Gascia Ouzounian

Embodied sound: Aural architectures and the body

This article examines two sound installations distributed on CD: Maryanne Amachers Sound Characters (Making the Third Ear) (1999) and Bernhard Leitners KOPFRÄUME (HEADSCAPES) (2003). The author undertakes an embodied reception of these works, experimenting with new models of listening and analysis that take into consideration aspects of the built environment, social spaces and imaginary architectures as these are perceived at the intersection of sound, space and the body. Conceptualizations of space, place and embodiment are engaged; and definitions for sound installation and ‘situated sonic practices’ are offered. The analysis ultimately reveals how the complex, dynamic networks of sound, space, place and embodiment can be understood to produce and constitute one another.

Recomposing the City: A Survey of Recent Sound Art in Belfast

ABSTRACT This article introduces examples of recent sound art in Belfast, a city that has undergone radical transformation over the past decade and is home to a burgeoning community of sound artists. The text investigates the ways in which sonic art can redraw boundaries in a city historically marked by myriad political, socioeconomic, religious and sectarian divisions. The article focuses on sound works that reimagine a “post-conflict” Belfast. These include site-specific sound installations in urban and public spaces, soundwalks, sculptures, locative and online works, and experimental sonic performances that draw upon traditional Irish song and music.

The uncertainty of Experience: On George Brecht’s Event Scores

George Brecht, an artist best known for his associations with Fluxus, is considered to have made significant contributions to emerging traditions of conceptual art and experimental music in the early 1960s. His Event scores, brief verbal scores that comprised lists of terms or open-ended instructions, provided a signature model for indeterminate composition and were ‘used extensively by virtually every Fluxus artist’. This article revisits Brecht’s early writings and research to argue that, while Event scores were adopted within Fluxus performance, they were intended as much more than performance devices. Specifically, Brecht conceived of his works as ‘structures of experience’ that, by revealing the underlying connections between chanced forms, could enable a kind of enlightenment rooted within an experience of a ‘unified reality’.

Impure thinking practices and clinical acts: The sonorous becomings of Heidi Fast

This article introduces the recent sound works of Heidi Fast, a Finnish voice and performance artist. Fast’s creative practice operates between art and philosophy, and articulates several ‘zones of becoming’: what Fast designates as ‘the clinical’, ‘the virtual’ and ‘vocal thought-material’. Using a methodology of routing, the article shows how these zones emerge as aesthetic, ethical and political concerns within Fast’s work. Since 2005, Fast’s sound works have variously taken shape as miniature concerts, social sculptures, imaginary soundscapes and environmental music performances. Drawing upon the writings of theorists who have helped shape her practice, this article argues that Fast uses sound and voice to propose an ‘actualising philosophy’. This philosophy actualises virtualities (unrealised potentials), affecting transformative shifts through tiny mutations in perceptions and behaviours.

Soundspace: A Manifesto

ABSTRACT The manifesto is a long-standing and powerful tool for challenge within architecture, deployed by those as diverse as Vitruvius and Frank Lloyd Wright (who proposed a Walt Whitman-inspired “Work Song” of 1896) to those publishing in blogs across the designing planet today. Manifestos are locations for dreaming, for the banging of shoes, for passion in words about the environment we invent. Our manifesto follows in that tradition of poetry and critical optimism in calling for a new architecture of soundspace. Here we wish to act as Markus Miessen’s “uninvited outsider” (Miessen 2010), a transgressive voice that disturbs the status quo beyond comfortable familiarity and brings together different types of thinkers and various modes of critique.[1] In this article we seek to probe “fundamental questions about how and for whom the built environment is produced and … conventional frameworks or oldestablished rules and regulations” through the interdisciplinarity that sound studies demands.[2] The ear to transgression is open.[3]

An interview with paul demarinis

Since the early 1970s, the American electronic media artist Paul DeMarinis (b. 1948, Cleveland, Ohio, USA) has created works that re-imagine modes of communication and reinvent the technologies that enable communication. His works (see Table 1) have taken shape as recordings, performances, electronic inventions, and site-specific and interactive installations; many are considered landmarks in the histories of electronic music and media art. Paul DeMarinis pioneered live performance with computers, collaborated on landmark works with artists like David Tudor and Robert Ashley, undertook several tours with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, and brought to life obscure technologies such as the flame loudspeaker (featured in his 2004 sculpture Firebirds). His interactive installation The Music Room (1982), commissioned by Frank Oppenheimer for the Exploratorium in San Francisco, was the first automatic music work to reach a significant audience. His album Music As A Second Language (1991) marks one of the most extensive explorations of the synthesized voice and speech melodies to date. Installations like The Edison Effect (1989–1993), in which lasers scan ancient recordings to produce music, and The Messenger (1998/2005), in which electronic mail messages are displayed on alphabetic telegraph receivers, illustrate a creative process that Douglas Kahn (1994) has called “reinventing invention.” Paul DeMarinis has performed internationally for several decades, and his works have been exhibited at museums including the InterCommunication Center (ICC) in Toyko, the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA). His work is the subject of a recent book, Paul DeMarinis: Buried in Noise (Beirer, Himmelsbach, and Seiffarth 2010). He is Associate Professor at Stanford University, where he holds appointments in both the Department of Art and Art History and the Department of

History, an Exit Strategy: The Retrofuture Fabulations of kara lynch

A cartographer constructs a map of an individual creative history, that of the American artist kara lynch, as it emerges in connection to a collective history of African American cultural expression. Positioning history as complex, dynamic systems of interwoven memory networks, the map follows lynch’s traversals through various “zones of cultural haunting”: places where collective memories made invisible through systematic processes of cultural erasure may be recovered and revived. Through these traversals, which are inspired by lynch’s “forever project” Invisible, the map covers such terrains as haunted narratives, mechanisms of abstraction and coding within African American media production, water as an informational technology, the distribution of memory in blood, the dialectics of materiality and immateriality that frame considerations of black subjectivity, and the possibility that place of music might not be the site of sound but instead the social production of memory. The following is not an article but a map. The map describes regions of an individual creative history, that of the American artist kara lynch, as they emerge in connection to a collective history of African American cultural expression. In the map, history is positioned as a complex, dynamic system of interwoven memory networks; the mapmaker attempts to illuminate some of the points, lines, and spaces that make up these particular networks. Even while illuminated, however, these networks remain contingent, transient, and imagined: “moving continuities” that contain multiple discontinuities, ruptures, and slippages. 1 As with all maps, this one features incomplete and inaccessible regions (regions that are disappeared or disappearing), places of faulty shading, and problematic issues of scale. The responsibility for these inaccuracies lies with the mapmaker’s limited vision and a history of mapmaking that has privileged certain kinds of vision and denied others. Visibility, invisibility, and their shadowy relationships to structures of power and dominance become keys to deciphering the map. Ralph Ellison, whose lifelong project was to illuminate the invisibility of blackness, writes: I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. That invisibility to which I refer occurs because of a peculiar disposition of the eyes of those with whom I come in contact. A matter of the construction of their inner eyes, those eyes with which they look through their physical eyes upon reality. 2