Abstract

This article considers a history of electroacoustic music from the perspective of modified vinyl records, one of the media through which it has been disseminated and heard. It is argued that the physical alteration of 12” and 7” records attempts to make the materiality of the medium audible, and interrupts the otherwise seamless commerce of music that relies on a functional commodity. By interfering with the flow of music and noise, some of these initiatives show commitment to a negative engagement with sound, whereby its ready appreciation and interpretation are halted in favour of detours, complications, misinformation and uncertainty. These approaches are discussed in relation to the history of the evolving technologies of record production, where it can be seen that experimentation with material properties has been inherent to shellac and vinyl manufacturing.

These strategies of negation develop as legacies of early twentieth-century historical avant-gardes, which themselves find epistemological and procedural precedent in philosophies of refusal that initiate with Diderot, Hegel and Nietzsche, amongst other writers. The argument is made that as historic avant-gardes made visible the destruction of art, so modified records attempt to make audible the destruction of sound.

Making music bad 

The world is fuller than ever with bad music, confirming the fears of Arthur Sullivan,after hearing Thomas Edison’s first wax cylinders and recording his response at a dinner party on October 5th, 1888. In his celebrated address, Sullivan effusively compliments Edison’s invention. Conforming perhaps to the pattern of after-dinner bonhomie, Sullivan remarks that his host may have drunk excessively, and then makes a joke about just how much appalling music will now be ineradicably recorded. The possibility of high-fidelity and digital sound greatly shifts the criteria by which we evaluate audio quality; and yet from the earliest recordings there is clearly awareness of relative good and bad sound, as manufacturers continually experiment with different materials from which to produce something playable. Whereas Alexander Graham Bell’s wax cylinders deteriorate after about thirty plays, Edison is after something more durable, and develops the Blue Amberol in 1908. Comprised of a plaster core coated in plastic celluloid this sounds better and runs for longer than Bell’s cylinders. For reasons of sound quality, Edison holds off from making flat records until he can produce the better-sounding Diamond Disc in 1912, named after the stylus required to play it. The history of subsequent record manufacturing is, predictably enough, determined by factors of cost and material availability. Compromised sound quality, bad music of another category, is an intrinsic concern of commercial innovations with record manufacturing materials. 

Musicians’, rather than manufacturers’, earliest experiments with records show a curiosity for the qualities of recorded sound affected by the material. Where their initiatives use the materiality of records as a variation on the conventions of concert performances and conveyance of musical sound, more recent sound artists and musicians see the vinyl record as a tool to impede sound reception altogether, effectively using it to engage in a negating action. The intensity of this negation may vary from ludic to annihilatory, but in all cases the gesture challenges accepted practices of production and reception, in order to create possibilities for the previously unheard and unthought. 

Although the practice has intensified in the last forty years, musicians have been experimenting with records and gramophones as performing instruments since the early 20th century. There is an account by Mark Katz of Paul Hindemith’s and Ernest Toch’s performances at the 1930 Neue Musik Berlin festival, where records were played simultaneously with live music, their pitch and timbre altered by speed variation. At the time, Toch explained the motivation behind these performances as a wish to reevaluate the gramophone’s application ‘by exploiting the peculiarities of its function and by analyzing its formerly unrealized possibilities…thereby changing the machine’s function and creating a characteristic music of its own’ (Katz, 2010, p. 112). John Cage was in attendance, and had been struck by Toch’s innovations. We might speculate on the stimulus this gave him to push use of the record player to a new threshold as an instrument, freeing it from the roles its manufacture prescribed. 

While repurposing record players and questioning the conventions limiting performance instruments, Hindemith and Toch are intent on making canonically acceptable, if unusual, music. Stefan Wolpe’s 1920 Berlin action with eight Victrola gramophones playing Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony at different speeds is recognized as a vituperative Dadaist sonic assault, the conversion of a nationally affirmative anthem into bad music, and characteristically directed against German institutions. Most likely unfamiliar with Wolpe’s action, Cage nevertheless moves towards a practice of institutional subversion with his experiments using records and turntables in the Imaginary Landscape series that starts in 1939 and ends with ‘No. 5’ in 1952. Rather than modifying the records themselves, Cage alters the record players by swapping the stylus for other sharp items, and by varying the rotation speed. He speaks critically of people treating records as a kind of mobile museum or performance space and feels they should instead be retooled for new compositional functions. In the catalog for a comprehensive exhibition of artists’ records at Berlin’s daadgalerie in 1989, Hans Rudolf Zeller writes of Cage’s initiatives that: ‘Perhaps within that lies one of the roots of the 20th-century development, collage procedure: that every action which negates alienated objects, frozen actions which, as it were, have come to rest, does so by means of an act of liberation: by disassembling them, and combining parts of the material anew’ (Block and Glasmeier, 1989, p. 73). ‘Imaginary Landscape No. 5’ enacts this negation of the purpose of records most comprehensively. Cage records two versions, sampling from forty-two respective selections of jazz and classical records where the sequence and duration of samples is determined using chance procedures. To grasp the force of this repudiation, it’s worth remembering Cage’s ambivalence towards jazz, as well as his comments later in life that he would walk out of an Anton Webern concert, as the music had nothing to say to him about his contemporary experience. For Cage, the exigencies of the present make classical music inadequate, and his conversion of records into violently juxtaposed samples expresses his alienation from the idiom and categorizes it as a kind of bad music.

This alienated repudiation of Cage’s echoes a section in Denis Diderot’s Rameau’s Nephew where the narrator runs into the eponymous musician in a Paris café. This nephew expresses resentment towards his former bourgeois patrons, who have ejected him from their salon for making an ill-timed offensive joke. He responds with anarchical-revolutionary statements and a wild pantomime of musical bricolage. ‘There he goes’, Diderot observes, ‘—losing his wits and working himself up into a scene’ (Diderot, 1964, p. 67). The youth starts singing so loudly and distractedly that everyone in the café gathers round to laugh at him. Diderot continues: ‘He jumbled together thirty different airs, French, Italian, comic, tragic—in every style. Now in a baritone voice he sank to the pit; then straining in falsetto he tore to shreds the upper notes of some air, imitating the while the stance, walk and gestures of the several characters; being in succession furious, mollified, lordly, sneering…he is a priest, a king, a tyrant; he threatens, commands, rages…never overstepping the proper tone, speech, or manner called for by the part’ (Diderot, 1964, p. 67). This explosive externalisation of the nephew’s alienation entails the massacre of the musical tradition on which he has based his livelihood. The narrative so impresses Georg W. F. Hegel that he quotes it in the master-slave dialectic of Phenomenology of Spirit, where it can be read as a discourse on self-alienation, on internal psychic dynamics, as much as a model for analysing social conflict.

However, in relation to the trail of damaged records left by musicians and artists like Wolpe and Cage, it is Hegel’s Science of Logic that offers a second point of origin for the arguments here. Concepts of the negative developed by Theodor Adorno, Alain Badiou and Boris Groys in their writings on aesthetics draw on Hegel’s use of the negative as a dialectical tool in the course of elaborating, or complicating, ‘mind’ in the Phenomenology, and ‘knowing’ in The Logic. In the latter, our thought, instinctual and conscious, engaged with the world or just moving internally, is shown to initiate by oscillation between moments of recognition of ‘being’ and ‘not being’: ‘Being, the indeterminate immediate, is in fact nothing, and neither more nor less than nothing…Nothing is, therefore, the same determination, or rather absence of determination, and thus altogether the same as, pure being’ (Hegel, 1989, p. 83). Thought acquires understanding of the world, or of itself, by a progressive surmounting of plateaus where negation acts as a means of differentiation. We think of one thing as not being another thing, but then this one thing, so defined, is only itself by virtue of not being that other thing, which is thereby contained within it. Hegel’s term ‘sublation’ entails the dissolving of opposites (Being and Nothing, for example), without their complete disappearance, into a new concept, in this case Becoming. The point made here is that the process of modifying records resists such implied progression from partial to greater knowledge, to fuller integration with consensual discourse and criteria of value. Instead the altered records hold close to the condition of nothing, enjoying the play and implications of a pure negative that will never progress into comprehensible sonic experience.

Another point of origin for this essay occurs in the intensely pessimistic third section of Friedrich Nietzsche’s first book about the origins of art, The Birth of Tragedy. Nietzsche’s proposal that Greek tragic drama emerges from a dynamic negotiation between Dionysian and Apollonian tendencies engenders the familiar representation of the former as an aggressively anti-institutional, irrational aesthetic force. This Dionysus, who flaunts social conventions and means-end rationale, is a nightmarish personification of the subject of nineteenth-century anxieties about anarchic and self-destructive artists found in representations by Honoré de Balzac, Cham, Honoré Daumier and Emile Zola. Nietzsche’s narrative of incursive force enables him to present a coherent model for artistic process aligned directly with social and political change and which is ultimately redemptive. The Apollonian mode is stable enough to generate representations of the gods that present the image of a controllable environment whose social relations are fixed, or at least predictable. The actions and outcomes of the Dionysian mode are by contrast in constant mutation, with destabilising effect on the Apollonian. This dynamic structure of two forces, out of whose antagonisms issues a resolution, relies on clearly prescribed terms: the Apollonian individuality principle and the intoxicated, desubjectivised Dionysian. One is stable and constructive, the other is fluid and destructive; one is virtually entropic, the other dynamic energy.

An aberrational moment occurs however, when Nietzsche narrates the story of King Midas’s interrogation of Dionysus’s companion Silenus. Midas’s desire for knowledge and meaning, essentially paradigmatic of the academic models of which Nietzsche is so critical, provokes him to torture Silenus into revealing what is optimal for mankind. The absolute negativity of Silenus’ response is the provocation for these artists of modified vinyl: ‘“Miserable, ephemeral race…why do you force me to say what it would be much more fruitful for you not to hear? The best of all things is something entirely outside your grasp: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing. But the second-best thing for you—is to die soon”’ (Nietzsche, 1993, p.22). This condition of nothingness, of unrecogisability, is the threshold of acoustic and material presence that interests the musicians considered here. Although the experimental sound artist of radical intent can’t reverse their own birth, they can certainly work to ensure their medium, or their practice, dies soon.

The materiality of nothing

How damaged records configure this nothingness is frequently determined by performance practices, by the sculptural configuration of sound, or by relations between a sound event and its presentation. In his exhaustive taxonomy of the practices of damaging records and turntables, Caleb Kelly starts with the least invasive, such as removable tape stuck to the disc, and ends with what is irreversible: ‘Sound is produced via the destruction of the turntable…smashing the tone arm down on the platter…” (Kelly, 2009, p. 95-7). Yet these only acquire dimension in the context of each modification or performance, and the sound that these generate. It is less, as Kelly writes, that ‘the devaluation of the record as a functional commodity, and as a fetishised object, leads in the end to its complete destruction’ (Kelly, 2009, p. 94) than that unforeseeable new functionalities and material states which seek to poise on the brink of nothing, arise from these transformations.

For example, Scott Konzelmann/Chop Shop records and processes environmental noise to be played through hybrid speakers constructed to correspond to that sound. The artefact Steel Plate RRR-075, 1991, contains two 10” records in tarpaper sleeves and a booklet of photographs of the speakers that share the four titles ‘Spinal’, ‘Speed’, ‘Cobra’ and ‘Hot Box’ with the tracks they broadcast. The records and booklet are bound to a thick steel plate by metal straps. As expected, the densely layered industrial noise of the recordings corresponds to the weight and appearance of the packaging. 

A 1990 7” record, with ‘Piece of Wood’ on its A-side and ‘A Smooth Finish’ on its B-side (Plastikville Records), is the work of New York sound artist Jim Sharpe Project (aka Fabio Roberti). The record comes in a sandpaper sleeve turned inwards, so that the more it is played, the more scratched it sounds. While the A-side is a recording of someone sawing and sanding wood, the B-side is entirely without grooves, causing the stylus to careen across the surface. An enclosed spoof review by a ‘Jayne Austen’ lampoons late-90s theory to highlight the likelihood of critical redundancy for reflexive sound artists: ‘Here, we have entered the realm of active destruction. From the moment we confront the abrasive sandpaper packaging, we have entered another era. For this is not the fin de siècle gesture of a negativity…but active negativity turned within to the surface of the vinyl only the better to leap outward: the record will instantly destroy your stereo needle—the very means of commodified mechanical reproduction—if played uncleaned’. The absurdist self-referentiality and humour of the project retrieves that component of historical avant-gardes that, like Wolpe’s 1920 assault on meritorious music, relishes its disaffirmation in withholding value and purpose. 

