for Solo Performer, that I have never really seen the Lucier performance except in photos, with the electrodes attached to the head, and in re-performances of Lucier's piece by younger artists and then I was intensely aware of, or drawn to, the strangely immobile body of a performer concentrating (or letting go, relaxing) : the sound generated by the brainwaves, inexplicably from a conventional schema or territory of assumption (as Nina asks) or value or even identification – unless we go to the other end and listen to the percussion instruments, and their membranal movement, but what moves the movement? how do you worry about waves (not being physicist or engineer or pyschoacoustic scholar).? And speaking from a perspective of theatre/dance and performance, which would interest me to ask you all about, as well as from a perspective of social choreographies or soundings (Julian Henrique's work on cultural sound systems and the operators of the speaker system collectively producing the Jamaican music and its kinetic frequency phenomena -- thus also the dancing and the community), how do you know, indeed, as Nina implies so poignantly, how to measure a gesture from a gesture, how to understand or know affect or react to it when you listen or move to sound vibrations? The energies in performance -- this might not be the subject that Douglas wanted to talk about here, and my knowledge of the physics of sound is minimal, yet Douglas mentions opening out sound to energy. But how does the snake measure the vibrations it feels on the earth (the snake is evoked by Antonin Artaud when he addresses vibrational energies and transmissions through/across and along the while body/organism), only along the length of the body? what lies outside? Or how do sounds or music (and higher frequencies) enter inside, via hearing, into the kind of most strangely perplexing affect, body-eros, and perceptional confusion of memories, for example when I started to write, here, and listened to a falsetto (castrato voice), right here in my room (online version of Othon Mataragas Ernesto Tomasini - Impermanence), then switched over to hear Tomasini talk excitedly about flamboyant gay performers re-owning the lost/suppressed male high voice. I found this very encouraging and exciting; and against suppression forgetting, I realize there is increasing work done out there, scholarship on sounding histories and localities (and artworks such as Teri Rueb's sound walks), well I came across a book by Emily Thompson, titled The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), and I figured she must have gone on to search out the old (radio) archives in New York or Chicago, maybe like Douglas did --- where do you go for these layers of older sound and (no longer existing voices)? And how to measure them? regards Johannes Birringer dap-lab London http://www.brunel.ac.uk/dap + [Nina schreibt] The rabbit hole of physical energy or, vibration, opened up beneath my feet when I started to question the assumptions I had to hold in order to subscribe to the category “sound.” It was experiences within my own sustained practice of singing and inquiry other singers' vocal pieces, pieces that initially did not make sense to me, that led to my doubting and questioning assumptions around sound. So, to address Marcus’ initial question: deeply indebted to the questions and perspectives sounds studies have opened up (Alain Corbin, Veit Erlmann, Julian Henrique, Doug Kahn, Mara Mills, Jonathan Sterne, Emily Thompson, and others), the way in which my work relates to sound studies is by interrogating the very category of sound. For example, in my forthcoming book, Sensing Sound, I am interested in how the different conceptualizations of and names (say, “sound”) given that which might be thought about as vibrations-transmitted-or-transducted-through-material directs our overall experience of it. (How might this relate to Doug’s three part framework: vibration, inscription and transmission?) For example, how is subsequent aesthetics and analysis marked by the understanding that sound is understood as measureable within in time—i.e. that a given sound starts, goes on, and ends? Moreover, if it is assumed we can know sound and that it occupies a certain time-span, what else is it assumed we ought to know about it? And, if a given person is not able to recognize or name according to such parameters, what do we believe their naming or inability to name the sound tells us about that person? In other words, thinking about vibration
Re: [-empyre-] vibration and movement
--empyre- soft-skinned space-- I'm intrigued too by the role of Lucier in Douglas' book -- and how Lucier thinks about matters of body and psyche in relation to his work. Did you get a sense of this at all when you were studying with him, Douglas? I was lucky enough to hear/see/feel a performance of Music for Solo Performer in NYC a while ago. I think what remains with me of the piece is the sense of one interior (that of a brain, or a psyche) somehow projected onto an exterior, which forms another interior (that of the resonant performance space). The confusion of the different inners and outers was really uncanny ... and it also triggered a sense that as listeners, we're also continually mediating these senses of inner and outer. But that's where modes of transduction ... also tempos of transduction, which Douglas discusses in the intro to his book ... are important. On 2014-06-10, at 4:25 PM, Johannes Birringer wrote: --empyre- soft-skinned space-- thanks to Nina, Marcus and Douglas for these very fascinating thoughts opening the second week, and it struck me, listening to (well, reading) Douglas trying to stay away from the body examining Lucier's Music for Solo Performer, that I have never really seen the Lucier performance except in photos, with the electrodes attached to the head, and in re-performances of Lucier's piece by younger artists and then I was intensely aware of, or drawn to, the strangely immobile body of a performer concentrating (or letting go, relaxing) : the sound generated by the brainwaves, inexplicably from a conventional schema or territory of assumption (as Nina asks) or value or even identification – unless we go to the other end and listen to the percussion instruments, and their membranal movement, but what moves the movement? how do you worry about waves (not being physicist or engineer or pyschoacoustic scholar).? And speaking from a perspective of theatre/dance and performance, which would interest me to ask you all about, as well as from a perspective of social choreographies or soundings (Julian Henrique's work on cultural sound systems and the operators of the speaker system collectively producing the Jamaican music and its kinetic frequency phenomena -- thus also the dancing and the community), how do you know, indeed, as Nina implies so poignantly, how to measure a gesture from a gesture, how to understand or know affect or react to it when you listen or move to sound vibrations? The energies in performance -- this might not