Category: Introduction to Sound Art

Sound arts now is a book written by Cathy Lane and Angus Carlyle, it fouses on sound art in the present tense (2010/20’s) and leans away from focusing on the “white men from the north” and gives a much more global insight into sound art in the present day. The book consists of 20 interviews taken with a range of international artists each bringing their own unique perspectives and ideas on sound art. Although I could not rent the book from the library as they did not have a copy, I was able to do research on the book online and using CRISAP I managed to find a excerpt of the book on the LCC UAL website. The excerpt is from the end of the book after all of the 20 interviews have concluded and the authors and talking within themselves, they discuss how the interviews have went and what they would do if they could do it again such as the guests not talking about their theoretical concerns as much as they might have wanted to.

https://www.arts.ac.uk/colleges/london-college-of-communication/stories/london-college-of-communication-researchers-professor-cathy-lane-and-professor-angus-carlyle-publish-sound-arts-now

“listening is presented as a medium or modality, a genre or a discipline in itself; on the other hand, maybe it is the exact opposite, with listening becoming subsumed, becoming a reflexive part and parcel of what a critical practitioner does?”

Sound art did not exist in China before the 1990’s but the culture did produce the most advanced sound theories and auditory aesthetics among world cultures.

The Bianzhong of Marquis Yi of Zeng is a instrument made in 433 BC, they were an accidental discovery in May of 1978

FM3 are are Chinese electronic duo consisting of Christiaan Virant and Zhang Jian who have created a range of different Buddha Machines with artists such as Cornelius, Throbbing Gristle and Phillip Glass. I thought that the collaboration with Cornelius on Ghost In The Machine was very interesting and sparked my interest as Ghost in The Shell is one of my favourite manga/animes. The Ghost In The Machine Buddha Box comes preloaded with 3 tracks from the Ghost In The Shell:Arise which can be played together. The idea of the Buddha Machine comes from ancient practices and is influenced by mantras and repetition.

“The music scene was all DIY, we basically had to do everything ourselves.” – FM3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VlSM3GMuYVU

The Echo Wall at the Temple of Heaven in Bejing is a wall where you can put your ear to the wall and hear echoes from the other side of the wall, the sound waves reflect off the wall and because of its circular shape it can be passed around to the other side. A wall similar to this is found up St Pauls Cathedral which has the same

Glossary –

dynastic rulers – a leader who inherits their power from their ancestors.

sovereignty – supreme power or authority

“All I am doing is directing attention to the sounds of the environment” – John Cage

“Cage was concerned to organise the temporal unfolding of the work in a context where chance already rules, for reasons that are more social than musical…” – Jean Jacques Nattiez

background noise

listening breaks apart the shell of the subject, eases the borders of identity and initiates an interdependence whereby one is constituted by the whole environmental horizon.

listening is very social it brings people together
connects people around the world

communication technologies make us more involved in others lives

art and now music serve to open peoples eyes and ears to the enjoyment of their daily environment

the way that we send and receive information is more important than the information itself – mcluhan

our memory spans have been reduced due to technology

talks on the future and how we are shifting into cyberspace, memory and screen space become valuable.

META
NFT
EARTH 2

Earth 2® is a futuristic concept for a second earth; a metaverse, between virtual and physical reality in which real-world geolocations on a sectioned map correspond to user generated digital virtual environments. These environments can be owned, bought, sold, and in the near future deeply customized.

transurbanism – shift away from the material city to the immaterial flow of information
further definition- a design strategy that allows cities to organise themselves as complex systems, where small local structures incorporate global flows
Wollscheid’s work is “production of the local “ in which the work of the imagination coalesces into collective sensibility, enhancing the intensification of prensence in digital society.

sensor band global string
the work consists of a metal cable stretched from the floor to caking fitted ehhh vibration sensors, the sensors translate physical vibrations into digital data that are fed to the network.
it’s a mono chord where the two end points are physical and the middle is the betwoej
creating extended musical instrument that collects and collates multiple inputs along the way, argumentimg physical and virtual spaces
is mono hoff where

sensorband are a trio of musicians using interactive technology active between 1993-2003


listening is about
Research on – Alchim Wollscheid
Joshua Meyrowitz
Tia DeNora

Marshall McLuhan

roland. bathes
david rothenburg
Achim Wollscheid

This article is text by Ryo lkeshiro ond Atou Tonoko about how sound art is viewed and percieved in the Japanese context. We are told about how sound is a very important part of Japanese culture, we are also shown historical sound art pieces by various sound artists from the years 1949 to 2013. Sound art is still relatively a new term in Japan.

Jikken Kōbō was an artist collective founded in Japan in 1951 and was disbanded in 1957, the group consisted of 14 members, they were artists, musicians, choreographers and poets who were self taught. Their leader Shuzo Takiguchi played a pivotal role in introducing Dada and Surrealism to Japan through connections to Andre Breton and Marcel Duchamp. They were described and being like Bauhaus but without the buidlings.

Gutai Art Association were another Japanese Avant-Garde artist group founded in the Hanshin region In 1954. In their early work they created a series of striking works anticipating later happenings, performance and conceptual art. “In which the artist rolled half naked in a pile of mud, remains the most celebrated event associated with the group.”

https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/g/gutai

Fluxus was a movement in art put forward by George Maciunas in 1963. The leaders of Fluxus consisted of George Maciunas, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, La Monte Young, etc. Fluxus’s work was profoundly influenced the nature of art production since the 1960s. The work had no single unifying style but adopted the DIY mindset.

“Purge the world of bourgeois sickness, ‘intellectual,’ professional & commercialized culture, PURGE the world of dead art, imitation, artificial art, abstract art, illusionistic art, mathematical art, — PURGE THE WORLD OF ‘EUROPANISM’!” – Maciunas

Glossary-

Wabi-Sabi – “beauty of irregularity.” Muneyoshi Yanagi “The notion of wabi-sabi may be seen as the aesthetic grounding of the Japanese reinterpretation of Buddhism, reflecting plainfless and simplicity, aged and solitary states.”

This text is an interview between Adam Parkinson and David Toop recorded in 2015 at the London Metropolitan University.

“What I’m trying out at this stage of my life life is new formats, or new settings maybe’ or formats and settings that have been tried before but then been forgotten or pushed aside because established formats have such a powerful hold on our thinking’ I’m frustrated by [” ‘]all the familiar routines that frame practice and discourse [“‘] what I want to do is modest, small scale, quiet, and uncertain – just a slight shift of conditions [“‘] a big thing but small, a conversation that can be quiet but loud’.”

“But sound art to me is problematic for a number of reasons. One, because it is so closely associated with a particular world and a particular economy – the art world – and there are all sorts of reasons why that’s difficult.”

Toop finds the term “sound art” problematic as he finds it too closely related to the art world and how it revolves around money. I find this

https://www.arts.ac.uk/about-ual/press-office/stories/david-toop-offering-rites-at-central-saint-martins

“They are more concerned with the unfinished or in-between, that which is difficult to articulate or impossible to exhibit; each one will involve offerings of different kinds, opportunities to listen, to watch, to speak, to be silent.”

Glossary–

Aesthetics – a persons idea on what is beautiful