In Vinyl Terror & Horror’s performances, Greta Christensen and Camilla Sörensen work with multiple record players and radically altered vinyl records, often used simultaneously. Records are cut up or broken apart and then pieced together in barely playable configurations. Record fragments are sometimes embedded in pools of melted vinyl such that the stylus struggles to hold to a groove for even a few seconds before skidding away unpredictably. Milan Knížák began his Broken Music works in 1963 using similar processes that included melting, cutting, painting, glueing, sellotaping and collaging vinyl records. Broken Music was a mistranslation of his declared objective, ‘destroyed music’. Knížák’s interventions on many of these records render them virtually unplayable, but he has always maintained they are primarily musical instruments made to generate unpredictable sounds. The idea of displaying them like pictures in a grid on the wall was not Knížák’s, although the visual effectiveness of these installations shows an awareness of design decisions made in the modification of some of the records. They may destroy music, but they are reborn as polychrome reliefs. Christian Marclay’s more ludic practice has always taken pleasure in the visual idiosyncracies of his record or film collages, drawing content from the correspondences between image and sound. His early 80s ‘Recycled Records’, which insert parts of one LP into another to generate surprising designs, are used in performances that sometimes involve four record players and elicit rhythmic and sonic patterns from the overlaid fragments of music. This foregrounded performer role references rock-and-roll stagecraft, and also derives from Marclay’s emergence at the origin of DJ scratching in New York. 

While Marclay is visibly engaged as a player, Vinyl Terror & Horror withdraw as individual performers, avoiding rhythmic and melodic citations in preference of a shifting landscape of noise, generated sometimes by tossing fragments of vinyl into the path of the stylus in an explicit courting of sound demolition. An effective way of situating this kind of work in the history of destructive artistic actions would be to repurpose a comment by Boris Groys concerning the impact of the avant-garde on the materiality of the work of art: 

Malevich continually tells the story of the new art…as a history of the progressive disfiguration and destruction of the traditional image…What can survive this work of permanent destruction?
Malevich’s answer to this question is immediately plausible; the image of the destruction of the image. The destruction cannot destroy its own image. (Cox, Jaskey, and Malik, 2015, p.76)

Following Groys, these vinyl performances then reveal the sound of the destruction of sound. They hover near, and at times cross, the threshold of a reinstitutionalisation of the unlistenable and unheard where genres of noise aggregate into finding audiences and venues for their consumption. Yet their fundamental motivation is to shut off, even invalidate, acceptable music in order to work in a realm of previously occluded sound. Obviously enough the modified records negate something in some way, but does this cancellation of sound have anything in common with the models of negation inherited from Hegel? Hegel’s own negative is the oscillation from being to nothing that finally arrives at the determinate being that is not nothing—‘a negative nothing is an affirmative something’ (Hegel, 1989, p. 102). By contrast, the modified vinyl record is not quite the thing (being) that plays sound (as that function has been interfered with), nor on account of its emptiness is it the non-object (nothing), as it still indexes the presence of sound, even if the sound it produces is indecipherable noise. Some of these altered records function in a liminal zone where the negating, the nothing, repeats over and over (like a stuck stylus, perhaps), as they refuse to become anything determinate. Staying in the negative, turning their back, as it were, on the inevitability of acquiring coherence and form, they resist becoming something. That sticking with nearly nothing provides a sense of authenticity. At the same time these records, or sonic objects, make some kind of matter real that was once invisible, transparent, inaudible or absent. The erasure of sound, or sometimes the impeding of conventional ways in which sound is made, introduces qualities that lie outside what is usually acceptable in recorded sound. Here is a kind of arch refusal, a rejecting of appropriate ‘work’, in the sense of research or musicianship.

But what of the lingering musical and formal traces in these negations? If there are recognisable remnants of destroyed musical practices in Marclay’s resculpting of noise sources or Vinyl Terror & Horror’s inevitable accidental concessions to salvaged timbres, does this invalidate their iconoclastic impulse? In two recent books, Alain Badiou has given an account of the avant-garde’s iconoclasm by reformulating Hegel’s dialectic of being and nothing. The chapter on Pasolini from The Age of the Poets broaches two sides to radically innovative artistic acts as affirmative and destructive negations. For example, he considers Arnold Schoenberg’s extraction of twelve-tone serialism from compositional processes of the tonal harmonic system as the destructive side of negation. Here tonality is ignored, if not effectively annihilated. As a counterpart to this concept of erasure, Schoenberg’s affirmative negation consists in creating a new set of rules and practices salvaged from the destruction of tonality. Badiou uses the term ‘subtracted’ to emphasise an act that appropriates what is necessary for proceeding while turning away from the remainder. Practices like those by Knížák, Marclay or Vinyl Terror & Horror repeat such a formula of destructive and affirmative negation by establishing procedures for generating sound, while comprehensively rejecting musicianship and conventional instruments. The socially transformative goals that serve to justify aesthetic radicalisms of early avant-gardes may have retreated, but an affirmative negation nevertheless subtracts and works on the noise, so integral to the representation of the experience of late twentieth- and early twentieth-first century urban life, that lies beneath the superficial content and commerce of music. 

Badiou’s The Century is an extended reflection on aesthetic radicalities, iconoclasms and avant-gardes that applies Hegel’s negative to a compelling reinterpretation of the early twentieth-century intertwining of revolutionary art and politics at their most creatively liberating and ruthlessly purifying. The intense drive for authenticity is conducive to fictions of realness like Josef Stalin’s show trials or Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution, and to relentless aesthetic purification, as with Kazimir Malevich’s reductive monochromes. There isn’t any reality, Badiou notes, that can’t be suspected of semblance. Therefore the teleology of the century’s art is purification, the bringing onto centre stage of Hegel’s nothing as the one manifestation of the real that can’t be accused of pretence. Yet, as with contemporary reductions of music to indistinct noise, taking this as a straightforward liquidation of sound limits the meaning of the new work. The meaning of the practice always lies in the difference between what remains and what has been destroyed. The musicians hold to the place of negation to resist reincorporation and interpretation, but the difference between what is salvaged and what is renounced, in effect the affirmative negation, inevitably signals towards the old content and prior models. Considering Webern and Stephane Mallarmé, Badiou explains that the most discerning and meaningful art develops ‘not through an aggressive posture with regard to inherited forms, but through arrangements that place these forms at the edge of the void, in a network of cuts and disappearances’ (Badiou, 2007, p. 132-7), and that there are ‘pieces which, in a matter of seconds, graze against the silence that absorbs them; or of certain plastic constructions that are there only to be effaced, or of certain poems eaten away by the white of the page’ (Badiou, 2007, p. 136-7). In other words, for these contemporary sound artists modifying vinyl, the inevitable retention of traces of melody and timbre are fragmented clues to the properties of their negations.

Punk as ‘composition’

The assault on musical norms through interference with the materiality of records is not confined to experimental art and music. In the late 70s, punk rock enacts its celebrated sonic reduction of popular music to a raw core of sound. The startled 70s listener’s encounter with incommensurable qualities of noise and voice began with certain key records released in the last months of 1976 and the first of 1977. Though talking about noise bands from a decade later, Paul Mann accurately captures the epistemological collapse of this kind of experience as ‘intensely material, an exaggerated idiocy, a subideological cocoon, a tear in the fabric of the social world within which it might still be possible to endure it, if one can endure the volume itself. What we must ask then is whether, at its most intense, loud is a thought’ (Mann, 1999, p. 168). Punk, besides being a fulcrum for the invention of all kinds of sonic tactics for making the world tolerable, is also the site of interventions into vinyl records through the brand new culture of self-financed DIY productions with eccentric packaging, improvised labeling, and entertainingly pointless frustrations of the listener. Even though he totally misses punk, this is much what Jacques Attali asks of ‘composition’, his term for radical noise, ‘an activity that is an end in itself, that creates its own code at the same time as the work’ (Attali, 1985, p. 135), and a negation, he says, of prescribed labour roles. Attali praises Cage for giving back to disenfranchised audiences the power to make sounds. For Attali this kind of radicality ends the old system, but without new networks of production and distribution nothing lasting will replace it. However, this is exactly what happens in the late 70s with DIY recording and distribution. It is, as Attali dreams, ‘A music produced by each individual for himself, for pleasure outside of meaning, usage and exchange’ (ibid, 137). 

A surprising number of these records list the costs of production on their homemade, photocopied sleeves. This is the case with the first 7” releases by Scritti Politi (Skank Bloc Bologna EP, 1978) and The Door And The Window (Subculture EP, 1979), as also with the second single by The Desperate Bicycles, ‘The Medium Was Tedium/Don’t Back The Front’, 1977. The short third-person statement on the obverse of the latter yields a celebrated instruction: ‘“No more time for spectating” they sing and who knows? They may be right. They’d really like to know why you haven’t made your own single yet. “It was easy, it was cheap, go and do it” (the complete cost of ‘Smokescreen’ was £153)’. 

In many locations, the communities built up around experimental electroacoustic music prove to be cohesive and mutually supportive. This is the case with New York in the 60s and 70s, with Britain in the late 70s, with Beijing in the early 2000s, and in many instances continues into the present at the same locations. Attali’s claims that for new music to remain subversive it must be played on new instruments would seem to lend credence to the radicality of using turntables and records as production tools. His view that the old instruments, whether violins or guitars, compromise the musician for being the very items that enable music to represent power, as well as encouraging speculative commerce, is one reason he feels that radically innovative musicians like Jimi Hendrix ultimately fail to engender permanent change, and why Attali can’t anticipate the subversion of punk’s sound, nor its appropriation of music recording, product design and distribution. He maintains that ridding music of all that alienates the musician, its exploitative commerce and stabilising of the ruling order, is to restore ‘the unsayable and the unpredictable’ (Attali, 1985, p. 142). 

Some punk bands went further than this by making records that interfered with playability and therefore impeded their commerce. Gerry and the Holograms’ second single, The Emperor’s New Music, 1979, is a definitively unplayable record, as all five-hundred copies are glued into their sleeves. Printed text on sleeve and label caution the listener not to attempt to play it, ‘NO – NO – NO – Whatever you do…don’t play this record…’. The Freshies second single (Straight In At No. 2 EP, 1979) embeds the pretense of a defect in its opening track ‘Johnny Radar’ where the record seems to skip grooves until there is sudden silence and we hear band leader Chris Sievey exclaiming ‘God, there’s a lot of dust on this needle’, followed by two sharp puffs of breath before the record resumes playing, this time flawlessly. In 1877, when Edison tried to raise support for his invention, he had his machine ask the audience at Scientific American how they liked the phonograph. In Sievey’s case, the record-playing process that announces its own faults is a clever reversal of what from the start of recording practices consists in an acclaim of new technologies.

There is criticism that this music - so often capitalised on by the marketing of its qualities - collapses back into Attali’s networks of ‘repetition’ and commercial stockpiling, once its moment of enfranchisement of musicians and audiences has subsided. This is to overlook several incommensurable aspects of punk innovations, including the irreducible qualities of voice and instrumental noise that comprise its incursive force in the first place, and which endure as exemplary negations, regardless of attempts, both in their own time and subsequently, to neutralise them through commerce. And then the vinyl artefacts themselves were issued in quantities too small to be speculated on, and, in cases like The Desperate Bicycles, despite commercial pressures were never rereleased. Furthermore, those first DIY bands inspired successors in a chain reaction that so valued discourse and participation as to annul any prospect of ‘repetition’-  exactly as foretold by Attali at the end of his chapter titled ‘Repeating’: “all of these things herald the invention of a radical subversion, a new mode of social structuring, communication that is not restricted to the elite of discourse” (Attali, 1985, p. 131-32).

The term ‘anti-record’, used by curator Trevor Schoonmaker for vinyl interventions like Marclay’s that take records to the verge of unplayability (Shoonmaker, 2011, p. 18), certainly sustains connotations of the historic avant-gardes. For example, in a reprise of avant-gardist tactics of iconoclasm and dysfunctionality in the degradation of material, Marclay’s ‘Footsteps’, 1989, invites others to contribute to qualities of unplayability by walking over LPs that carpet the gallery floor. Those records, later distributed as an edition, have their recording of tap dancing and footsteps interfered with by the real scuffs and scratches of visitors’ shoes. However, as virtually all punk DIY records are materially just like any other black vinyl records, Schoonmaker’s term obscures nuances of their intentional imperfection. The stranger qualities of late 70s punk music aside, there’s seldom any intervention to the material itself that might throw its reception out of alignment with conventional listening practices. In the end though, far from the stances of aggression and iconoclasm with which it is usually associated, what stands out in punk rock is the profound pleasure taken by musicians in their own unconventionality and inventiveness, as well as their easy resignation towards the likely inconsequentiality of such approaches. This does correspond with Mann’s interest in the possibility of marginal practices that completely turn away from visibility, the ‘stupid undergrounds’ of post-avant-garde milieus: ‘We move from the masterpiece to avant-garde art-against-art to non-art (folk, brut, etc.) to the end of art (autodestructive art, art strikes) to the most vigilant refusal, a refusal that never puts itself on display at all…’ (Mann, 1999, p. 131). Punk’s incandescent non-cooperation is also a reminder of the qualities of Bataille’s engagement with Nietzsche’s writing taken as a tool for living ecstatically, for designing a new kind of intoxicated life. Bataille is critical of ethical claims about the impact of thought being measured according to the extent of its external transformations. For him, the value of Nietzsche’s proclamations also resides in their remaining ‘unfocussed…dazzling radiances…untraceable’ (Bataille, 1992, p. 87), and that is exactly what is notable in many of these records.

