Ian Whalley

Robert Reigle and Paul Whitehead (Editors): Spectral World Musics: Proceedings of the Istanbul Spectral Music Conference

festival’s mission remains the same— we are steadfastly dedicated to the pursuit of the curiosity that is so deeply rooted in humankind’s nature, and we continue to peer intrepidly far into the future. Our immediate objective: to once again foment a fruitful, fascinating dialog at the interface of art, technology and society.” This is a praiseworthy mission statement. But Ars Electronica’s intrepid peering into the future with Armageddon exhibits may have thwarted for the moment its immediate objective of fomenting dialog. The current reviewers were sometimes left at a nonplus. And Mr. Fontana’s prize-winning work, understood as the focal sound statement of the 2009 festival, suggests that music, for the time being, has not yet recovered from its speechlessness and articulated a response. Or, perhaps its response is to recoil and to recollect the harmony of the spheres, reviving the atavistic human capacity to become one with the environment through hearing. One might see the visual art presented as representational (horror scenarios) and music as evocative (utopia): Big Ben and the sonic/visual projections on the AEC—both took place in the night, in the locale of wordless dreams. The skill of hearing—at the neuronal level—has always enabled man and woman to meld with their surroundings. Man and woman in their cave at night, without light and without sight, were only in touch through hearing, and through hearing, “becoming” (to borrow a notion from Gilles Deleuze), becoming human. We hope that the cultural utopia evoked by Mr. Fontana from the midst of our world’s dark night is not just sentimental retrospection, rather a contribution to drawing us into a new and lighter period of becoming—humane, humanist, human. Publications