be the subject that Douglas wanted to talk about here, and my knowledge of the physics of sound is minimal, yet Douglas mentions opening out sound to energy. But how does the snake measure the vibrations it feels on the earth (the snake is evoked by Antonin Artaud when he addresses vibrational energies and transmissions through/across and along the while body/organism), only along the length of the body? what lies outside? Or how do sounds or music (and higher frequencies) enter inside, via hearing, into the kind of most strangely perplexing affect, body-eros, and perceptional confusion of memories, for example when I started to write, here, and listened to a falsetto (castrato voice), right here in my room (online version of Othon Mataragas Ernesto Tomasini - Impermanence), then switched over to hear Tomasini talk excitedly about flamboyant gay performers re-owning the lost/suppressed male high voice. I found this very encouraging and exciting; and against suppression forgetting, I realize there is increasing work done out there, scholarship on sounding histories and localities (and artworks such as Teri Rueb's sound walks), well I came across a book by Emily Thompson, titled The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), and I figured she must have gone on to search out the old (radio) archives in New York or Chicago, maybe like Douglas did --- where do you go for these layers of older sound and (no longer existing voices)? And how to measure them? regards Johannes Birringer dap-lab London http://www.brunel.ac.uk/dap + [Nina schreibt] The rabbit hole of physical energy or, vibration, opened up beneath my feet when I started to question the assumptions I had to hold in order to subscribe to the category “sound.” It was experiences within my own sustained practice of singing and inquiry other singers' vocal pieces, pieces that initially did not make sense to me, that led to my doubting and questioning assumptions around sound. So, to address Marcus’ initial question: deeply indebted to the questions and perspectives sounds studies have opened up (Alain Corbin, Veit Erlmann, Julian Henrique, Doug Kahn, Mara Mills, Jonathan Sterne,
[-empyre-] Day 2 Week 2: Sonic Paths
--empyre- soft-skinned space--Hello all: This is great! I now see that other commitments are on the back burner this week (see, already a thermal metaphor). Marcus, part of the book does address historical media theory, hopefully in a way that will open things up to nature and ecology beyond manifestations of programming and ecological communication; and in complement with green media analyses, while going beyond the framework of depletion, exploitation and pollution to a radically positive being on a dynamically homeostatic planet. This is the topic of the book I'm working on right now A Natural History of Media, which carries on from the last chapter of Earth Sound Earth Signal. Per your second point, mentions of energy are dismissed by some as thinly- or not-so-thinly disguised panpsychism or undigested quantum popsci, infused with either vibrating subatomic particles or the soul (sometimes they're right but no need to dismiss). Nebulous energies course through quite a bit of Deleuzean discourse and can be found circulating as the juice through a variety of assemblages. It can show up as a generative backup (resonant field) too, not just a current or capillary flow, in different religions, occult and mystical traditions (Hinduism/Tantrism), as well as in Elizabeth Grosz's Chaos, Territory, Art where, by the way, it is vibratory, vibration, etc. The easy approach is to dismiss such things for any variety of reasons, whereas I think doing so is just plain lazy. If you study the arts, music, religion...hell, culture, you will be cutting out some of the most interesting phenomena. People don't shy away from dealing with Catholicism, say, so why is Wilhelm Reich too strange? Within the study of Western art music, the usual procedure is to nod to a composer's attachment to occult or spiritualist attachments, but not sink oneselve into the field and literature of those places themselves to understand the possible attractions and the work that their attachments modulate. And you're right, Reich was very influential. I mention in passing how Sheridan Speeth, a scientist at Bell Labs, first told James Tenney and Carolee Schneemann about Reich, and in Noise Water Meat I mention Michael McClure's fascination with Reich (and Tantrism) in the formation of his beast language. The body in the poetry and arts of the 1960s was greatly influenced by Reich and, someone should write a book on the topic, if they're not writing it as we speak (or already written it...). There's scholarship on Wm Burroughs that addresses his Reichian activities fairly well, and there's a new book on him and Scientology (whackier than Reich) that looks good. The task is to get deep into the messay workings of things, specify and work out from there; that was Walter Benjamin's working method in a nutshell. What might actually be happening in the black boxes of becoming or transduction? Waving a hand over a process is too much of a metaphorical procedure. It is not as though you will avoid metaphor altogether (or at all) by breaking open the black box and specifying the mechanism and means, but you will likely a more provocative field of switching arrays and grounds for better metaphors. It doesn't have to be scientific but, if (non-)humanists are grand synthesizers, scientists are the masters of specification. Get into the biophysics of transduction involved in human vision and soon you're into mechanisms present in new and possible forms of quantum computing, solar power, etc., metaphors of plant life and Cold War communications; it's really quite wonderful. I think Karen Barad's work is very good at such specification. She is, of course, a theoretical physicist working the quantum beat, while my contention is that most of the world people live in operates in the manner of classical physics, and that's where poetic engagements and political vernaculars will more readily develop. As I say in the book, Maxwellian electromagnetic waves, when compared to sound or other experiential energies, are historically very recent and do not have vernaculars commensurate with their saturation and importance culturally and ecologically. The quantum floor keeps rising but is still comparatively very shallow. I have to head off to a meeting on the other side of town but will be back this afternoon to continue with Nina's contribution. Until then, Douglas --empyre- soft-skinned space-- Thank you to Renate and Tim, and to Marcus, for the invitation to engage in this conversation with Douglas, Marcus, and the empyre community. The rabbit hole of physical energy or, vibration, opened up beneath my feet when I started to question the assumptions I had to hold in order to subscribe to the category �sound.� It was experiences within my own sustained practice of singing and inquiry other singers' vocal pieces, pieces that initially did not make sense to me,