Past Future Technologies

What of the future for modified records? There is an emerging DIY culture amongst young artist musicians making laser cut masters or lathes, while reviving the most rudimentary casting techniques for producing playable objects. This suggests that the history of record making is undergoing a kind of practical reexamination. Innovative design engineers such as Amanda Ghassaei are using laser cutters that read algorithms to burn the grooves out of a matrix in ways that resemble inveterate carving processes. Similarly, Kazuhiro Jo laser-cuts circles and spirals of sound in cardboard matrices, in one case transposing the earliest known recording, Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville’s ‘Au Clair de la Lune’, which, as a phonautogram of marks on paper, has remained inaudible until recently. 

At the other extreme of fabrication processes, Michael Ridge and Ian Watson return to casting methods. Ridge, for example, makes objects out of cast glue that play recorded sounds of voices or singing birds, commingling with the more brutal noise of the impact of the record’s imperfections on the needle. These are part of a larger group of discs that he terms Anti-Releases, in part because they are one-off or small edition productions, but also because of frequent interventions, like hole-punching, that reduce their playability. Watson’s 7” Only Surface Noise Is Real, containing his own music, is made from a silicon mould that was itself cast from a vinyl master. He explains how the process appealed to him as a way to make short-run editions without resorting to more lathe cutting. It is expediency rather than iconoclasm that provokes Watson to make a record this way, and although he is drawn to the pops and crackles of the resin’s imperfections he is not making work that engages the potential of those kinds of noises. Those chance sounds and the recorded music coexist on the same terrain held by Ghassaei’s 3D-printed discs, on which she reproduces well-known records for sound comparison. Processes like these may come to be used with more negative intent or more accommodation to aberrant sound. At present, as if they were reincarnations of Thomas Edison, both Ghassaei and Watson approach the sound with a desire to improve its quality, despite their suggestions of interest in the records’ imperfections. 

From wax cylinders onwards, recorded music has always had an unusually intense engagement with materiality, due to the wide range of approaches by which the grooves followed by the stylus can be manufactured. Predictably enough, these manufacturing processes are affected by costs and availability of materials, as well as by new technologies. For example, the record’s core, which at the start of the 20th century was made of cardboard, plaster, or even cement, was then coated in shellac, a brittle secretion of the lac beetle. With the scarcity of shellac, caused by its use in bullet casings in the Second World War, many substitute materials were tried out, including aluminium and glass for record masters (although glass was also used at the start of recording history by Bell for storing his recording of ‘Mary Had A Little Lamb’). Alongside many innovative plastic formulas for records in the 1930s, one of the most resourceful experiments in alternative materials was for ‘Hit of the Week’ productions, made of cardboard laminated with durian, an edible fruit from South East Asia. During this time of shellac shortage, RCA developed Vitrolac as an early form of vinyl. The initially slow take-up of the new material was accelerated by radio, as DJs recognised that vinyl records sounded better than what they were usually playing, and when VDiscs—the armed forces records produced from 1943 to 1948—started to be made out of the more durable vinyl to protect them when they were dropped onto ships.

The 7” record was not made until 1949, when RCA Victor introduced colour-coded discs: red for classical, yellow for children’s and green for country music. As companies experimented with mass marketing and low-cost materials, the quality of some kinds of records declined. Taking the technology back a giant step, Columbia Records developed a degradable soft plastic disc as a giveaway promotion to record clubs. It isn’t until 1955 that we arrive at what are now standard vinyl albums, with the raised edge and centre distinguishing the objects used by most of these artists discussed here. One of the most successful experiments with coloured vinyl by a contemporary artist revisits RCA’s 1949 innovation. Jack Goldstein’s 1976 A Suite of Nine 7-Inch Records with Sound Effects links colours with sounds—a purple record with a recording of a tornado, for example. For Goldstein, the materiality of the record is crucial: ‘…I arrive at a sound through an image. Through being manipulated the records become sound objects…There should be a direct relationship with the object for it to be effective, not just a sound coming out of a loudspeaker’ (Schoonmaker, 2011, p. 189).

We typically define materiality in terms of human use, but one approach by writers on ontology - including, for example, Martin Heidegger, Francis Ponge and Jane Bennett - considers material properties more from the side of the object, apart from human need. Even Adorno, writing in Aesthetic Theory, makes the unusual proposition that materials, in their inherent properties, offer up a resistance equivalent to the modifications being acted on them: ‘The violence done to the material imitates the violence that issued from the material and that endures in its resistance to form’ (Adorno, 1997, p. 50). Is there a way, then, in which the materials used to make records push back? Adorno suggests there is an intrinsic materiality to things that we are never able to reach, even at our most aggressively invasive. In his recent essay ‘Sonic Thought’, Christoph Cox asks how to counter philosophy’s occlusion of objects’ own volition and voice: ‘How might one challenge this domination, allow the object to speak…permit it to generate concepts rather than solely to be subject to them?’ (Cox et al., 2015, p. 123). In this sense, what else might the record want as material, or object? Think of how Francis Ponge considers the behaviour of objects in light of what he acclaims as the painter Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin’s ‘indifference’: ‘There is nothing special, no merit in choosing such objects. / But their way of encumbering our space, of coming to the fore, or making themselves (or appearing to be) more important than our way of looking…That is unquestionably one of the grandest designs’ (Ponge, 32). In exactly what ways might a record ‘come to the fore’? Where records can now be made from resin, paper, glass and metal we expect other material histories to be in play. However, the vinyl record, Dario Robleto points out, is made from fossil fuel, carrying this deep history of plant and animal life within it: ‘Every time a new groove is cut into a vinyl record, we are literally carving our history, our hopes and dreams of today, onto the chest of life of the distant past…The record needs us like we need it’ (Schoonmaker 2011: 196). If that life, those properties of shellac, of vinyl, which allow us to press grooves into the material in a pattern that stimulates the movement of a diamond stylus to generate electronic signals, is a use of material in response to a need for recordings that can address our present-day realities, then what properties of resin or paper might be addressed by Ghassaei or Jo as they use those materials to inscribe sounds? 

Conclusions

In 1934 under the telling pseudonym ‘Hektor Rottweiler’, Adorno published an essay highly critical of the market demand for records, suspecting that the phonograph would sooner alienate consumers from their culture than stimulate any new kind of musical creativity. In his opening paragraph, trying perhaps to figuratively lay bare the dumbness of this ubiquitous commodity, Adorno provides a remarkable account of a record coming to the fore, as if encountering it for the first time: 

One does not want to accord it any form other than the one it itself exhibits: a black pane made of a composite mass which these days no longer has its honest name any more than automobile fuel is called benzene…It is covered with curves, a delicately scribbled, utterly illegible writing, which here and there forms more plastic figures for reasons that remain obscure to the layman upon listening; structured like a spiral, it ends somewhere in the vicinity of the title label, to which it is sometimes connected by a lead-out groove so that the needle can comfortably finish its trajectory. In terms of its ‘form,’ this is all that it will reveal (Adorno, 1990, p. 56).

For Adorno the record, in this case the 78rpm shellac disc, intercedes negatively in life as a mute commodity having nothing to do with genuine human needs and owing its dominance to advertising’s artificial manipulations. The point has not come, will never come he surmises, when we will regain control over this commodity and use records in ways that answer our real needs - that is, in ways where we treat them independently of their mass marketing. In spite of this skepticism, it’s plausible that today’s artists who modify vinyl continue to reverse this loss of control by misusing record players and discs in practices that start with Wolpe, Hindemith and Toch. Theirs is a negation of commerce’s own negation of human needs. As part of this misuse of technology, it is a property of much of this kind of sound work that it turns its back on decipherment to make a stubbornly negative absence of sound, a kind of non-sound, a sound that is so scratched, impure, or unfathomable that it yields very little to interpretation and remains in the realm of the negative. At the same time, if this kind of sound belongs to a subgroup of recalcitrant things, it evidently still has its own circles of appreciation and hierarchisations in terms of notions of quality or interest. Perhaps it’s reasonable to conclude that these kinds of records straddle two realms - one of an absurd pointlessness and resistance, the other of a tentative institutional validation - and that these two realms are themselves interpenetrable, intermittently indistinguishable and blurred.

Abstract

Sound has been argued to be a more immediate mode of perception, affording a methodology of understanding distinct from that which has been shaped and cultivated by visuality, the latter often linked with the totalising and objectifying tendencies of the Western rational subject and knowledge. It might be framed as more embodied, affective, and experiential. But what about some of the other qualities of sound, such as the way it eludes the linguistic register and operates on the peripheral? Given the claim of the sonic to immediacy and immersion, how does it figure as a ‘medium,’ especially within scholarship on mediation and technology? How might sound be utilised in an age governed by the disciplinary logic of information and communication technology (ICT), a field and way of thinking that perhaps link the objectification of the visual with the tacit operations of the sonic? This paper seeks to explore digital media polemics in relation to the usage of sound in ‘algorithmic culture’, and to examine sound’s relationship to immediacy and mediation, via scholarly writings from the fields of sound, digital media, technology, and art, and it concludes by looking at the author’s most recent sound installations.  

Introduction 

As early as 1976, Jacques Attali had argued that, contrary to the focus Western thought has placed on vision, it is through the sonic that one comprehends the world. Vision had been linked to a totalising tendency, abstracting phenomena into decontextualised statistics. Noise, on the other hand, is what permeates all, and offers an alternative understanding. In Listening to Noise and Silence, Salomé Voegelin (2010) opens with a similar dichotomy. Likewise, she defines visuality as a drive for total and objective knowledge/truth, a propensity afforded by the ‘gap’ between the seeing subject and the seen object. On the other hand, aurality possesses no such gap, for hearing is everywhere, and the sonic offers a more contextual and inter-subjective methodology. For her, “sound […] is always the heard, immersive and present” (Voegelin, 2010, p.xiv). Unlike the seen object, which is purportedly stable and cohesive, the heard is constantly unfolding in time, dynamic and contingent, allowing listening to function as a generative and active mode of apprehension. As she describes the act of listening, Voegelin reminds us that sound is perpetually present, shaping reality, regardless of our conscious perception: “listening produces a sonic life-world that we inhabit, with or against our will” (Voegelin, 2010, p.11). Sound, for her, is pure experience, phenomenological and beyond the linguistic and rational order, which is signified by visuality. Frances Dyson makes a similar point in Sounding New Media, noting that “sound is the immersive medium par excellence” (Dyson, 2009, p. 4), and that its distinction from visuality negates the Western binary of subject and object. It is sound’s claim to immediacy and immersion that I wish to focus on for this paper.  

Voegelin’s contention rests on a polarised understanding of vision as passive and distant analysis, and the sonic as active, embodied and immediate. While I appreciate her formulation of the sonic subject as an experiential mode that resists abstracting rationality and challenges a visual (by extension, administrative and capitalistic) dogma, I have three issues with this distinction. First, it presupposes the possibility of separating the visual from the sonic, and ignores the existence of media such as film and digital media. Second, it possibly overlooks much scholarship that has taken place within art history and cultural studies that has centred around questioning the visuality perpetuated by the dominant ideology (such as those outlined by Martin Jay in Downcast Eyes), as well as maxims of postmodernism that all meaning is contingent. Third, unlike Attali, she does not acknowledge the danger of the sonic methodology becoming appropriated as a tool for the dominant power regime, despite her conceding that “every sensory interaction [is] always already ideologically and aesthetically determined” (Voegelin, 2010, p.3).  

This paper has no intention of reifying the binary forged by the sound scholars noted above between the sonic and the visual, but uses it as a springboard for further discussion. Navigating through two scholarly directions, specifically media and technology theory on the one hand, and critique of post-Fordist immaterial capital on the other, the paper seeks to explore the ways in which some of sound (and other media)’s qualities may be implicated in the wider operation of contemporary information capitalism, and offers the presence of noise/medium as a subversive tactic (noise defined here not in the sonic sense, but rather in the information sense), a specific form of deviation, remainder, and undesirable excess in the capitalist machine – something that philosopher Michel Serres would refer to as ‘parasite’. The paper concludes with a look at two of the author’s most recent sound installations, not as empirical evidence or application of the theoretical stance proposed by the paper, but rather simply as examples of the author’s engagement with some of the ideas to be outlined below.  

Algorithmic Culture 

Speaking of the imperative to focus on noise, Attali contends that “its appropriation and control is a reflection of power, that it is essentially political” (Attali, 1985, p. 6). As an artist and scholar whose primary interest and practice lie in digital media criticism and sound installations, I would suggest that his proposal is especially timely in the contemporary age, where the legacy of cybernetics and information theory is the dominating logic, realised as the post-human capitalist enterprise of data-mining and algorithmic quantification – what cultural theorist Ted Striphas (2015) has termed “algorithmic culture”. Various media scholars have utilised different terms for framing this state of affairs, such as cognitive capitalism, the knowledge economy, the attention economy, etc. For Jodi Dean (2005), the term is “communicative capitalism”, designating a state where communication is a commodity, rather than a liberating act of agency. Maurizio Lazzarato (1996) articulates a similar idea in his theorisation of immaterial labour, and argues that communication and other social and cultural acts are now subsumed under the production circuit. Matteo Pasquinelli (2009) has also outlined in detail the ways in which Google’s PageRank algorithm leverages the population’s general intellect and capitalizses on users’ attention and knowledge. Nicholas Carr (2012) has described this system as “digital sharecropping”, Web 2.0’s core means of value-extraction, which exploits the free labour provided by the masses by granting them the means of production but then retaining rights over that which they produce, accumulating economic surplus for the providers of such ‘tools’ and platforms, while ensuring that the labourers do not see themselves as working, but rather as ‘users’ who are socialising.   

The assumption underscoring all of this is that being may be cognizable by undergoing codification. For Striphas, ‘algorithmic culture’ involves the conversion of all patterns of relations, expressions, associations between objects, people, locations, and ideas, into quantifiable informatics. As media theorist, philosopher, and programmer Alex Galloway has suggested, “informatics is what Marx would have called a real subsumption […] of the visual […] espiteme handed down from the Enlightenment” (2007), referring specifically to the relation between seeing, reason, and knowledge, and drawing this line of thinking all the way to software development and algorithm deployment. Galloway’s formulation echoes the distinction outlined by Attali and Voegelin, linking visuality, totalising knowledge, decontextualisation, numeric quantification, and cybernetic control. But what role does sound play in this information-political landscape? 

Medium / Mediation 

In the essay “Noise and Exceptions”, Stephen Crocker (2007) opens with the observation, following Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin’s double logic of ‘remediation’, that our innovations and advances in media have always been driven by an intention to be more immediate, leading to a paradox whereby the more we try to escape mediation (the same way that a painting or virtual reality or video conferencing efface themselves to achieve realism and presence), in order to be more immediate with the content (thoughts, reality…etc.), the more mediated we become. He urges for a McLuhanesque focus on the medium itself, “the process of making a means visible” (2007). Drawing from Michel Serres, Crocker goes on to emphasize the persistence and ineradicability of the medium. Utilising communication between a sender and receiver, he illustrates how the conception of a perfect signal transmission is impossible (something that mathematician Claude Shannon had already noted in his landmark paper on information theory in 1948), that the noise of the medium always exists, and that immediacy is an illusion. As he argues, “the medium in which our actions take place affects what we can be and do” (2007). The medium, then, exhibits particular qualities, here conceived by Serres as the ‘noise’ in signal-processing. “We can never eliminate the space of transmission. There is always a context of communication,” he writes. This emphasis on the persistence of the medium and its effect being a significant feature to be examined, is rendered evident when he says, “the user is used by the medium” (2007). 

Talking about a specific form of mediation – technology, media ecologist Neil Postman has noted that “technologies change what we mean by ‘knowing’ and ‘truth’; they alter those deeply embedded habits of thought which give to a culture its sense of what the world is like” (Postman, 1992, p. 12) and that “embedded in every tool is an ideological bias” (ibid., p. 13). This is very much the focus of philosopher Andrew Feenberg’s (1999) book Questioning Technology, where he illustrates how technologies are not neutrally self-determined and autonomous entities, but rather they are imbued with very specific socio-political implications and intentions right from their conception. As the critical pedagogue Ivan Illich says, “surrounded by omnipotent tools, man is reduced to a tool of his tools” (Illich, 1971, p. 165). 

So what about sound, if one considers it a medium, and a technology? 

Sound as Mediation 

While philosopher Bernard Stiegler’s (1998) writing has been used by proponents of post-humanism, it might be helpful here to think about his idea of ‘originary technicity’, the idea that humans have always been technological and mediated. Taken with the arguments of the medium by Crocker and Serres, one can propose that sound (or aurality, to be specific), too, is a form of mediation, and that immediacy and mediation are not mutually exclusive, but are simultaneous qualities of sound. As Dyson notes, “audio has naturalised […] the disembodying effects of new media technologies, and […] paved the way for further mediation” (Dyson, 2009, p. 3). Even if one concedes, for the moment, that there is indeed some distinction between visuality and aurality, and that sound is more immediate than sight, what is the cost of this ‘immediacy’? How does it function simultaneously, as mediation? 

As Dyson notes, “immersed in sound, the subject loses itself” (Dyson, 2009, p. 4). In 2015 I attended a conference on Jacques Lacan and psychoanalysis at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, and one speaker, Alois Sieben, talked about the character of Samantha, the operating system, in the movie Her by Spike Jonze, and how she successfully occupied an ambivalent and entangled space between the human and non-human, using the humanness of her voice. However, for me, what was more intriguing was how Samantha’s voice signified the phenomenon of how sound is being used to condition, control, and indoctrinate the population, through its expert deployment and complicity in creating an immersive and ‘interactive’ everyday experience. Speaking of adapting Samuel Beckett’s work for film, artist Stan Douglas writes that “the advent of the sound film is exactly contemporary with […] its formalisation of how a new cinematic space would be constructed” and that “these innovations made it possible for a film to yield a greater impression of subjective experience” (Douglas, 1988, p. 16). This ongoing quest for further, deeper, more realistic immersion, which sound assists in constructing, is precisely what many scholars are wary of. In a chapter titled “What Does Simulation Want”, Sherry Turkle answers her own question by proposing that “simulations want, even demand, immersion” (Turkle, 2009, p. 6) and that “simulation makes itself easy to love and difficult to doubt” (ibid., p. 7). There has been much development in cultural studies, art history, visual culture, film studies, and other disciplines in the humanities for the past century focusing on visuality and semiotics in the examination and criticism of popular culture, mass media, language, colonialism and capitalism. Sound had been referred to in the context of mass media, its role in creating propaganda and advertisement obliquely acknowledged (here I am thinking mostly of the Frankfurt School), but much more emphasis has been placed on the visual. I would argue, in the contemporary context of the ubiquity of information and communication technology (ICT), that sound plays a crucial role in creating a fully technologically-dependent and machine-governed existence. Sound design, sound effects, sound cues, phone messages, phone voices, voice recognition, ringtones, notifications, etc.; an entire society undergoing a Pavlovian experience. Contrary to thinking about Samantha’s voice as a machine-becoming-a-Subject, I am more interested in thinking about another character played by Scarlet Johansson, that of the alien in Under the Skin, who, in the beginning of the film, ‘practised’ speaking by making various fragmented phonetic sounds, training herself to abduct humans: the voice as a technology, and in this case, a tool for colonisation. 

As an addendum to this thought, a few days after the above conference I received a phone call where I did not realise until a minute in that I was speaking with a machine. The programme was expertly engineered to emulate a real person, with pre-recorded messages and a sophisticated word-recognition software programmed to respond intuitively to all my answers. It was not until I became irate and snapped at the ‘telemarketer’ that the program malfunctioned, exposing its opaque machinic self, by replaying certain segments of the pre-recorded phrases. Perhaps this is the cost of immersion and immediacy. 

How might artists cultivate spaces for alternative understandings and resistance? 

Techné, Art, and Noise 

In The Question Concerning Technology, Martin Heidegger (1977) discusses in depth technology’s propensity for constructing worldviews by tracing the etymology of the concept to techné, the activities of craftsmen and artists. He contends that while traditional technology is meant to reveal and bring forth, modern technology – through the process of gestell (enframing) – constitutes an apparatus that positions the world into a particular order of revealing: that of the standing-reserve. As Heidegger notes, enframing “banishes man into that kind of revealing which is an ordering [and] where this ordering holds sway, it drives out every other possibility of revealing” (Heidegger, 1977, p. 27). This particular construct induces an understanding of the world as discrete and calculable blocks, as marketable resources, as capital, ready to be abstracted, ordered, and privatised. Emphasising that technology is not driven by rational functionality, Feenberg follows Bruno Latour in noting that “technical devices embody norms” (Feenberg, 1999, p. 85), and that after certain technological innovations have been black-boxed in a process Latour calls ‘closure,’ the norms and social values they embody become the “unquestioned background to every aspect of life” which “seem so natural and obvious they often lie below the threshold of conscious awareness” (ibid., p. 86). Heidegger’s conception of technology as a deterministic and autonomous entity that seems inherently geared towards control and oppression has been heavily criticised by Feenberg, who approaches the question in a much more considered manner, synthesising the Frankfurt School, postmodern critical theory (i.e. Foucault), as well as thinkers like Latour and other contemporary sociologists. Nevertheless, perhaps Heidegger’s theory has something to offer here in terms of a counter-strategy.  

If we accept the aforementioned claims that 1) the medium persists and exerts its own forces, effects, truths, and norms, that 2) sound is also a medium/technology with immediate and mediated qualities, and that 3) the nefarious operations of ICT-facilitated capitalism function, at least partially, through its immersive and clandestine qualities (as do all technologies), then how might artistic gestures be mobilised in response? Here one returns to the paradox of mediation, being reminded once again that immediacy is always already a form of mediation in itself, and that noise will always persist.  

In Being and Time, Heidegger (1962) applies his analysis to tools and the two states of readiness-to-hand (Zuhandenheit) and presence-at-hand (Vorhandenheit) to elaborate on the idea of transparency of the medium, noting that a tool only emerges from the hidden operation of readiness-to-hand when it is broken, and becomes presence-at-hand. This suggests that, in the realm of technological mediation, a critical investigation of our relationship to the dominant technology can only occur through the breakdown or displacement of the normative function, such that the medium itself and the state of mediation can be revealed, foregrounded, and emphasised. The concept of examining the medium has similarities to Marshall McLuhan’s (1994) idea that it is the medium itself, usually hidden from users’ awareness, that needs to be examined in order for a critical understanding of its psychological and social effects to be possible. As Terence Gordon explained, McLuhan championed artists to create ‘anti-environments,’ such as James Joyce’s Finnegan's Wake (which, for him, highlighted the inadequacy of print and linear language through unsettling the reader), for their potential in making “a visible environment of media effects intended to jar us awake” (Gordon, 2010, p. 86). This can also be likened to the estrangement effect of the Marxist playwright Bertolt Brecht. A literary device that originated from the Russian Formalists (ostranenie), Brecht took estrangement into a politicised realm of theatre spectatorship in order to self-reflexively break the fourth wall and disrupt naturalised but invisible cognitive and social tropes. By doing so, he aimed to highlight and destabilise the constructed nature of theatre, representation, and by extension, meaning and society (Foster et. al, 2004). This language of examining the hidden mechanisms of technics is reminiscent of Latour and Feenberg’s argument noted above. Like Heidegger’s notion of presence-at-hand, the medium only becomes visible and transparent for consideration when something out of the norm has occurred, such as breakdown of its intended function (in this case, immersion, identification, illusion), accentuating the device.

Similarly, in calling for an unveiling and breaking of the illusions normatised by reigning modes of mediation, Feenberg also proposes that “a critical theory of technology can uncover […], demystify the illusion […], and expose the relativity of prevailing technical choices” (Feenberg, 1999, p. 87). Although he only suggests an investigation from a social sciences perspective, and does not mention art, his theorisation of the necessity to examine the ‘technical codes’ that have become invisible and self-evident, can be very beneficial in thinking about a strategy and space where this alternative thinking can occur. 

In an essay titled “Noise versus Conceptual Art,” improvisation musician Mattin lists several characteristics of noise, one of them being that “noise exceeds the logic of calculability” (Mattin, 2010), and that it operates in opposition to capital. As Crocker (2007) reminds, the medium, the noise, always persists in signal-processing. If noise is an ‘other’ to signal, as Joseph Nechvetal (2011) notes in his book Immersion into Noise, then it is through noise that one should begin to formulate a strategy of countering the signal-processing of communicative capitalism. 

So, is the role of the artist to reveal the medium/technology through noise? At the conference Sound Art Matters held at Aarhus University in 2016, Jamie Allen and Morten Søndergaard spoke about the idea of revealing. Unlike some scholars, such as Heidegger, who believe that revealing/transparency is imperative, Allen is of the opinion that revealing alone is not enough, and to counter what he calls the infrastructure (or perhaps ‘protocol,’ in Galloway’s terms) one needs to engage it directly, to couple, to modulate, and to generate new information. I can agree with this perspective, especially in the wake of Snowden. The general public seems to be living in a state of outraged passivity; surveillance is common knowledge, but beyond agreeing that it is ethically suspect, it does not automatically lead to widespread public unrest and demand for change. An artistic operation that focuses solely on revealing may be accused of ignoring the persistence of mediation, in presuming that there is, beneath all the layers and after all the phenomenological bracketing, an authentic and unmediated truth or essence to be revealed, and once that is done, oppression ends and a process of subjectivisation ensues. Furthermore, Jodi Dean has pointed out the irony in the use of transparency rhetoric of  by the ICT industries to justify the incessant digging for information, so that we may at some point reach the democratic utopia of full publicity, “the ideology of technoculture” (Dean, 2003, p. 101). However, I do also wish to express support and admiration for hacktivist groups such as Anonymous and Wikileaks, and also believe in the potentiality and significance of simply revealing information that was hidden, in the important tradition of artists such as Hans Haacke and Mark Lombardi. That being said, the proposed tactic is not merely a call for transparency of the machine, as many interpret Heidegger and Brecht; what I am suggesting is rather a form of revealing beyond simply the revealing of information (ie. Wikileaks) or revealing as information (ie. techné), but rather one characterised by the production of something that exceeds the discrete unit, through an appeal to the medium’s persistence.  

Commenting on artist Char Davis’ practice of virtual reality-based work, media art historian Oliver Grau also speaks to the danger of immersion when he says that “the more intensely a participant is involved […] the less the computer-generated world appears as a construction.” (2003, p. 200) And he goes on to caution that the apparatus of VR, with the aid of audio, effectively hides itself from scrutiny, creating a lack of distance which is needed to critically analyse art. “Immersion is produced […] when the message and the medium form an almost inseparable unit, so that the medium becomes invisible.” (2007, p. 148) But if one follows the arguments noted above by Crocker, Serres, and Stiegler, then this lack of distance is an illusion, as the medium of VR itself still exists. The imperative, therefore, is not to advocate for some mythical objective outsider’s critical analysis, but to expose and examine the medium, while understanding that we are always mediated. Grau seems to point to this obliquely when he says that “obviously, the relation between critical distance and immersion is not a simple matter of either-or.” (Grau, 2007, p. 154) Art educator Maxine Greene’s (2001) theorisation might be helpful here, as she insists on the simultaneous different phases of the experiential and the detached knowing (or, the immediate and the mediated). 

Recent Work 

As attempts to engage with the explicated ideas above, I will briefly talk about two recent sound installations, both funded by the Canada Council for the Arts Media Arts program.  

The first project, titled sonic prostheses, was completed in late 2014. Taking the form of a spatial bar graph, the sound installation utilises sound recordings of user-computer interaction and the sculptural form of bar graphs to scrutinise the ubiquity of machine administration/quantification through the data-mining of users.  

It consists of 9 steel pipes (placed roughly 4’ apart) protruding out from the wall in various lengths. A speaker is mounted at the end of each pipe. Playing from each speaker are sound recordings of computer-usage from a group of users, such as keyboard-typing, mouse-clicking, chatting, gaming, streaming, etc. These recordings have been quantified according to a set of personal measurements determined by myself, and the results are reflected by the lengths of the pipes. The categories of measurements were intentionally arbitrary, nonsensical, and situated, ranging from whether the artist ‘likes’ the voice of a user to how satisfied with their life the artist thinks the users are. The artist, in turn, takes on the role of the ‘analytics,’ a fact that is more significant than the specific qualities being ‘measured.’ The result becomes a counter-graph, where the categories measured by the artist are not of conventional marketing use, but are idiosyncratic and based on spontaneous arbitration, inducing an obsolescence that becomes a disruption of capitalist signal-processing.  

In this way, each user has been profiled through the data derived from their computer-usage, emphasising their reduction to just an indicator on a graph, disembodied and anonymous. The capitalist process in which all cognitive/social attributes are subsumed into the production circuit is made ostensible through the representation of each user as a pathetic and minimal Beckettian humanoid, constituting part of larger statistical graph, repeating through the mouthpiece only the sounds of digital immersion and mediation, simultaneously. There is perhaps a resemblance to the play Not I by Becket, where all the viewer can see and hear is a mouth spouting out some barely intelligible speech very rapidly, highlighting this unfathomable desire to keep communicating, to keep disclosing information. In this case, sound is used on several levels: as an indication of the computer-user relation, as a quality utilised to measure and represent subjects, and as an index of the body, fully complicit in the operation of capitalist abstraction and digital immersion. 

Like some of my previous work, this installation seeks to emphasise both the disembodied nature of reducing being to information for instrumental purposes, as well as the persistence of the medium/body/noise, what Crocker calls ‘medial noise,’ through a deliberately embodied spatial installation and obsolescence. As Galloway has said, the human body is “the most emblematic media system” (Galloway, 2012, p. 9). In this case, the audience will be able to experience the graph spatially, walking in between the pipes/humanoids, with the lengths corresponding to the quantified traits of the users, and the speaker acting as both the last remnant of their bodies, as well as an insistence on the presence of the medium/body in general. The noise ruptures through via a deliberate exacerbation of the quantification machination, an emphasis on foregrounding the medium, but also through a deviation from its normative function, a role reversal in which the artist becomes the analytic, and the quantifying function is rendered obsolete. 

The most recent project, before z axis (feedback loop of commensuration), is a large floor-based interactive sound installation that spans roughly 30’ by 30’ and consists of 49 small 4” by 4” wooden blocks composed in a 7 by 7 grid, placed roughly 4’ apart. Situated on each block is a speaker unit consisting of a micro-controller, a battery pack, and speaker. A computer and a webcam are situated on the side, collecting and measuring certain traits from the audience members. Like the previous project, the exact data to be extracted (most likely traits such as density, movement, and height) is less relevant than the act of extraction itself. The calculated result from the data-mining will take the form of X and Y coordinates, which are transmitted by the computer wirelessly to one of the speaker unit blocks, plotted on the grid via sounds emitting from the speakers. This process repeats every thirty seconds to a minute as audience members walk through the installation, continuously having their data collected and directed towards various coordinates on the grid. 

In such a way, the viewers/users experiencing the piece will be subjected to the compulsory and clandestine operations of surveillance and the machinic abstraction of distilling human subjects to quantifiable traits that will come to determine their identity, regardless of how decontextualised and inadequate this process may be. The grid, like the bar graph above, comes to stand in as an emblem of ICT and its capitalist function. As the machines calculate and represent the users by mapping their data on the grid, the users’ own bodies are being mapped as well, as they navigate the grid to locate their own ‘coordinates’, where the sound will be emitted. Through the process of experiencing the piece, the users’ bodies become abstracted and reduced to a single node on the grid, while they themselves are spatially mapped on the grid as well, repeatedly, as they navigate through the piece. The process emphasises the ways in which they ‘become’ the data that has come to represent them, blurring the line between subjects and their data representation. In this sense, technological knowing, machinic abstraction, and data-based representation all mediate the users through an ever immersive and immediate operation, facilitated by sound, attesting once again to sound’s simultaneous properties of immediacy and mediation. 

My work is often influenced by the linguistic and existential absurdity of Beckett. This project attempts to create a Beckett-esque scene in which subjects without agency navigate a nameless space monotonously and repetitively. Through pushing certain elements of the contemporary human condition to the extreme and minimal, the work of Beckett utilises a strategy that Gilles Deleuze (1971) characterises as a method to reveal the vacuousness, absurdity, and political agendas of normatised underlying structures. In a similar vein, this project intends to spatialise a minimal form of quantification – that of a grid – while capturing information from the viewers and inducing them to navigate the space in a way that might resemble de-subjectified humanoids wandering through a maze akin to lab mice, repeatedly towards their coordinates, their data representation. The sounds might induce a Pavlovian response where viewers are compelled and summoned to voluntarily approach the source, foregrounding the agency that communication technology has in determining and priming human behaviours/responses. Once again, the medium of algorithmic culture, of ICT-facilitated capitalism, is foregrounded for scrutiny, while its function is displaced in an absurdist exacerbation in which what emerges is not instrumental signals, but a surplus of dysfunctional non-information (or, new information): noise. In creating a situation in which the viewers wander about a grid chasing their data in the form of generic beeping sounds, the installation will attempt to highlight the contemporary phenomenon of surreptitious yet coercive data-mining, the alarming prevalence of data-based representation, and, as this paper attempted to demonstrate above, the fraught relationship between sonic immediacy and the potentially subjugating mediation.   

Conclusion 

The paper has attempted to sketch an examination of sound’s claim to immediacy through a reading that combines media and technology theory and socio-political concerns of the digital, via cultural theory and post-Marxist thoughts, and proposes noise as an artistic tactic that deviates from the normative function such that the apparatus may be foregrounded and examined. Sound’s currency via its claim to immediacy, embodiment, and the experiential is questioned by examining its potential complicity with the operations of algorithmic culture and digital immersion, fuelled by an understanding through techné. The simultaneous immediacy and mediation are argued to be characteristic of all media/technology, including sound and sight, and the paper challenges sound’s privileged position against visual rationality and totalisation. The proposed artistic tactic for dissent is not simply to celebrate sound’s formal claims but rather to lean on the noise of the medium, noise as that which is inherent to the medium and facilitates slippage from the dominant mode of being and knowing, allowing the normative machination to be revealed such that an alternative mode may emerge and new or counter-information may be produced. There is a need to acknowledge the accusations of technological determinism when referencing Heidegger and McLuhan, as well as the descent of Brecht’s currency on the political aesthetics hierarchy. (Whether or not these may be reasonable arguments will need to be taken up elsewhere). Like other scholars, I too view ‘transparency’ as a narrow-sighted argument to offer within the polemics of technology and media criticism. However, my reading of the above scholars does not limit their contributions to a simple call for ‘revealing’ the machine, but rather one for possibilities of the alternative, through a focus on noise, the ‘other’ of the information-capitalist assemblage. 

Abstract

Can ‘sound’ be ‘exhibited’ as an artistic object? Is the notion of exhibiting sound not a fallacy, considering the nature and characteristics of sound, predominantly emerging as an ephemeral and immaterial phenomenon? This question problematises the positioning of sound art in the contemporary field of artistic and curatorial practices, demanding a new set of theoretical approaches and methodologies. Addressing this fundamental question from a conceptual leaning, in this article I will try to examine sound’s specific subjective inclination as artistic experience beyond the material object. 

Introduction 

Intense discussion within the art world about the perception and interpretation of the notion of ‘sound art’ followed a show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York entitled "Soundings: A Contemporary Score" (2013). It was a collection of sculptures, video pieces, installations and work on paper with audio components1. Rather than framing sound as medium, event or corporeal vibration, this show, a first of its kind at MoMA, explored sound with a strong emphasis on its material and object-based visual dimension. To artists, critics and thinkers alike, this show accelerated the otherwise dormant debates around sound art’s position within gallery- and museum-dominated mainstream public showcasing of contemporary art. 

This debate suggests a deep confusion and uncertainty about how sound art is defined. From the perspective taken in this article, however, the central question is: Can ‘sound’ be ‘exhibited’ as an artistic object within a gallery? Is the idea of a ‘sound art exhibition’ not problematic, considering the nature of sound as a predominantly ephemeral and immaterial phenomenon? This very question complicates the positioning of sound art in the contemporary field of artistic and curatorial practices, demanding a new set of theoretical approaches and methodologies. In this article the question will be addressed within a conceptual reformulation of the notion of the sound object in relation to sound art, shifting the focus to listening experiences.    

The somewhat contradictory attitudes reflected in the comments made by artists and critics after the show at MoMA explain why the so-called ‘exhibition’ of sound art triggers serious thoughts about the matter of the artistic object concerning sound. Let us make a brief review of the development of 'sound art’ in the historical tradition of Western art. The idea of sound art moves from Luigi Russolo's noise intoners and subsequent experiments by Dadaists, surrealists and the Situationist International, to Fluxus happenings and environments, forming a trajectory that leads to what Seth Kim-Cohen terms “the conceptual turn” (2009) in the post-war period, following John Cage’s works with sound-in-itself on the one hand, and the emergence and sporadic inclusion of sound in the gallery- or museum-based arts on the other. Because of the apparent diversity of what is termed ‘sound art’, there are debates about whether sound art falls within the domain of visual art, experimental music or new media – or whether it falls between the categories. There has been a definite surge in the cultural production and dissemination of sound art in the last few years, which has garnered intense attention; but these intensifying activities have occurred rather “tentatively and ambivalently”, as artist and writer Brandon Labelle claims (2006). 

Where do you belong, sound art? Are you a misfit everywhere?  

This ambivalence surrounding sound art history stems from the fact that, more often than not, sound art has been ‘framed’ within the practice, production and showcasing of the visual arts. The problem in this taxonomy lies in the fact that there are basic and fundamental differences between aural and visual representations that we cannot ignore. ‘Sound’ can be perceived as mysterious and ineffable, transient and ephemeral, or immediate and indeterminate in comparison to its implied visual counterparts – the artistic objects that are visible in relation to diffusion of sound in space. Therefore, ‘sound art’ as a term cannot exist in a representational vacuum, due to its inherent characteristics. LaBelle states, “it seems sound art continues to hold an unsettled place within artistic institutions, which could be said to unearth the impasse between an overtly ‘visual’ institutional structure with an intensely ‘sonic’ medium” (LaBelle, 2006, p. 153). He mentions in this respect the comments of curator Bernd Schulz2: “The inexpressibility and cognitive impenetrability of the phenomenal experience make it difficult to secure for sound art the place it deserves in the art world” (2002)3.    

Kim-Cohen describes sound art as the unwanted child of music (2009). He has pointed out the boundaries, tendencies and specific shifts in post-war sound art practice after Pierre Schaeffer’s experiments with musique concrète and John Cage’s experiments with silence, paving the way for a conceptual turn. Following the established research and scholarships in sound and site, such as Murray Schafer’s work (1994) at Simon Fraser University, terms such as soundscape and acoustic ecology were used to describe specific sound practices embedded with a strictly environmental aesthetics. I have argued elsewhere (2012, 2014, 2016), however, that these practices were inherently constrained within predominantly musical structures and ecological concerns. These practices with recorded and composed soundscapes do not substantially contribute to the so-called conceptual turn that the emerging sound art would subsequently experience.   

Sound art seems “less esoteric” in the contemporary “new media art” environment, because of our “newfound comfort with the immaterial world of pure data and information flowing through the cyberspace” (Dayal, 2013). The “new media” allow for the separation of sounds from their locations, and facilitate their travel across globally dispersed networks as digital data and information. Sound that is disembodied from its locational specificity falls within multiple layers of mediation across multiple levels of reception and interpretation outside of place, time and context in the new media environment, whether in an audio-streaming network on the internet, a multi-channel sonic environment, a telematic performance, or an exhibition in augmented space of an interactive installation work. It is evident that, in this space of constant and itinerant flow, the production and reception of sound over greater mobility and interactivity lead to its interpretation as a fertile and more alive auditory situation, rather than being posed as static material of a ‘sonic artefact’. Hence, I may assume that sound art is more comfortably discussed within the object-unspecific, essentially immaterial and multiply interpretative ‘new media art’ paradigm. Such positioning of sound art within the contemporary art context is necessary to comprehend my following conceptualisation of what I term an ‘object-disorientation’ of sound.  

The case of the object-disorientation  

Often we become absentminded, or experience a trance when listening to certain sounds. These sounds can be as mundane as everyday occurrences — we usually do not attend to them in our daily activities. However, some of these sounds may quite randomly induce us to elevate ourselves to some other perceptual planes perhaps not directly related to the object, source, signification or site of these sonic occurrences. These sounds open the doors of the layers of reality into another world beyond their intended immediate meaning or sonic object-hood. It needs to be understood why these sounds manage to unsettle us in such a way that we experience an elevated state of contemplation and meditative mindfulness. It seems these sounds are not the specific cause of our becoming thoughtful while enjoying a sense of poetic detachment from immediate reality; rather, somehow a fertile ‘auditory situation’ unfolds around us as the sounds occur. The subtle formation of an auditory situation transcending the sonic object or the material is the point of curiosity in this article.   

This fluid world of sound, as impermanent as it might seem to the ears of a listener, may open hidden doors and obscure entrances that invite further perceptual meanderings, disrupting the epistemic object with an immediate meaning that the sounds would otherwise embody. The epistemological problems and ontological questions embedded in an expansive mode of listening suggest an object-disoriented behaviour of sound, which manifests itself in an explosion of multifarious meanings, interpretations and mental states dispersed outside the sonic object. Let me elaborate on what I mean by this ‘object-disoriented’ behaviour of sound. To do this, we need to go back in time and excavate the term ‘sound object’. Pierre Schaeffer, arguably the founder of musique concrète, coined the term ‘sound object’ (objet sonore), paving the way for a new kind of perception — “acousmatic listening.” To Schaeffer, the ‘sound object’ was an intentional representation of sound (Demers, 2010) to its listener. With the rise of new audio technologies, the ‘sound objects’ recorded on magnetic tape or other media no longer referred to a sound source, hence the musical exploration of the ‘acousmatic experience’ of sounds that one hears without seeing the causality behind them. The emphasis here was on the reduced listening state instead of causal listening, if we borrow Michel Chion’s terminology (1994). The problem here was the imposition of the word ‘object’ over ‘sound’. The intrinsic flaw in reduced listening, as Schaeffer conceptualised it in Treatise on Musical Objects, was that it assumed that sound had an “a priori ontological foundation” (Demers quoting Kane, 2010, p. 43) separate and distinct from any cultural or historical (or even personal) association it might have subsequently acquired. According to scholars such as Joanna Demers, this assertion is problematic on both practical and theoretical counts. Listeners indeed have difficulty hearing sounds divorced from their associations; but at the same time, it is nearly impossible for the human listening faculty not to ascribe a multiplicity of causes to a single sonic phenomenon. In practice, the listener is almost certain to simultaneously create imagined gestures or link a sound to its illusory myriad of sources, evoking some kind of contemplative and thoughtful imagery in this process of mental resonance and mindful personalisation of sounds into poetic-contemplative listening states.  

Likewise, sound scholar and early phenomenologist Christian Metz expressed serious doubts about the object specificity of sonic phenomena in scholarly thinking, thereby challenging Schaeffer. Metz focused instead on the ‘characteristics’ of sound, emphasising the problematic aspects of locating sound’s object-oriented or location-specific meaning. He stated that “Spatial anchoring of aural events is much more vague and uncertain than that of visual events” (Metz, 1980, p. 29). In classical sound studies, scholars such as Rick Altman have already underpinned the issue of sound’s problematic relation to its object or source, emphasising its interpretative nature following its means of production: “Sound is not actualised until it reaches the ear of the hearer, which translates molecular movement into the sensation of sound” (Altman, 1992, p. 19). Altman speaks here of a sound event as defining the trajectory of the essential production and subsequent reception of sound. Its narrative, as Altman terms it, is hypothetically bound to the source that produces it. These sound sources, or the sounding objects when producing sound, are spatially defined or connected to a site, but are not rendered until and unless they are carried by a medium (such as a tape recording) to reach the point of reception and subsequent interpretation. By the same token, a sound is remediated whenever it is digitally converted from its analogue recording source into the digital format. Digitisation further dislocates sounds from their sources, turning them into discrete data. Sound contents enter the domain of constant travel, flexibility, and flow at different stages of digitalisation towards reaching a saturation state of an assumed ‘post-digital' ecology, during the process of which they are freed from the object or source. Sounds thus, in the contemporary post-digital condition, imply mobility and subsequent object disorientation. The process of interpretation is, however, more complex than it appears at the perceptual level. Contributing to this discourse, new media scholar Frances Dyson argues, concerning the ‘sound object’,  “first—find a way of discussing and representing sound unhinged from the visual object, second, find a device (the tape recorder) that will somehow enable such a representation, and finally, mask the mediation of that device by arguing for an ontological equivalence between the reproduced sound and the original sonic source” (Dyson 2009: 54). This ontological equivalence might be difficult to achieve for a wandering listener for whom a specific sound presents a multitude of amorphous listening states, leading to a sonic explosion of object-disoriented but mood-based streams of contemplation in a nomadic condition. These listening states are not rooted in the immediate sonic reality; rather they transcend the mere recognition and knowledge about the source or object of sound. They move towards a realm of fluid thinking processes that unsettle the epistemic and ontological structures of sound. This problem of ambivalence prompts Christoph Cox to investigate sound’s unsettling behaviour outside of the object. Jean-Luc Nancy has aptly called such transcendental behaviours of sounds “beyond sound” (Nancy 2007: 6) in similar arguments with Cox, who maintains his perspective on the mobile and virtual world of sound: “[A] strange world in which bodies are dissolved into flows, objects are the residues of events, and effects are unmoored from their causes to float independently as virtual powers and capacities” (Cox, 2013, p. 6). This mobile and contingent world of sound originates from corporal sites, evolving spatially and temporally, but becomes illusory, turning into disorienting auditory situations. Deleuze and Guattari use the notion of nomads and nomadology (1986) to think through such states of de-territorialised experiences. These perspectives suggest disruption in the sense of site-specificity or object-hood of sound in the perception of an unfolding auditory situation for an individual listener. 

The Situationists, whose ideas have attracted the deep interest of urban theorists and artists, employed the concept of “psychogeography” to describe a certain experimental practice of subjective and mindful exploration of (urban) places (Sadler, 1999; Coverley, 2010; Self, 2007). Expanding their ideas into sound studies, we can examine how acoustic geography engages the mental construction of space by an object-disoriented and de-territorialised mode of listening, to perceive everyday sounds for urban navigation as fluid auditory situations. It is no surprise that Nancy has also thought about listening in similar ways. In his work Listening (2007) Nancy underscored how sonic phenomena outline certain situations or contexts. 

I would argue that such situations unfold around a sonic phenomenon (or a number of sounds occurring together in a certain place), but, for the wandering listener, the sound may seem to cease signalling its origins as it moves further away from its locative source into the as yet formless ‘auditory situation’ brought on by a contemplative state of mind. In my recent works, I have discussed the ways in which such situations might unfold spatiotemporally, resonating towards a stream of thoughts and poetic contemplation and creating ripples in the consciousness when a nomadic listener mindfully navigates from one place to another in a psychogeographic, rather than physical, fashion. What I emphasise here is a shift in attention to sounds and their resonating, affecting qualities—in short, a listening to the process of ‘how’ rather than the immediate ‘what-is' of sounds. This special attention can be achieved by being mindful of sound’s fluid movements from one state to the other, which produce an elevated experience involving the contemplative state of the listener rather than seeking an immediate meaning for epistemic knowledge. This particular emphasis on the poetic attributes of an expanded mode of listening provides us with a context for exploring the unexpected splendour of everyday sounds and their transcendental potential as artistic ingredients, such as the materials for multi-channel compositional developments. This emergence of contingent moments in the listening experience expands the Cagean idea of chance composition towards a context of fluid interactions with and navigation through ephemeral and ineffable everyday unsitely sounds in the contemporary post-digital condition. As explained earlier, sounds are remediated whenever they are transformed to enter the digital realm. Digitisation further dislocates sounds from their material source, turning them into elusive data. Sounds embrace constant travel, flexibility, and flow at different stages of digitalisation towards reaching a saturation state of an assumed ‘post-digital’ condition; in the process, they are freed from the object. In the contemporary condition, sounds thus imply unsitely aesthetics of perception and subsequent object disorientation. A non-Western perspective on sound, such as ancient Indian philosophical aesthetics, indeed emphasises subjective resonance as perceived by the listener beyond the material objecthood of sound.  

In addressing this fundamental problem of an object-disoriented behaviour of sound while perceiving works of sound art, in this article I underscore sound’s specific subjective inclination as artistic experience beyond material objecthood. In order to examine the problematic relationship between sound and the artistic object, I draw attention to the work of a number of Indian philosophers who have divided the sonic discourse in terms of dhvāni (sound heard by the ear) and sphōta (sound grasped by the intellect). They recognised sound’s many possible interpretations beyond the material object or source of occurrence. This perspective helps theorise streams of contemplative states that are potentially generated inside the mindful perception of the listeners experiencing works of sound art. Emphasising the sonic subject’s essentially withdrawn, inward-looking and contemplative capacities, I pursue the claim that sound is less closely tied to the Kantian category of substance than vision, and therefore any attempt to frame sound as an artistic object or artefact with which to materially tie the viewer, poses serious problem of a philosophical nature.  

Sonic subject  

What I listen to and what you listen to may differ from one another at the perceptual level. Based on my own artistic practices with sound as well as a series of community art practice-based workshops titled “Hyper-listening: praxis”4, I have arrived at the concept of what I would like to call the sonic subject or ‘sujet sonore’.  

In Indian aesthetic theory, the topic of ‘subjectivity' and ‘selfhood’ being embedded in sonic phenomena has been highly discussed. From S. S. Barlingay’s writings, we know about the concept of sphōta, which indicates, “A sound changes into (subjective thinking) and language, and acquires meaning only after a certain explosion of sounds” (Barlingay, 2007, 27), as part of a self-involved mental association in listening. He states in his work A Modern Introduction to Indian Aesthetic Theory: 

We not only utter sounds, we can imagine sounds. A man can sing a song silently, i.e. he can make a mental division of time without it being perceived by any other person (Barlingay, 2007, 29) 

It is no surprise that my experiments show why a given auditory situation appears to a drifting individual listener as liquid and amorphous; newly heard sounds are juxtaposed with sonic memories, triggering the aural imagination. The individual listener becomes elevated from the physical location, and epistemic knowledge about the sound events that occur within the situation becomes open-ended, contributing to an unfixed, malleable and evolving relationship between sound and the implied object when perceived in the listener’s mind. Nancy has rightfully asked, “Why, in the case of the ear, is there withdrawal and turning inward, a making resonant, but, in the case of the eye, there is manifestation and display, a making evident?” (Nancy, 2007, p. 3). Brandon LaBelle has expanded his discussion on listening in this line of thinking, “toward the context in which interpretation must always take place” and pointed out “its potential to foster subjective intensities, from listening to living” (LaBelle, 2006, p. 5). 

The answer may be found if we set aside epistemic and ontological issues of recognising the source or ‘object’ of sound and focus instead on the phenomenological, and inward-looking subjective perception of sound within ‘selfhood’ as the listener's mindful perception; thus we can examine the way memory, imagination and the personal experience of the listener alter the character of sound in its mindful perception. I refer here to the proclamation by the visionary composer John Cage: “Silence is not acoustic. It is a change of mind” (Popova, 2013).  

The assumption of subjective propensities of listening, emphasising the essentially self-contained nature of sound as an artistic experience, leads to sound-based artworks being construed within individual, private or personal contemplation. This position may, I admit,  ultimately be idealist; moreover, if I begin with the subjective and then try to move towards the external world and toward other listeners, I face a question: is sound in any way public before it is private? This conceptual positioning further problematises the negotiation of the role of the listener in relation to an artwork. If listening is fundamentally subjective, then what is the point of making art – that is, curating a public object or event involving listeners other than the artist him/herself? 

Auto-curating 

Taking a clear point of departure in object-oriented sound art, and shifting the focus to the individual listener’s own personal experience of encountering and interacting with sound in an artistic context, I propose in this article an alternative methodology of sound art curating, which I term “auto-curating”. Addressing a practice-based approach, I refer to the recent sound art exhibition “Escuchas” (Listenings, 2015 – 2016) at the Museum of Modern Art Medellin5. The 12 multi-channel sound artworks included in this major group event, including my 6.1 channel work A Day in the Life of a Listener6, were played in loop in a completely dark room of the museum, where visitors were asked to enter and experience the works without any visual reference. This kind of acousmatic auditory situation incorporates the concept of “auto-curating”, which means that I situate the curating of sound art in the higher-level cognitive thought processes between the source of sound and the listener’s mind that apprehends it, framing an experience of situational and immaterial phenomena that are peculiar to sound’s subjective nature of emergence and unfolding at the listener’s end. This method operates, perhaps, in the way artist Yolande Harris puts it in her doctoral thesis: “To create situations where sound can affect and activate people’s experiences in a personal way”. Central to this process is the role of the listener in making an artwork complete. Scholar Tom Rice underlines the personal inclinations of listening: “[l]istening is often described and experienced as a solitary and individual practice, sometimes deeply personal and private” (Rice 2015: 102). My coinage of the term “auto-curating” is based in such private modes of individual listening in the context of sound art, and highlights the participatory and collaborative aspects of listening rather than posing a fixed object in a strictly exhibitory context.  

What I term “auto-curating” was already planted in earlier practices of sound art that considered sound as phenomena and did not construe its object-hood in the artistic mediation of the production and showcasing of what Kim-Cohen has termed “gallery arts”. An emphasis on the acousmatic experience of sound may shed more light on this method. Take, for example, Francisco Lopez’s performance installations, which are usually set in dark rooms in which he situates himself at the centre instead of the podium. Audiences sit in concentric circles with their backs to Lopez and are blindfolded. The surround speaker arrays are arranged across the perimeter of the room and kept invisible. Audiences are forced to minimise any actual associations with the visual parts of the performance. In the programme notes of his performance Buildings [New York] (2001), Lopez writes: “Every listener has to face his/her own freedom and thus create”. Although Lopez’s “passional [sic] and transcendental conception of music” (Kim-Cohen, 2009) and fetishist attention to the purity of sound inhibit the freedom he keenly desires for the audience, he nevertheless opens doors to the negotiation of the role of listener in relation to the artwork by revealing the process of “creation” in the listener’s mind. This process also finds resonance in Luc Ferrari’s works such as the Presque Rien series in which he posits a natural social situation for the listener, by denaturalising in the recording what is to be re-naturalised at the listener’s end as a creative process. Kim-Cohen has spoken of Ferrari’s work as providing “raw, phenomenological data” (Kim-Cohen, 2009), a foundation from which “thinking and doing” (Kim-Cohen, 2009) proceed. On the one hand, this process explores the personal or private nature of listening; on the other, it engages with the public and social ramifications of sonic phenomena. We find resonance of this methodology in the work of artist Brandon LaBelle. He records room tones in his apartment and sends it to different architects, asking them to develop an imaginary plan of the apartment. Creating a participatory atmosphere, these practices accentuate the potentially raw subjective behaviour of the listener in relation to a situation.   

Auditory situation 

What I mean by auto-curating is, then, an extension of the process of extracting and deciphering what happens in the listener’s mind while listening to a fertile auditory situation. This process may perhaps be partially quantified by the listener’s behaviour. This practice expands Don Ihde’s notion of the post-phenomenological realm. Ihde has talked about “auscultation” and similar contemporary acoustic constructive technologies for detecting and representing all sorts of bodily phenomena and giving voice to things, the silent and unheard (Ihde, 2009, p. 69-70). Within the theoretical framework of post-phenomenology, Ihde has given a number of examples from contemporary data-sound-image convertibility, by picking up signals from a range of instruments. I would mention the accelerometer that I have used myself to transduce the signal a listener makes. 

In a sound art project, The Well Tempered City (2010 - 2014)7, I employed the ingenious accelerometer to allow the listener’s emotive sonic inputs, such as touching, tapping and hitting the surfaces of things and built spaces, to be heard. The work is intended to help understand the emotive quotient of city-dwellers' everyday interactions with pervasive urban structures. The project was conceived as ubiquitous computation of subtle vibration-contents generated by ordinary citizens through everyday interactions such as walking, resting, touching, tapping or hitting the structural surfaces of the city, such as the streets or walls. These surfaces served as the physical interface for citizens’ affective interactions with their personified everyday environment. The project employed participation and performative intervention of city-dwellers in the built spaces of the city to generate sonic artefacts, which functioned as the reflections of citizens’ immediate emotional situations and the affective context. The Well Tempered City: Book I was conceived, produced and exhibited during a fellowship-residency at Jaaga, Bangalore, where the work was installed on-site in a 10-channel live set up8. 

The following instalment of the project The Well Tempered City: Book II was a commission for Museo Reina Sofía Radio, Madrid, featured in November 20149. It formed part of a series of podcasts entitled Modernity and Transduction. The Well Tempered City: Book II looked at the concept of transduction in relation to the Indian city of Bangalore and also at the concept of hypermodernity generally in today’s cities. The work, which involved a listening mediated by the use of electronic devices, such as the arrays of accelerometers and contact microphones, transduced the vibrations produced by interaction between citizens and the city’s architecture into sound sequences. This method created a texture of sounds, which, as it progressed, became denser and richer in variations. Listening to this piece’s transformation of listener-generated vibrations into audible sounds revealed a whole spectrum of transfers of individual activity to urban spaces. Something like an artificial respiration of the context, the presence of citizens in the city of today becomes the impulse that gives life to architecture, which as a living body responds with slight movements that convert city spaces into vibrant and geological structures. The work was explicitly based on the participation of the citizens in producing the sound contents,  thus contributing directly to the development of the work as an ‘auditory situation’ (Chattopadhyay, 2013, 2015, 2017) – an open-ended context for public participation and multiple reinterpretations. 

My more recent work Exile and Other Syndromes (2015 – 2018) also intends to create a 'situation' rather than an ‘object'. The work considers mindful aspects of the private mode of listening experience, and explores its introspective capacities for transcending the barrier of immediate meaning to touch upon poetic sensibilities. The work was produced during an artist residency at Kunstuniversität Graz, between September 2015 and January 2016. The pilot version (for 24-channel sound and 4-channel video projection) was premiered at Kunstuniversität Graz, on 19th January 201610. In essence, the work transmutes the urban space to reorient the navigational mode of listening involving the listener's contemplation. The work incorporates multi-channel projection of sound-generated text-visualisation on the screens as moving images installed at a venue11. This specific method of intervention can examine the way in which the memory, imagination and subjectivity of an itinerant listener elaborate the character of sound. The work relies on intuitive capacities of listening, rather than the ontological and epistemological reasoning involved in deciphering the immediate meaning of sound. This belief in inward contemplation and subjectivity available to wandering urban listeners enables the work to explore the poetic-contemplative possibilities embedded in everyday listening in the city for countering the neurosis of contemporary urban living. The particular emphasis on the poetic attributes of an expanded mode of listening provides a context for exploring the unexpected splendour of everyday urban sounds and their transcendental potential as evocative and unfolding situations beyond their site-specific static object-hood. Emergence of contingent moments in the urban listening experience expands the Cagean idea of chance composition towards a context of fluid and nomadic interaction with everyday sounds in contemporary cities. The fuller version of the project will be exhibited at the Screen City Biennial 2017 to be held at Stavanger, Norway, throughout October 2017. 

I am currently involved in developing a new project entitled Expanded Object (2017 – 2019), in which I intend to trigger a shift in perspective from 'object' to ‘situation' in sound art. Through my artistic practice I am departing from the idea of 'sonic object’ considering the object-hood of sound in an exhibitory context as an uncertain and mobile ‘framing' through which sounds may experience manifold spill-overs to create fluid situations12.  

Critical listening  

The artistic consequences of some of these methodologies (e.g. The Well Tempered City) can be explained as the acoustic presentation of data collected from subjective sonic perceptions that are manifested in bodily phenomena: what Beryl Graham and Sarah Cook call in their book Rethinking Curating, “behaviours and contexts with a post-medium emphasis” (Graham and Cook, 2010, p. 5). Following Ihde’s notions of post-phenomenology, and examples showing that all data can be turned into acoustic phenomena, I believe that auto-curating can be a framework within which the curating of sound art can be situated by higher-level cognitive thought processes in the listener’s mind. By exploring the listener’s behaviour, in the way he/she orients him-/herself within a given auditory situation of a sound art event or context, the process essentially involves mental computation that can be divided into early or low-level perception and advanced or higher-level processing or cognition. The sense modalities provide audio information, which the listener can process creatively in the way what I call “auto-curating”, allowing the listener to make sense of the artwork and behave according to the sound data available from navigation and perception of the unfolding auditory situation. It would be worthwhile following what the listener responds to the artistic experience of sound. Young Indian curator Samrridhi Kukreja recalls13 her first encounter with sound art in India:  

My first encounter with Sound Art was weird, I had never encountered something of this sort; it was strange and yet gripping. It made me experience things that were almost scary but very much required. ‘Required’ because as a spectator I have felt things as a result of visuals, but when I felt things as an outcome of sound, it was alarming and an unknown sensation waking me up to experience something new - knowing what sound alone can do (2016) 

Having the listener at the center, a work of sound art would question the materiality, site-specificity and object-hood of sound, and address aspects of contingency, contemplation, mindfulness and transcendence inherent in listening. Such perspectives in artistic practice would intend to shift the emphasis from 'object' to ‘situation' in the realm of sound art. In this context, a sound artist would intend to create contemplative auditory situations as fluidly sonic sculptural forms using multi-channel diffusion of sound for the listener to navigate by privately making mental and psycho-geographic mappings of the unfolding aural space of a sound art event.  

In my own work as a sound artist, i.e. in the projects I have mentioned above, sound is spatially organised to intervene into a given space, disrupting the notion of the 'aural objects' or the 'sound object’, in order to investigate what I have earlier termed “object-disoriented behaviour of sound’ involving generative composition of imaginatively fertile auditory situations as a fluid aural architecture. My compositional and artistic practices instigate such inquiries with a research-based approach to sound creation. I prefer to explore the ephemeral and transcendental nature of sound. The fundamental role that I play as an artist is to intervene in a given situation, incorporating spatial sound practices to alter the perception of the situation by disrupting the sonic navigational mode at the site. This process operates between dissemination of sonic artefacts and exploration of the perceptual and cognitive realm of listening through the creation of multi-channel sculptural situations that are contingent in texture and form, so as to change with the interaction of the listener and the situational contexts. Taking the ontologically questionable experience of the sound object as a critical juncture, I intend to radically reorganise the conventional form of the composition towards a situation for self-reflection and participatory engagement. It is my contention that sound as an artistic medium pertains to this end. 

This artistic practice is built on the consideration that sound art is inherently perceptual and participatory, and arguably proposes a new set of hypotheses. I suggest that the given auditory situation of a traditional exhibition or public showcasing of sound art appears to a drifting listener as liquid and amorphous, triggering and driving the aural imagination further away from the intended artefact or artistic object posed in the foreground. Therefore, it is important to create fertile auditory situations where sound can affect and activate the personal listening experience through a multiplicity of interpretations, contemplations and moods at the listener’s end, rather than trying to devise a material object or artefact in its so-called ‘exhibition' within a visually constrained framing. Taking the ontologically questionable space of the exhibition as a critical juncture, sound artists may process or radically reorganise the conventional form of the exhibition as a space for self-reflection and participatory engagement.  

Conclusion 

The sound artist transforms him-/herself from the always already ‘being’ into the gradual ‘becoming’ of an interlocutor and operates between the listener and the artwork by keeping the listener at the centre of an artwork. The ambition to dissolve the gap between the artist as sole active producer of meaning/truth and the listener as passive consumer, substantially informs “auto-curating” as an appropriate methodology for sound art creation and curating. This process provides a speculative and experimental framework for revealing some of the paradoxes in contemporary thinking about technologically informed sound-based artistic practice for further discourse. As this article indicates, sound art is potentially suited to direct the listener towards the personal or subjective unfolding of an auditory situation, rather than representing a sound object. The listener engages with the situation through memory, imagination and contemplation, possibly creating meanings that are different from the intention of the artist or other listeners experiencing the same artwork. This position explains the inherent attributes of immateriality, ephemerality and contingency embedded in sound art experience.  

• 1. See https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/1351?locale=en
• 2. Curator of Stadtgalerie Saarbrucken.
• 3. In the introduction to the exhibition catalogue Resonances: Aspects of Sound Art, Heidelberg (2002).
• 4. See: http://budhaditya.org/projects/doors-of-nothingness/hyper-listening-praxis/
• 5. See http://elmamm.org/Exposiciones/Lab3/Id/103 and http://ecos.eter-lab.net/escuchas/
• 6. See http://ecos.eter-lab.net/escuchas/artists/
• 7. See http://budhaditya.org/projects/the-well-tempered-city/
• 8. https://vimeo.com/26643718
• 9. See http://radio.museoreinasofia.es/en/budhaditya-chattopadhyay?lang=en
• 10. See http://budhaditya.org/projects/doors-of-nothingness/exile-and-other-syndromes/
• 11. See https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/239155/239156
• 12. http://budhaditya.org/projects/expanded-objects/
• 13. On her Facebook page, 6th December 2016.

With this special issue of Seismograf we are happy to present a new format of articles: Audio Papers.

Audio papers resemble the regular essay or the academic text in that they deal with a certain topic of interest, but presented in the form of an audio production. The audio paper is an extension of the written paper through its specific use of media, a sonic awareness of aesthetics and materiality, and creative approach towards communication. The audio paper is a performative format working together with an affective and elaborate understanding of language. It is an experiment embracing intellectual arguments and creative work, papers and performances, written scholarship and sonic aesthetics.

For this special issue of Seismograf, the guidelines for authors and peer reviewers mainly focused on the format. Topic-wise we encouraged dealing with site-specificity and topics related to the island Amager, but other topics were welcomed as well. From our experience with the development of the concept, the workshops, the peer reviews and the editorial process, we suggest the following statements as a germinal manifesto for the audio paper:

AUDIO PAPER MANIFESTO

1. The audio paper affords performative aesthetics.

2. The audio paper is idiosyncratic.

3. The audio paper is situated and partial.

4. The audio paper renders affects and sensations.

5. The audio paper is multifocal; it assembles diverse and often heterogeneous voices.

6. The audio paper has multiple protagonists, narrators and material agencies.

7. The audio paper brings aesthetics and technologies together in mediation.

8. The audio paper is a constituent part of larger ecologies.

Ad. 1 The audio paper affords performative aesthetics

The audio paper is experimental in character and is positioned against the conventional written paper. The audio paper insists on awareness during the dissemination of the academic argument; it is performative, and it is acutely aware of its own means of presentation and representation.

The academic field of performance studies can contribute to bridging diverse knowledge disciplines and shaping them into experimental yet coherent forms. As formulated by American ethnographer Dwight Conquergood (1949-2004): “The constitutive liminality of performance studies lies in its capacity to bridge formerly segregated and differently valued knowledges, drawing together legitimated as well as subjugated modes of inquiry” (Conquergood 2002:151).

Similar to Conquergood’s definition of performances studies, the audio paper as an academic discipline has the potential to assemble heterogeneous and segregated knowledge disciplines. For instance, it combines the rationality of language and speech with the sensation and affective materiality of the voice, or it incorporates the sound aesthetics of various environments, landscapes and spaces to underline and strengthen the academic argument. In several ways such performative aesthetics of the audio paper are related to 20th century avant-garde aesthetics. Techniques of Verfremdung, awareness of materiality, and everyday aesthetics are all drawn upon to develop means of expression.

The performative aesthetics of the audio paper are closely related to technology. Technology and mediations create a new subject of knowledge. Jon McKenzie addresses the notion of performative objects: They do not occupy a single “proper” place in knowledge; there is no such thing as the thing in itself. Instead, objects are produced and maintained though a variety of socio-technical systems, overcoded by many discourses, and situated in numerous sites of practice” (McKenzie: Perform or Else, p. 18).

Audio papers as such can differ from the ones presented in this issue and are not to be understood as an establishable format. As the audio paper is performative and its proper place always differing, it must continuously be renewed: When the present audio papers become conventional, the audio paper will once again reconsider its format and move towards new investigations, once again bringing in new awareness to the work. In this sense, the oral and the soundscape can make language perform in differing ways. In this regard, the audio paper draws on the performativity of language in the broadest sense. English linguistic J.L Austin notes how language performs through contexts. Thus, meaning is intrinsically bound to the situation. In the audio paper, sounds and soundscapes become frameworks in which language performs. Recorded sonic environments, the aesthetics and materiality, serve as a contextual situation in addition to the tone, physicality and timbre of the recorded voice. Such contexts support the narration or operate on their own, in contradiction to the presented statements and arguments.

By applying performative aesthetics, the audio paper recognizes and realizes both representation and presentation. On the one hand, the audio paper represents semantics: topics of listening, nature, new labour, cultural places and even interpretation of works of art. On the other, the audio paper presents itself in mediation. Mediation contributes to the performative gesture and is self-referential. The mediation reveals meanings through, for instance, the physicality of sound or the dramaturgy by which the soundscape, voice and theses are put together. Or, as Holger Schulze states in his lecture, “in performing you take new and different, exploratory and analytical, disruptive or harmonizing actions. You provoke new situated events; you generate dissent and consent, ruptures and new experiences, new conclusions and new unfolded claims. Finally you go for transmitting.”

Ad. 2 The audio paper is idiosyncratic.

While academic knowledge often tries to avoid the idiosyncratic, the audio paper is deeply rooted in idiosyncrasies. It investigates environments –  the social, the material and the sensorial – by taking several dynamics of the perceptual and analytical process into account. The audio paper welcomes this. Inventions often occur in attempting to formulate or mediate through a media. The researcher always makes choices, also when writing, but this process of experimenting and choosing becomes palpable when transferred into a new format.

The audio paper is related to genres such as reportage, montage and feature. Reportage, as it relates to a certain place and the issues related to it; montage, through its awareness of mediations and any meta-reflexive components; feature, as it proposes a subjective and sensory approach to an issue. But the audio paper differs from the above three genres through its concern with the idiosyncratic: formal, auditory, inventive, experimental and investigatory idiosyncratic. The audio paper is an answer to Schulze’s rhetoric question, as it does “identify our respective, individual and sensory idiosyncrasies as the actual core elements in any historical as well as future research methodologies.”
Ex: The New "Amagerkaner", Between Maps and Territories, Hearing on the Verge

Ad. 3 The audio paper is situated and partial.

As an academic format, the audio paper can contribute with its “partial and situated truths” (see Haraway, 1988), a knowledge production that is qualitatively attentive to the various situations of research and their inherent aesthetic and sensory potentials. Situated and partial knowledge also implies that the production is restricted by its means of production: technologies, tools, media, places and contexts. The audio paper draws attention to the knowledge situation by, for instance, reflecting on the means of production. As sound material is visceral, the audio paper also is aware of different modes of expression and the aesthetic potentialities of sounds. Situated implies that the sound work is composed with sound [technologically extracted] from the environments with which they engage: the radio studio, the harbor front, the island of Amager, or an imagined future.
Ex. "Like Sitting inside a Phone", Mountain Meets Urban Waterfront, A Sound Factory on Amager

Ad. 4 The audio paper evokes affects and sensations.

The audio paper works with sensory and affective modes of knowledge. Sound has a material quality. Language is rendered through the voice with its attunement (Massumi 2002) to the surroundings, its rhythms and pace. Feelings and sensations are present in the audio paper and work side by side with the semantics of language and sound. The aesthetic, material aspects of the audio paper produce affects and sensations in the listener. Affects are felt. What is felt could be the body of the soundscape, the body of the voice, or the feeling and sensing body of the listener while listening.

The tone and timbre of the voices used in the audio paper makes the narrator present. It affords feelings and sensations. Voice and tone thus perform meaning in the broad continuum between cognitive reason and bodily sensations.

Like affects, the audio paper is productive and emergent in the sense that it does not represent lived processes so much as it participates in actively shaping processes to help constitute them as facts. The audio paper works with affects and sensation to give the listener a bodily felt and sensed experience.

Academic knowledge in the audio paper is therefore felt, experienced and produced in temporal processes.
Ex. Through the Air with the greatest of Ease, Hearing on the Verge, Place Time (Sounds)

Ad. 5 The audio paper is multifocal; it assembles diverse and often heterogeneous voices.

The audio paper is – like 20th century avant-garde radio art, drama, literature and poetry – not necessarily narrated from the perspective of a one-dimensional protagonist. The audio paper’s research questions and arguments are developed within academic frameworks, while the presentation can take various forms. The audio paper hereby continually opens towards an integration of dramaturgical complexities that not only functions as a representational and performative tool, but also integrates the overall academic argument in the presentation itself.
Ex. The New "Amagerkaner", Between Maps and Territories.

Ad. 6 The audio paper has multiple protagonists, narrators and material agencies.

The audio paper is not limited to narrations performed by human beings. Not only humans act, also landscapes, objects, technologies and politics are rendered active agents (Latour 2005) in the audio paper. Austin’s concept of performative utterance, “speech acts,” (words are more than just words, they are causal actions with consequences depending on the context they are presented within), is not only a[n operating] principle reserved for language, but can be identified as operating within all other sounding agents as well (Salter 2010).

Ex. Mountain Meets Urban Waterfront, "Like Sitting inside a Phone".

Ad. 7 The audio paper brings aesthetics and technology together in mediation.

The audio paper is produced by means of digital audio technologies. With the field of Art and Technology in mind, technology – its function and dysfunction and the development and investigations generated – have demonstrated that technology is in itself a carrier of aesthetics (e.g. Klüver 2004). With reference to Bruno Latour (1999), Chris Salter explains it this way: “Technology does something in and to the world by modifying existing relations and constructing new ones between humans, tools, processes and the environment in which all are deeply entangled. ‘Techniques are . . . not means, [...] but mediators, means, and ends at the same time; and that is why they bear upon the social fabric’ (1999: 197)” (Salter 2010: xxxv).

In the case of the audio paper, this frame of understanding underlines the awareness that recording equipment, filtering, mixing, mastering and conversions are not neutral processes and tools. They are in themselves expressions of various actors and aesthetic means. 

Ad. 8 The audio paper is a constituent part of broader ecologies.

The audio paper depends on diverse sound environments and human practices in its attempt to assemble aspects, narratives, phenomena and sensations of the world. Its dissemination and production depends on technology, which becomes a part of the expression and a key to information itself: “Technology does something in and to the world by modifying existing relations and constructing new ones between humans, tools, processes and the environment in which all are deeply entangled” (Salter 2010: xxxxv).

The audio paper is never conventional, as it always incorporates an awareness of the processes of research and technological production. It not only reflects its own research question/s, but reflects the reflection itself: the process of knowledge-production, the presentation and representation of language and voice, the narrative and dramaturgy, and the aesthetics of sound.